CHAPTER 24
Julia
Julia couldn’t remember when she’d washed and folded so many sheets and towels. Maybe the summer she and Marney were hired to clean the condos at Fairfield Resort on the island’s sound. Julia wanted to buy her own car, and Marney always needed extra cash. Their nightly tips at Dockside weren’t cutting it so they took the extra day job and cleaned houses Saturday through Tuesday of every week.
Julia looked down at her hands, raw from all of the hand washing and the cleaning with Clorox and Comet. The poor kids. The bug hit them all at once, and it seemed pretty violent. Thankfully, Julia felt fine, but she made sure she washed her hands every time she came into contact with one of them. She did not want to be yacking on an international flight tomorrow.
She had her bags packed. She was ready to go. She hummed John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane” as she picked up Charlie’s tinker toys on the screened porch and put them in a basket by the rocking chairs. It was the first song she’d ever learned when she took a few guitar lessons back in college. She was a terrible musician.
Despite the trip to the ER and the illness and the flea infestation, the week had actually flown by. And there had been moments, if she admitted it to herself, that were sweeter than any she’d had in a long time, partly because they were a surprise and partly because they reminded her of some of the happier times of her childhood. Catching that first fish with Charlie was one, seeing Jed for the first time in more than twenty years was another, buying the kids some new clothes and sketching the surroundings were two more.
All in all, she would come out of this fairly unscathed. It hadn’t been as hard on her heart as she imagined it would be. Maybe that was because she never actually had to see Marney. Maybe it was because the kids and the cleaning kept her too busy to think. Maybe it was because folks like Skeeter and Glenda and Jed and even her mother seemed to be supporting her in some unspoken way. The one person she’d yet to see or speak to was Aunt Dot. All reports were that she was recovering steadily with her new hip, but Julia was shocked that she hadn’t called to check in. Maybe Aunt Dot would make it to the wedding in December. Maybe they could have a long chat then about the bizarre eight days Julia spent on Edisto Island looking after her half sisters and half brother, facing the thing she dreaded most—not necessarily full on, but not cowering away either. And how—all things considered—it hadn’t been nearly as bad as she imagined.
Well, tomorrow she would be on her way to Budapest and Simon would meet her there. Through a series of e-mails, they had decided to cancel the Istanbul trip. They’d wait and go back for their honeymoon. However, he would take the time to help her get settled in Budapest before heading back to the States to meet with Hockney and begin the preparations for the Tate Gallery exhibit.
Now Julia could hear a little puttering out on the creek. She watched as a boat tied up to the floating dock, and she walked out to see Jed pulling the bow rope tight.
“Hey.” He swung his leg over the bow, putting one foot onto the dock, and in the darkness his outline looked almost exactly as it had that night that they’d taken a boat ride back when they were teenagers—tall, thin, broad-shouldered. “How’s everyone doing?”
“They’re all asleep.” She smiled. “And I’m all packed but utterly disgusting.”
“Well,” he said. “Why don’t you go wash up and I’ll set up a little dinner for us out here.”
She felt her stomach grumble. She was hungry, which she hoped was a sign the bug was not going to get her.
“All right,” she said, and she raced back to the house and to the upstairs bathroom where she quickly showered, threw on a pair of jeans and a crumpled white tank top from the top of her bag, and slipped on her old leather sandals. She checked on the kids, who each felt cool to the touch and were sleeping deeply, and slipped quietly through the screened door and back out into the balmy June night.
As she walked toward the dock, framed by the shadows of the live oak trees, the Spanish moss swaying in the thick breeze, she admired the moonlight on the water. And then she admired Jed, bent over a well-dressed card table, lighting a few votives. He smoothed out the tablecloth, stood, and turned to her. “Dinner is served.”
As she stepped onto the dock, she stopped for a moment and savored the smell of pluff mud and burning wax and fresh seafood. She couldn’t help but grin as he pulled two of the plastic chairs toward the table and held one out for her like a maître d’ at a fine restaurant.
