Moon Over Edisto

by Beth Webb Hart

  She nodded. “Okay.” Now Julia turned to look at the dock. She feared if she walked out there and took in the whole vista, she might break down. So she went back to the kitchen, ate a rotting banana, found some instant coffee, and made herself a cup. On the refrigerator was Marney’s surgeon’s number. Apparently he had a place on Edisto and was going to stop by with an update, which was good because Julia didn’t think she could just call up a hospital—a stranger—and check on a patient. Even if she had somehow found herself caring for the patient’s children.

  Julia’s scalp began to itch. What was she going to do about these fleas? As she scratched, she felt a presence behind her. She turned around quickly only to see the hem of the girl’s nightgown as she darted up the stairs, each step creaking as she went.

  So Etta talked, but not to Julia. She didn’t even want to be seen by Julia. Oh well, she’d get hungry eventually and need to show her face. Julia started taking an inventory of what the kitchen needed: milk, eggs, fruit, vegetables, bread, meat.

  She opened the pantry’s cockeyed door and spotted the old ice cream churn on the top shelf. The one in which her father always made fresh peach ice cream every Fourth of July. Her mother was a great cook, but her father liked to make dessert, especially ice cream. He’d check on it all day, filling it with salt, churning it, turning it over and over. And everyone’s mouth would be watering for it by nightfall.

  They’d had it the first summer Marney had stayed with them. They all sat on the wicker porch and watched the fireworks being shot off at the docks farther down the creek.

  Julia suddenly remembered something Marney had said to her that night. She didn’t allow memories of Marney to surface, and she wanted to push it back, but it was up and running away from her before she could catch up to it. “You have a real family. You’re lucky.”

  Julia had taken in the scene through Marney’s eyes. She saw her mother chuckling over something Aunt Dot had said and her father agreeing to fire off a few roman candles with Meg and two of her friends from school who were staying with them.

  “I guess so,” Julia had said. She had never really thought about how fortunate she was. Then she had turned back to Marney, who picked at her cuticles, something she did when she was reflecting or fighting off a down spell.

  Now Julia looked at the brown banana and tossed it in the plastic trash can that looked as though it had been around and hadn’t been washed for years. When she turned back, Charlie was naked as a jaybird standing right in the center of the kitchen. “I’m ready!” he said, proud and free in his birthday suit as he came over and took her hand. “Bath time!”

  CHAPTER 10

  Jed Young

  Jed’s coffee was resting on the dashboard of his old Land Rover. The steam rose up toward the windshield, leaving a perfect circle of condensation. He lifted his arm from his elderly black Labrador, Rascal, who was snoozing in the passenger seat, his head resting on the center armrest. Jed reached for the mug to keep it from toppling as he turned off of Highway 174 onto Peters Point Creek Road.

  On his way to the dilapidated creek cottage he still couldn’t believe he’d purchased, he had to swing by the old Bennett place and report to whoever was staying there how Marney Bennett was doing. He supposed it would be Skeeter or maybe Meg, the local daughter of Mr. Bennett’s first marriage. And he was glad he had relatively good news to report.

  Jed’s neck and shoulders ached. It had a been a long night at the hospital—a five-hour lung surgery on an elderly man whom Jed wasn’t sure could withstand the physical trauma, though the man’s daughter had insisted they go ahead. The man, Mr. Wannamaker, had woken up from the anesthesia and his vitals were not too weak, though he had that look on his face that Jed knew all too well: the dark sunken eyes, the colorless cheeks, the weary jowls that said, “How much longer do I have to go on?”

  Mr. Wannamaker’s daughter—a rotund woman in her fifties with brightly painted orange lips and a lavender sweater with butterflies stitched across the shoulders—fired question after question at Jed when he checked in before heading home. “When will the catheter come out? How long until we can stand him up? When will he recognize me? When will he be ready to go back to the nursing home?”

  Jed took a long look at the patient and then gave a side-angled glance at the seasoned nurse, Juanita, who was often getting herself into trouble for saying too much. Her lips were buttoned up this time, and Jed took a deep breath and said, “We’re going to have to take it one day at time, Mrs. McCrary. But I can’t imagine him sitting up, much less standing, for a good four or five days, and I don’t want to push him.”

