Savannah by the Sea

by Denise Hildreth Jones

“Sergeant Millings, you have got to be kidding me! You are going to give me a ticket for doing—”

  “License and registration, Miss Phillips.” He sucked air through his teeth. They should have used him in the Dukes of Hazzard movie. It would have gotten better ratings, I’m certain.

  “Would you like blood with that? I’m sure I could draw some for you.” Especially had the steering wheel been my arms, because my nails were now embedded in it.

  “Don’t be smart. Now, hand them over, missy.”

  “It’s Lucky, remember!” I said, wanting to toss them across the street.

  He took the paperwork from my hand, and the sun bounced off of a gold wedding band. In all these years I had never met Mrs. Sergeant Millings. Poor woman had probably taken to hiding. If she was smart, she had hidden from him as well. Amazing to me how a man like that can find love while I’m relegated to the companionship of crazy people.

  “Well, Miss Phillips.” His voice called my mind back from its thoughts of vehicular homicide.“Here you go. You can send your check by mail, or you can see me in court.”

  “Are you serious?” I jerked the ticket from his hand. My eyes got to what mattered most. “A hundred and fifteen dollars? For two miles over the speed limit?”

  “No, forty dollars for two miles over the speed limit, and seventy-five dollars for verbally assaulting a police officer.”

  “You are being absurd!” I could cover my rent and have just enough money left over for food. This would sure put a dent in that achievement.

  He flapped his little black notebook in my face.“I have more tickets.”

  “Well, do tell me, Sergeant Millings, what orifice would you like to pull this money out of ? Huh? Because I’ve already exhausted all resources of my behind!”With that, I tossed the ticket in the passenger’s seat and rolled up my window. Old Betsy gave him a sputter of her thoughts as well as the black smoke choked him.

  A week away just might be exactly what I needed. Granted, I was going with a crazed mongrel and a morbidly depressed beauty-queen reject, but it was Seaside. What could happen in Seaside?

  CHAPTER TWO

  When I arrived at the paper, it seemed just as busy as a weekday. Of course, Saturday and Sunday still required a paper. But the staff was predominantly different. My small cubby-hole that rested at the back of the first floor had slowly come to feel like home. I had brought in some of my favorite books, placed pictures of my friends around the Styrofoamish walls, and even hung up a beautiful oil painting created by my best friend, Paige, who owns her own art studio in the back of her parents’ antique store. Door or no door, this had become my world.

  I jogged up the three flights of stairs to Mr. Hicks’s office.He was always here.

  His booming voice responded to my knock.“Come in.”

  I breathed deeply before opening it, hoping the opportunity I had rehearsed between my tirades of financial ruin would prove convincing.“Hey, Mr. Hicks. How are you on this beautiful morning?”

  He sat his coffee cup down rather firmly on his lacquered desk and picked up a handful of peanut M&Ms from the candy jar on his desk. Rumor had it he refilled the jar twice a day.

  “Savannah Phillips, what are you doing in here on a Saturday? I thought you did nothing but read books on the weekend.”

  The man knew me better than I thought.“Well, I’ve really been laboring over a deeply rooted concern. I feel that our paper has been insensitive and abandoned a truly humanitarian voice regarding the desperate plight of the hurricane victims along the panhandle.”

  His brow furrowed. His candy crunched. “What do you want?” he asked through peanuts and chocolate.

  I leaned over his desk so he could see my sincerity. “I feel I need to go.”

  “Go where? The panhandle?”

  I leaned in farther. He retreated. “They’ve been through so much.”

  “Most of the hurricanes hit the Gulf.”

  “And yet the psychological trauma spared no one. The packing up, the unpacking up, the one-minute-it’s-coming, the next-minute-it’s-retreating chaos. The hurricane season always looming on the horizon . . .” I moved my head in circles for effect.

  “A story, huh?” He folded his arms across his expansive chest.

  “A real human-interest story.”

  “On the panhandle?”

  “It will only take a week.”