“Thank you, sir.” She took her seat and let him push it in.
On the table was a serving plate with a tower of crab cakes, a bowl of rémoulade sauce, another with fresh corn and butter bean succotash, and another with an arugula and grape tomato salad. And there was also an old iron skillet with homemade corn bread sliced in large triangles.
“Wow.” She leaned forward and admired the bounty that filled the makeshift dining room table as he made a plate for her and then for him and poured them both a glass of white wine in some plastic tumblers before sitting down across from her.
He raised his plastic cup. “From pestilence to disease, you have survived the week.”
She chuckled and met his glass with hers and they both took a sip. Then she raised hers again. “To the chef,” she said.
“No, no, no,” he said, pushing away her compliment. “To Edisto Island, which provided the fare and the inspiration, some of it anyway.”
She nodded and looked back to the old cottage that was lit up with lamps and seemed just as it was when she was a kid. To an old home, she thought to herself, but she didn’t speak the words. Instead, she touched tumblers with Jed a second time. Then he said a short blessing and they began to eat.
The meal was delectable. The crab was fresh, and he’d barely put any bread crumbs with it so that the texture and flavor came clearly through. So sweet and rich.
She watched him as he dished up the corn bread and offered her some butter. He seemed to take great pleasure in preparing and serving a meal.
“So.” She cocked her head, and his eyes, glistening from the votives, met hers.
“Besides becoming a surgeon and a five-star cook, what else have you been up to the last quarter of a century?”
He looked out over the creek, scratched his head, and then turned back to face her full-on. “Honestly, Julia,” he said, “I’ve been up to the usual plus a little of the awful—school, college, med school, a short-lived marriage, divorce, work and more work, burying my parents, work and more work . . .”
He took a bite of his corn bread and met her eyes again. “But I think very little about me has changed since that summer twenty-three years ago.”
“Really?” She smiled.
He nodded as his eyes moved back and forth as if he were reading his own story for the first time. “Maybe that’s why I bought that old cottage at the auction. I guess there’s a part of me that’s always wanted to re-create my time here as a kid and return home to it. You know what I mean?”
“Those were good times, weren’t they?”
He shrugged his large shoulders. “Yeah, they were. I guess I was never happier than those summers I spent out here, fishing and swimming, puttering around in the johnboat, getting stuck on pluff mud banks, playing endless poker games.” He cleared his throat and looked up from his plate. “Daydreaming about a bright and beautiful sixteen-year-old girl . . .” He cleared his throat and leaned back. “Hoping I might somehow be able to catch her attention.”
Julia swallowed hard. Her cheeks were warm, and she didn’t know how to respond. Was this just the longings of a young man in a grown man’s body? Didn’t we all idealize our childhoods, our first crushes, our first kisses? Didn’t we set them on too high of a pedestal?
As if he read her mind, he shook his head and leaned toward her. “Boyhood fantasies.” He went back to his crab cakes and took a hearty bite. “Hard to shake, I guess.”
He cocked his head and smiled at her. “But what about y
ou? What have you been up to for the last quarter of a century?”
She looked down at the flickering candle and then up to him. What had she been up to? Heartbreak, therapy, baring her teeth in order to survive, learning how to seal off certain sections of her heart and her history and burying them deep, deep below her consciousness.
She rested her chin on her hand and watched him waiting for her to give him an honest answer, an answer that would require a lot of vulnerability. Was she up for that?
“Well, I’d like to say I’ve been building this wonderful career and life, but that wouldn’t be the truth.” She looked back to her old house and then to him.
He sat back as if he had all the time in the world. “What is the truth?” he said.
She took a deep breath and put down her fork. “I guess the truth is I’ve been trying to get past the pain of my dad leaving our family.” She looked out to the glistening water and then up to the gibbous moon, now waning. “You know, Marney was my best friend from college.”
He nodded. “I’d heard that.”