  Marney Bennett, on the other hand, was progressing better than expected. He hadn’t had to remove as much of her left lung as he’d originally anticipated, and all her vitals had remained strong after the procedure. She was already sitting up and had eaten her first meal on her own last night. She was alert and seemed to understand what was going on. Yes, cancer was a wily, unpredictable beast, but if Jed were a betting man, he’d guess they caught hers in time.

  Now he turned onto the familiar dirt road two down from his. When he was a kid, before his dad was hired to head up the genetic testing department at MD Anderson and he and his mother reluctantly moved from Atlanta to Houston, his family had spent a number of happy summer vacation evenings with the Bennetts, whom they met after Jed’s rented johnboat ran out of gas near the Bennett dock one afternoon in early July. They were one of the most hospitable families he’d ever known, and he had fond memories of Mr. Bennett teaching him how to throw the cast net so adeptly that he once caught enough creek shrimp for dinner at age fifteen. He also remembered playing hours of poker on their screened porch, stealing glances at the eldest daughter, shooting off fireworks in their backyard, and, of course, devouring Mrs. Bennett’s fried flounder, deviled eggs, and tomato pie from the heirlooms she grew in her bountiful garden.

  None of the women in his life could ever really cook, so in the end he decided that if he ever wanted to taste food like Mrs. Bennett’s, he needed to teach himself. And so after his move back to Charleston two decades later, he enrolled in classes at both the Maverick Kitchen and Alice’s soul food joint, where he taught himself how to fry chicken, sauté okra, simmer creamy grits, bake corn bread in an old iron skillet, and roll out his own piecrust for his own cheesy tomato pie. The Bennetts’ dinner table on Edisto had been his inspiration, and while he’d yet to cross paths with any member of the family since his move back to the lowcountry, he hoped that one of these days he’d see Mrs. Bennett and ask her if they could compare recipes and methods. He also remembered hearing about the nasty divorce through his mother when he was in med school, and he must admit that the first thought that crossed his mind was that Mr. Bennett must be insane. How could a man ever let a woman who cooked like that go?

  But Jed knew better than to imagine relationships in such simple terms. And marriages seemed as unpredictable as cancer to him. Even more so, really, because you couldn’t even track their path to destruction. He had learned this lesson the hard way after his beautiful new wife, Priscilla, an ER nurse at the Medical University, up and left the year they lived apart during his fellowship at Sloan-Kettering in New York. Within less than eighteen months of matrimony, she took off with one of his closest friends, Brandt Russell, who had just started his plastic surgery practice in Hilton Head. Brandt had been a groomsman in their wedding. He had given a heartfelt toast at their rehearsal dinner, and Jed was left wounded and scratching his head, wondering, What went wrong? when Brandt answered Priscilla’s cell phone early one morning.

  Of course, Jed crossed paths with the couple every now and then, and each time Priscilla looked different than before, a new nose one year, cartoonishly full lips the next, so that Jed began to wonder if she was even real. Or if she had been a figment of his imagination all along.

  It had been a quick romance during his residency and an even quicker engagement, sped up for the reason that many nuptials a
re: Priscilla was expecting. She miscarried shortly before they wed, but Jed assured her that his love for her was real and that they would try and try again until they had a houseful of kids, and he meant it. He was a glass-half-full kind of guy. Always had been. So what had gone wrong? Priscilla never did have children. Maybe that was the last thing in the world she wanted. He’d never really know.

  Truth is, short marriages were not atypical of the surgeons and researchers on his particular tract who seemed more married to their work than anything else. He felt his supervisors were pleased when they learned of the news, as if it was some badge of honor to his profession. This sickened Jed so much that he refused the job Sloan-Kettering offered him at the end of his fellowship and took a much less prestigious post at the Medical University of South Carolina because the lowcountry was the one and only place he felt at home. And he was not going to let his ruined marriage or his career keep him from that love.