  “A week!” he yelled, his chair squeaking as it projected him forward. It was a good thing he’d swallowed already, or he might have choked. I backed my own self up. “You think you’re going to go away for a week to some beach and call it work?”

  “What would you like me to call it?”

  “Call it for what it is, Savannah, vacation.”

  “Humph. I don’t get vacation for two more months. This is not a vacation, I assure you.” If I told him Amber was coming, he would agree. “This is a lesson in living. A lesson for our city, which has been spared much trauma from the perils of the sea.”

  “You should have been an actress.” He was softening. “A week, huh?”

  I looked into his blue eyes, largely hidden by his gray bushy eyebrows.“For a real story.”

  “It better be Pulitzer worthy.”

  I tried to hide the fear. “Lilly Pulitzer?”

  “You know what I mean.” He ushered me out. When he closed the door behind me, I was certain I heard him chuckle.

  I gathered my pink Arreviderci OPI fingernail polish from the top drawer of my particleboard desk. And a few other things I might need while I was gone. Like my ability to pull a story out of my— “I’ll only be gone a week,” I heard Joshua’s voice call out.

  I tried to listen without revealing myself from behind the Styrofoam wall that separated us.

  “Stay away from the girls,” an unknown voice called out.

  Joshua laughed as he approached his workspace opposite mine. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll try.”

  I slid farther along my wall, trying to scrunch toward the corner out of his line of sight. I didn’t have it in me today. A woman could only do so much.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ll try,” I mouthed to the dust particles flying in front of my face.

  I heard papers shuffle and drawers open and close in Joshua’s cubicle. In a few minutes, his flip-flops stopped at what seemed to be my entrance. Had his curls turned the corner and his black eyes scanned the four-foot cell,he would have caught me like a rat in a trap.

  Finally Curly Locks flip-flopped away.

  I exhaled.

  He had tormented me since my arrival. And his torment became incessant the moment my old boyfriend made his way down the aisle without me.

  Grant Lewis married almost nine months ago. I didn’t go to the wedding. No need:Vicky gave me a play-by-play. Not that I had asked. I spent the next month sulking, and Joshua spent the next nine months assuring me I was not destined to become a sequestered old maid.

  I crawled from my hole and peeked around the corner. He was gone, to set his sights on other maidens, I hoped. I scanned his small cubicle and noticed the book lying at the corner of his desk. I didn’t even know he liked to read. Truth be told, I didn’t know much about him at all. Except that his dark chin-length curls were always in his dark eyes, his skin was always perfectly olive and perfectly flawless, his favorite pair of flip-flops were the brown leather ones with brown stitching, his favorite drink was Dr Pepper, his favorite sandwich was a ham, cheddar, and tomato on wheat (which he brought in with him almost every day), and his favorite color was blue. I mean, why would I notice that he read? Not much of anything he did mattered to me. I spun his chair around and looked forward to a week away. Just another week of not noticing anything that had to do with Joshua North.

  Katherine’s Corner Bookstore wasn’t far from the newspaper office. And I was officially in desperate need of new fiction. As I stepped out of the car, I heard my name called. Well, my name to Savannah’s Honorable Judge Hoddicks.

  “Betty!” the white-haired, di
stinguished man called from the other end of the sidewalk. He had called me Betty since I was thirteen, when I petitioned him to change my name. He got nowhere with my mother, so I changed hers to Vicky for a while. His beautiful wife, June, was on his arm. “How’s that brother of yours and his lady friend?” he called.

  June nudged him.

  At a certain age, a wife’s nudge is nothing more than wasted elbow effort. Judge Hoddicks was just that age.“Oh,well, can’t say I’ve seen either one of them lately.”And that was the truest gospel there was.

  Thomas worked with Judge Hoddicks every summer. They had a mutual respect.“Won’t you see them on your vacation?”

  If I didn’t know the man was my father’s closest friend, I would have blabbered Thomas’s news across the square.“Well, all the details haven’t been worked out yet.”

  “Well, tell him I want to hear all about her when he heads back this summer.”

  “Will do.” Oh, everybody will hear all about it. Of that I was certain.