“Well, I was devastated when I realized what was going on between her and my father. It broke my heart, and it broke my heart to watch my mother’s life shatter, and my sister’s too.”
Jed swallowed hard and kept his eyes right on her. “I can’t imagine, Julia. I can’t imagine a worse betrayal.”
“Well, you know I was really close to my dad. And I blame him mostly. I mean, Marney was young too, although she may have been the one to make the first advance.” Julia shook her head. “She was a lonely kid, and she loved our family like everyone else.” She turned to meet Jed’s tender gaze. “And maybe she didn’t really care what happened as long as she found a permanent place in it . . . I don’t know.”
Julia took a sip of her wine and twisted her wet hair up into a knot. “I just ran away, really. And I didn’t look back. I refused to.” He smiled at her as she pulled a slice of corn bread from the skillet. “I was pretty good at running away and starting a new life . . . though I’ve had some eruptions, mainly in the form of panic attacks and bouts of depression, which haunt me from time to time.”
Jed nodded solemnly. He breathed in the air slowly and leaned forward. “Did you ever find any resolution with your father . . . before he passed away?”
“No, I can’t say that I did.” Now she felt the sting in her eyes and she blinked back the tears. “I would love to say that we had this moment of reconciliation or forgiveness or something. But we didn’t. We just didn’t.”
She patted her eyes with the paper napkin, and he handed her his.
“I’m sorry, Julia.”
She swallowed hard and felt her ears popping. She hadn’t meant to open all the way up. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so honest with anyone.
Julia looked back at the house and down at her half-eaten plate. She was tired, very tired. And tomorrow would be a long day.
“I guess I better head on back and get some rest, Jed.”
He nodded. “Okay.” And then he reached out his large, warm hand and put it firmly on top of hers. “Thank you.”
She blinked back the sniffles and smiled at him through her watery eyes. “I should be thanking you,” she said. “You’ve come to my rescue and filled my stomach more than once this week.”
He moved forward as if to say more, but she was too weary to hear it and too afraid of what it might be.
She stood quickly as the plastic chair scraped against the wood of the dock. Then she stepped back and looked into his eyes. “It’s been great to see you, and I wish you the best with the cottage and your work and whatever else is in store for you.” She thought of his “appointment” the other night. And she imagined that one day the right woman would come along and love him well, and he would be happy.
She held out her hand for a handshake. Something businesslike and curt. She couldn’t help herself. She had to protect her heart.
He stood up and peered down at her and returned the handshake with a warm, firm grip. Then he started to load up his cooler with the leftover food as she blew out the candles and folded the tablecloth.
After everything had been loaded back up in his boat, he stepped back on the dock, and before she realized what was happening, he embraced her and she embraced him back, tightly, this tall, broad-shouldered man who had reappeared on the craziest, most Southern gothic dysfunctional week of her life and taken her breath away.
Then he let go as quickly as he had held tight, and she had the urge to step forward toward him, but she stopped herself.
He stared at her for several seconds as the incoming tide pushed into the creek, and then he turned, stepped back in his boat, and started the engine. She untied the rope and tossed it over his bow, and then she watched him turn and putter down the creek toward his dock. He looked back only once to wave and then continued down the waterway, the moon and stars lighting his path.
Julia felt a fullness, a fullness from a remarkable meal and even more so from the honest conversation with an old, safe friend. But there was something more beyond the fullness. There was a longing, a longing from the warmth between them and from the sudden embrace and from the kiss years ago that somehow bound them together.
She shivered as his boat rounded the bend and the sound of his outboard motor faded away. She needed to shake this longing quickly because it felt a good deal more complicated than mere friendship. And because she sensed that the feeling was mutual.
She breathed in the balmy Edisto air for what was likely the last time in a long, long time. It was thick and dense and salty just like she’d remembered it from all of those summers ago. And it seemed both strange and true that nostalgia and longing and love and loss could coexist in the same space in the same moment in the same . . . deep . . . breath.