  As he turned into the soft dirt road of the Bennett driveway, the morning sun piercing through the pines and live oaks, he was struck by a longing that the island had evoked in him ever since he was an adolescent. It felt too primal to be nostalgia. But then again, he was tired and weighted down by the suffering of his patients and the stalwart disease that thrived inside their bodies. He had a weakness for Edisto, and this weakness clouded his judgment from time to time. It had moved him to find his way to an auction of a crumbling old vacation cottage last year and place the winning bid. And this purchase had already sucked an inordinate amount of his time and resources.

  Now Rascal stretched and yawned and Jed wondered, as he had from time to time since his adolescence, where the Bennetts’ eldest daughter, Julia, was and how she was doing.

  As the dirt gave way to gravel, he pulled in beside a little red rental car with Tennessee plates and Rascal started barking, eager to get out and roam and chase rabbits and raccoons and any critter that moved with Phydeaux, his pluff mud buddy.

  Little Charlie opened the door. He was in his birthday suit, a nice coating of talcum powder on his little barrel chest, and he was grinning from ear to ear. “It’s the doctor!” he called back over his shoulder to a woman running toward him with a towel.

  The woman covered the boy up and picked him up in her arms. She was petite and thin with golden, silver-streaked hair.

  “Hi, I’m Julia Bennett,” she said as she propped the boy on her hip and extended her hand.

  Jed couldn’t contain his smile. She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, waiting for a handshake. Then he could see that it was dawning on her.

  “Jed?” she said.

  “Yep.” He wiped his sweaty hands on his scrubs and met her handshake with a warm squeeze.

  The little boy was looking back and forth between them. “You know the doctor, Jewel-a?”

  “I used to,” she said as Jed continued to grin into the gaze of her deep green eyes. “A long, long time ago.” Charlie squirmed his way down her leg. “I’m going to put on my Spider-Man outfit.”

  “Okay.”

  She turned back to Jed. “Last I heard, you were in Texas.”

  “Twenty years ago.” He rubbed his hands together and nodded toward the creek. “I bought back the old Saunders cottage. The one we used to rent? It’s in pretty rough shape, but I come out and work on it when I have a chance.”

  “So you’re Marney’s physician?”

  “Well, Maria Tamsberg is her oncologist, but I’m the guy who operated on her.”

  Julia smiled. “So you followed in your father’s steps?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” He nodded. “Ironically, it was cancer that got him a few years ago. Pancreatic.”

  He watched her furrow her brow. She was more beautiful than ever. So real-looking with her gray streaks, her unmade face, her high cheekbones, and her jade eyes. What a woman she had become. He swallowed hard and hoped his face wasn’t turning red. This was ridiculous. He was a thirty-eight-year-old man. A ladies’ man by some folks’ standards. He shook his head and instinctively slapped at his calf. Something had bitten him.

  “This place has a flea infestation.” Julia scratched her head and motioned for them to step outside where the two dogs were fighting over a well-worn chew toy. He leaned against the grill of his car, and she crossed her arms and raised her delicate eyebrows. “So how’s Marney doing?”

  He put on his serious surgeon’s face out of habit and straightened up. “She’s doing better than expected. We took out a fair-size portion of her left lung, but it wasn’t as much as I thought we’d have to. Her vitals are strong. She’s coherent and has just started to eat on her own. I bet within the next couple of days she’ll be able to stand.”

  “Good,” Julia said. She looked out toward the dock and back to him. “I’m supposed to be in Budapest on a fellowship that’s pretty critical to my career. I need to get there as soon as possible.”

  Jed nodded. “Well, my guess is, she’ll be released within the next three or four days and then she’ll need some care for the next two weeks following that.”

  “Hey there!” a voice behind them hollered. Skeeter ambled over with his cane and his own frisky little dog, a scruffy Jack Russell named Maude.

  “What’s the report, doc?”

  “Yeah, I want to know too,” Heath said as she walked toward Jed with her finger in her book. “When can we see Mom?”

  Jed shook the old man’s hand and then patted Heath on the back. “I was just telling Julia that she’s doing better than expected, and I’m sure she’d love a visit from you as soon as you can get there. My guess is she’ll be home by Saturday. However, she’s going to need a lot of help for a few weeks after that.”