  Katherine was ringing up a local socialite with some book on flower arranging. Paula Deen, Savannah’s resident celebrity, had a new cookbook out; it was on the edge of the counter. It was a cookbook with her friends, Mother being one of them. There are even pictures of some of her friends on the cover. Unfortunately Vicky was at the edge. Got clipped by a hair. A couple actually. A couple of her brown hairs that you can actually see on the edge of the cover. That had Mother’s goat for a week; then she found out Paula was starring in a movie. Well, that had Mother going out to get head shots, and me retrieving antacids. The world couldn’t handle Vicky on the screen. I even called Miss Paula myself and asked her to avoid all conversations of agents, acting, and the union. She promised she would.That bought us a week.

  Katherine’s face lit up when she saw me. She had the same effect on me. She was just the kind of lady that you simply enjoyed being in the room with. Natural, graceful, real. No mayhem on her doorstep.

  She tucked her salt-and-pepper bobbed hair behind her ear and walked my way. “Savannah Phillips, what are you up to on this fine day?”

  “About to leave on vaca—I mean, on research, for a story, as a matter of fact.”

  “Oh, now you’re traveling for stories?” She laughed.

  “You’ve got to go where the story is.”

  Her red painted lips turned upward. “I completely understand. But vacation sounds a lot more fun.”

  “Well, Mother has a new pet and another vibrant traveling companion, so a vacation it certainly will not be.”

  “I’m not sure I even want to know,” she said, replacing the old Southern Living with the new.

  “Trust me. You don’t. So, I need some reading material.”

  “You’ve already finished those two books you picked up last week?”

  “It was two weeks ago, actually.And yes, I have.And I want fiction. No self-help. No autobiographies. Just plain other people’s issues. Worlds that aren’t my own.And I’ve never read this,” I said, picking up Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.The weight of it caused my arm to sag.

  Katherine’s dark brown eyes registered their shock. “You’ve never read this?”

  “No. Not even when Oprah made it mandatory. I was into something else and just haven’t ever picked it up.”

  She took the book from my hand.“Well, my dear friend, since you’ve never read Anna Karenina, this one is on me.” Her dainty hand placed it on the counter.

  “Katherine, I—”

  “Now, hush! You buy enough,but classics are a must. So you must.”

  So I did. I had planned on buying a couple books, but this one held enough verbiage to prevent me from spending insufferable travel time with my mother and her mongrels—I mean mongrel— either coming or going. But come to think of it, I didn’t need to travel this insanity completely alone. I mean, books are good and all. But companionship was better.

  “I need you, now!”

  “Where have I heard that before?” Paige retorted.

  “Pack your bags for the beach, and get here in nine minutes. Eight minutes if you argue.”

  “I can’t leave the studio for a week, Savannah. My mother would have a conniption.”

  “Tell her you’re with my mother, and she’ll end up wanting to come herself.”

  “She’s out of town.”

  “Good, because the car’s going to be crowded anyway, and plus she won’t even know that you’re gone.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Don’t play dumb. Why will the car be crowded?”

  “I can’t tell you or you won’t come,” I said.

  “Don’t tell me and I won’t come,” she said.

  “You won’t like it. It’s downright disabling.”

  “Amber’s going on your vacation.”

  “How—”

  “It was either that or your mother has gotten a dog.”

  “Ooh, now, that would be horrible,” I said.

  “I can’t endure a week with her,” Paige confirmed.

  “It’s Seaside.”

  “Ooh, I love that place,” she cooed.

  “And you can reschedule that meeting with the J. Proctor Gallery that you missed last year,” I coaxed.

  “You’re brazen.”

  “Come on. Pretty please! Everything is better in pairs. Please! I’m begging you. I am on my knees in the middle of the street, begging you to come with me.” I dropped to my knees. “I cannot endure such torment alone. Amber is teetering on the brink of a collapse. I’ll need therapy when I get home. And I can’t afford it! You of all people know this!” Thomas was right, I did still owe her two hundred dollars.

  “I’ll be there in a minute. I’m caught up here. Just let me lock up and pack a few of my paintings.”