CHAPTER 25
Julia
It was Skeeter who woke Julia up the next morning, banging steadily on the screened porch. “Anyone home?” She had forgotten to set her alarm, and they had all overslept. It was ten a.m., and her flight from Charleston to Atlanta left at noon.
Now Julia bolted out of bed and let Skeeter in. He was supposed to keep the kids until Brooke, the babysitter, arrived midafternoon. Then he and Glenda would go to town and pick up Marney, who was set to be released, and deliver her home.
“Go, go, go,” Skeeter said. “Glad I kept knocking.”
“Me too,” she said, then raced back up the stairs and threw on her jeans and T-shirt and the brown leather jacket she always flew in. Charlie arrived on the threshold of her bedroom door as she zipped up her suitcase. He was groggy-eyed and she could hear his stomach growling.
“How are you feeling, buddy?”
“Okay,” he said. “I want some chocco milk.”
She uprighted her suitcase, double-checked that her passport was in the side pocket of her purse, and turned back to him. “Charlie, you know I’m leaving this morning, right?”
He nodded. “And Brooke’s coming,” he said. Then his eyes widened with excitement. “And then later, Mama.”
“That’s right,” she said. “And right now Skeeter’s downstairs, and he’ll help look after y’all.” She crossed her arms. “But I don’t think your stomach is ready for milk. I’m going to leave out some plain toast and some applesauce and water for you. If that goes down all right, then you can try something with a little more flavor for lunch, okay?”
He nodded, and before she realized what was happening, he ran toward her and hugged her legs so hard she nearly toppled over her suitcase.
She caught herself and then bent down and looked into his big brown eyes with their impossibly long, dark lashes. They were the eyes of her father and the eyes of a little cherub.
“I’m going to miss you,” she said, shocked by the lump in her throat.
He nodded solemnly. “When will you come back?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It may be awhile. But I hope you’ll go to the library and e-mail me sometime
. I want to see some pictures of all of the big fish you’re catching.”
He grinned and nodded. “I will,” he said.
She looked up to find Heath standing at the door as well.
“You’re running late.” The girl shifted her weight and rested her long, tall, nearly grown-up body against the door frame.
“Yeah,” Julia said. “We overslept and I have to go. I left you . . .”
“I heard,” Heath said. “We’ll be all right.”
Julia held out her arms and Heath walked into them. Julia rocked her back and forth and felt the child’s body soften and embrace her back.
“I’ll order you the rest of the Tolkien trilogy this week and have it mailed to the PO box.”
“Okay,” Heath said. She stopped for a moment, stepped back, and looked into Julia’s eyes. “Thank you.” And Julia could tell that her thank-you was for more than the books. She pecked the girl’s beautiful forehead, then grabbed her bags and walked toward the top of the stairs. She peered in Etta’s room, but the bed was empty and the child was nowhere to be seen.
Charlie and Heath followed Julia downstairs.
“Where’s Etta?” She looked on the porch, then in the kitchen, then in the den.
“She just went out the door,” Skeeter said.
Julia stood outside and called her. She looked at her watch and ran to the shed. No sign of her. Then she checked the dock where the tide was pouring in. No sign of her there either. When Julia came back out in the yard to scan the woods, Skeeter opened the screened door and called out, “You better go on. You can’t be delayed another day, Julia.”
She turned back to Skeeter, Heath, and Charlie, who were all on the porch watching her. “Will you tell her good-bye for me?”
“We will,” Charlie said.
Julia scanned the property one more time, picked up her bags, and piled them in the car. Charlie chased her a little ways, barefoot and in his pajamas, as she drove down the dirt driveway. Then he stopped and held his stomach, his hunger likely getting the better of him. Julia waved and he waved back and then turned toward the house. As Julia drove on down the tree-lined road, she kept looking back and forth between the live oaks and scrub pines and palmettos, hoping to catch a glimpse of the little girl in the white nightgown and the red rain boots, but Etta was nowhere to be found. It was probably just the way Etta wanted it.
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