  “Well,” Skeeter said, “Glenda and I can help some. I talked to Dot last night and she came through her surgery all right as well, but it’s going to be a long while before she can run after little Charlie. Glenda was going to go see her this morning, and I’m sure she wouldn’t mind taking the kids to see Marney.”

  Heath smiled and nodded. “That would be great.”

  “Yeah!” Spider-Man appeared in the doorway, mask and all. “I want to see Mommy and Aunt Dot!” Then he jumped down and ran over to the big dogs, who wagged their tails and followed him into the woods.

  “I can stay for a week,” Julia said to Skeeter. “Then I’ve got to head out.”

  “We’ll figure something out between now and then.” Skeeter sniffed at the air before scratching a welt on his arm. “In the meantime, we’ve got to do something about those fleas. That house is full of ’em, from the dog, I reckon.”

  “Guess we better set off a bomb,” Jed said. “I’d offer my house for you all to stay in, Julia, but the only thing working is the kitchen. I sleep on a little mattress by the refrigerator when I’m out here.”

  “Y’all can come on over to my place for the night, Julia.” Skeeter scratched his chin as he thought. “I’ve got two extra bedrooms, one with bunk beds for the grandkids, so there’s plenty of room.” Then he turned to Jed. “Boy, if you’ve got a little time midday, maybe we can pick up all the furniture and set off a bomb. In the meantime, Julia, you can do the laundry and . . .”

  “Clean the house?” she said.

  “Yeah,” Skeeter said. Then he leaned in toward both of them. “I’ve never seen such a mess, have you?” He looked around to make sure the kids weren’t within earshot. “Marney knows better, but I guess she’s felt too bad to do much about it. We’ve got to help her because even out here, there are eyes on this place.”

  Jed wondered what Skeeter meant by that. Eyes on this place? It couldn’t be more removed from the world. But Skeeter was right about one thing, it was in sorry shape.

  Spider-Man and the dogs ran by. Spider-Man was holding up a large palm frond that the canines were leaping at. They all collapsed beneath a live oak tree, and Spider-Man laughed a hearty superhero laugh as Rascal and Phydeaux yanked the frond out of his hand and pulled on it like a wishbone.

  Julia le
aned in toward Skeeter and Jed. She smelled sweet, and with the morning light on the strands of her long hair, Jed had to step back and catch his breath. “I haven’t even met the other girl.” Jed admired her delicate jaw as she turned to Skeeter. “She seems really shy.”

  “Oh, she’s shy, all right. And she doesn’t speak, except to Spider-Man over there.” Skeeter shook his head, looked around to see if she was in earshot, and then said, “I haven’t seen her say a word to anyone other than him since your daddy passed.”

  “How does that work with school?” Jed asked.

  “Marney homeschools.” Skeeter lifted his furry eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders. “But I’ve told her all along I think they need to be around other kids.”

  Jed watched Julia’s eyes widen. “So should I be teaching them this week?”

  “Nah.” Skeeter batted at the thick air as Rascal dropped the better half of the palm frond at Jed’s feet. “They’re smart as whips. She’ll make up for lost time later in the summer.”

  Skeeter examined his watch. “I bet Glenda will want to head out within the hour.”

  Julia clapped her hands once. “Okay, I’ll get them bathed and dressed and deliver them to you by ten.”

  Skeeter nodded. “Sounds good. And I’ll go to the store and get us a few bombs.”

  Jed patted Rascal’s head and looked to Skeeter and Julia. “I’ll help move the furniture after the cleaning is done. And in the meantime, I’ll put together some sort of meal for us to have tonight. Y’all can all come over to my place for dinner.”

  “Okay. Great,” Julia said. The enthusiasm in her voice was like a fresh wind to him.

  After Jed got himself and Rascal back in the Land Rover, he stopped for a moment to watch Julia as she walked toward the outbuilding that housed the washer and dryer and cleaning supplies, as if on a mission. Her gait, the toss of her hair—it was coming back to him like an old song he still knew by heart, though he hadn’t heard it for years, and as he started the engine, he had to shake himself out of the trance. He had a lot to do between now and dinnertime.