  Now we’re talking.“Okay, but you’ve wasted five minutes, so get a move on.”

  “Well, shut up so I can pack.”

  I hung up. Life was always more tolerable when the ratio of sanity to insanity was at least even. Three against two. It wasn’t pretty, but it could be worse. Of course Paige had no idea “pink toenails” was coming too.

  I noticed a new ding in my car door. That ding magnet I bought off the TV infomercial hadn’t done anything yet except destroyed the muscle in my right shoulder by trying to actually suck the dings out of my car. The dings had remained; the muscle had taken six weeks to recover.

  I sat down softly. Old Betsy groaned. I groaned.

  I shifted the pillow on the driver’s seat. I purchased this new pillow because the seat had caved in a little more and I needed extra cushion.

  I say it’s the heat. I say that hoping when winter arrives, the springs will constrict and raise me up a hair. But I’m not looking for too many miracles. After almost seven years of being driven hard by me (after two years by someone else), the budget is going to have to find a car payment in it eventually. But me and Old Betsy have memories. Our parting would be traumatic.

  This old girl knows the streets of Savannah like she knows the guts of her transmission. She knows my favorite places to eat and hide and eat again. She could make a direct path to The Lady & Sons and then to the Gryphon Tea Room for dessert without having to be steered. She has carried me to school, to home, to Grant, to my world. And I’m not ready to let her go. Who cares if the knob to the gear shift comes off in my hands twice a week. There’s duct tape for those things. And there’s love for the rest. Hers for mine and mine for hers, and we’ll worry about the rest as it comes.

  I pulled her into her new home: the carport behind Dad’s coffee shop. She was happy. I was happy. A Coke for me would make both of us even happier.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Don’t come in here today if you ain’t going to work, girl,” Richard said. His black hand scooped coffee grounds into a filter.

  “You throwing a party while the owner’s away?” I laughed at the right arm of my father’s coffee shop, Jake’s. Richard had been here fourteen of his sixty-six years.


  His scooping was rather determined.“I don’t know how I’m going to make it with those two old birds for a week without your father.”

  As if on cue, Louise came through the swinging door, hollering, “I heard that, Richard!”

  “I hope you did. You’ve been going on out there all morning.”

  “Yakety-yak!” She scurried through the kitchen like a Swiffer on speed.

  I poured me a BIG Coke.“Can we order bigger cups?”

  She and Richard jerked their heads around at me in unison.

  I took a step back.“Maybe we’ll check into that on another day.” I peeked my head through the door and saw the clamor. Mervine, Louise’s twin of seventy-five years, was pouring coffee as fast as her wrists could tilt.

  “Savannah Phillips?”

  I looked up and felt the Coke burn its way up through my nostrils. It was her. The woman I had successfully avoided for nine months, ten days, and—I caught a glance at my watch—sixteen hours.“Yes?”

  “Elizabeth Lewis,” she said, extending her hand. My ignorant look worked.“Grant Lewis’s wife.”

  The dagger went in deep. What was left to destroy? My mother had a dog. Amber was encroaching on my vacation. Now this.

  The bling-bling from her left hand caused me to stumble backward. The swinging door hit me in the hiney. I could see Mervine watching me. I cast her a glance. She gave a knowing smile of pity. She didn’t talk anyway, so who did that surprise?

  “Oh, Elizabeth, yes. I’ve heard so much about you. What a pleasure to meet you.” I scanned her together ensemble, with its complementary toned handbag and shoes to match and wondered why I didn’t think Saturday required organized apparel. The blue running pants that stopped above my ankles and white T-shirt didn’t say, “Ooh, America’s Next Top Model has just arrived on the premises.” And the New Balance tennis shoes that I had just purchased were still shining like a beacon on a stormy night.

  “Oh, and I’ve heard so much about you. Grant has told me ever since we got married”—dagger is now being turned —“that I had to meet you. And I love your articles. They just touch my heart every time. Especially the story about the elderly lady named Joy, who lost her memory and was wandering the streets of Savannah. Oh, girl, I cried for a week.”