Pawleys Island

by Dorothea Benton Frank

She drained it quickly and said, “Oh!” When Huey opened the front door, the sounds of the storm rushed in on wet air. The storm was so violent we may as well have been outside.

  “Take me home, son,” Miss Olivia said. She took his arm, snuggled into his side and they left.

  I watched them lean into the wind and cross the front terrace to Miss Olivia’s door, which was actually more expedient than taking the long covered pathway from the side of the house. If we were having storms like this in July, what in the world would the hurricane season bring?

  Soon Rebecca and Huey were back. They were absolutely drenched. I didn’t want to talk about the pictures unless Rebecca did, and anyway the obvious first step was for them to get dry. Huey led Rebecca to the guest room, offering her a bathrobe and a hair dryer and saying that Byron would dry her clothes. She glared at me as she passed the living room, where I had curled myself up into the corner of the couch.

  While they were gone, I tortured myself. Don’t shoot the messenger. Yeah, sure.

  Byron reappeared with a tray of fruit and cheese, offering it to me.

  “Some drama, hey, Miss Abigail?” he said dryly with a little smile.

  “You know what, Byron? When you say these things, I am never sure how to respond.”

  He stood back waiting for me to continue but I was not comfortable enough with Byron to engage him in gossip. Besides, he was Huey’s houseman. He put the tray on the coffee table, and sensing that there was no camaraderie forthcoming, he threw his hand back.

  “That’s all right! You don’t have to dish it with me. I hear it all anyway.”

  He turned, left the room and to his back I muttered, I am sure you do.

  “I do,” he said from down the hall.

  Well, that was just Byron and I was as sure of anything that Huey probably sat around with him at night and recounted every detail of his life. I don’t know what I thought about while I waited there alone for Huey and Rebecca to return, but I can tell you that the time passed slowly and I was hugely relieved when Byron called us to dinner.

  Huey sat at the head of the table and I sat opposite Rebecca. Byron placed a tureen at my elbow and filled my soup plate. It looked like cream of asparagus, but it could have been broccoli or artichoke, for all it mattered to me. We waited in silence as he went around the table serving the first course, pouring wine and water and offering bread. Finally he left the room and Huey attempted to break the ice.

  He raised his glass and said, “Here’s to friends. There is no greater love than that of a good friend and no greater loyalty than that of a good friend. Their value is inestimable!”

  We clinked all around and took a sip. Hesitating, Rebecca raised her glass and said, “Here’s to friends honoring each other’s privacy and not discussing each other’s problems when the troubled one is absent.”

  Huey touched the edge of his goblet to Rebecca’s and then turned to me. I placed my glass back on the table. I wasn’t going to quibble over this insinuation. I was going to get it straight.

  “Rebecca. You have not known me long enough to know that I would never give away any single thing you ever said to me in confidence. It is human nature for friends to discuss friends. It’s the tone of that discussion that counts. If it’s malicious, then you would have a right to your bitterness…”

  “I’m not bitter…” She shot me a death ray.

  “All right then, your suspicions…”

  “I’m not suspicious either.” Another laser of destruction was lobbed my way.

  I took a deep breath and dealt with her as I would have any client. “All right then, what would you call it?”

  Huey was on the edge of his seat holding his breath. He hated confrontation, and especially at the dinner table. So did I. Rebecca was quiet for a few moments, and then she finally spoke in surrender. It seemed that Rebecca didn’t have the wherewithal or the desire to have a battle with us.

  “I would call it disappointment,” Rebecca said. “I am very deeply disappointed.”

  “About Nat and his behavior?” Huey said.

  “Well, of course she is, Huey,” I said.

  “Of course I am upset about that,” Rebecca said. “It’s horrible. But I’m more upset about his choice of a lover. Do y’all know who the woman is?”

  I kept quiet and Huey shook his head.

  “I was never privileged to see what you all are discussing,” Huey said with a trace of royal jealousy. “And whatever you may think, Rebecca, Abigail told me almost nothing. Except that she was concerned, deeply concerned about how best to give the information to you.”

  Rebecca looked up at me and this time she seemed apologetic. She was going to need a lot more spine that she apparently possessed to get any justice from her creep of a husband in a court of law.

  “I just don’t like y’all talking about me, that’s all. You hardly know me. I came here to paint and to get away…”

  “Yes, we know that, Rebecca. You’ve said it a thousand times. But while you’re away and painting you are allowing Nat to rob you of everything you are entitled to…”

  “Ostrich!” Huey offered, smiling, pleased with his cleverness.

  Rebecca and I stopped and stared at him.

  “Honest to God, Huey,” I said.

  “Thanks a lot, Huey,” Rebecca said. And then she added, “You’re right. He’s right, you know. It’s just that I don’t want to fight with Nat. You don’t know how he is. He’s ruthless. If he wants the kids and the house, let him have it all. I quit. And he can have that lowlife Charlene too.”

  “Lowlife?” Huey said.

  The kitchen door swung open. All conversation ceased as Byron cleared the untouched soup and replaced them with plates of tiny lamb chops propped on mounds of risotto, drizzled with a gleaming sauce. He put a bowl of watercress salad on Huey’s left and excused himself.

  “I’m going to see about Miss Olivia now,” he said.

  “Of course. Thank you, Byron,” Huey said. “This looks beautiful.”

  “Is she not well?” Rebecca asked.

  “No, she’s fine. Just a little tired,” Huey said. “Now, back to Charlene? Who is she?”

  “She’s gross! She has a flat chest, a flat butt, barely a high school education, nasty hair…I mean, y’all, she’s a little redneck nothing! She makes minimum wage and…”

  “Um, Rebecca, she doesn’t have a flat chest. Or a flat anything,” I said.

  “She has ears like a mule!” Rebecca said.

  “No, she doesn’t,” I said.

  “She most certainly does!” Rebecca said with insistence.

  “Not anymore, and I can prove it,” I said.

  “Please do!” Rebecca said.

  “What in the world…” Huey said, thoroughly confused.

  “I have other pictures in the car. Should I get them now?”

  “You have other pictures in the car? By all means!” Rebecca blurted.

  “Abigail, darling,” Huey said, “let’s have dinner first. We didn’t touch Byron’s soup and I’ll hear about that for sure, and if you don’t eat dinner he’ll have a fit, and besides…it’s still pouring outside.”

  “There’s an umbrella by the door,” Rebecca said. When we looked at her, incredulous that she would send me out into the proverbial dark and stormy night, she said, “What? I want to see the pictures!”

  “So do I,” Huey said. “Take my raincoat from the hall closet.”

  I ran to my car thinking, well, at one point in her life she had gumption, and although my favorite sandals were squishing from the puddles of rainwater and the great crackles of lightning terrified me, I was glad to see Rebecca speak up for herself. It was about bloody time! And who was Huey kidding to suggest that we eat before looking at the pictures? But on second thought, it would take an earthquake to get between Huey and a meal on a plate in front of him.

  When I got back, Huey was gobbling up dinner and Becca was pushing hers around the plate. The pictures remained on the table
, tucked inside the pages of People magazine, where I had slipped them to keep them dry. There was a photograph of them leaving the bank and, yes, I had censored the one of them taken from the tree across the street from Rebecca’s bedroom. I don’t know what had made me pull that one out but I guess I couldn’t bring myself to have Rebecca see her husband in such a sordid position. And the one of them leaving the bank? It was bothering me, that’s all. There were a few others—less incriminating, but shots of this Charlene clear enough for Rebecca to say whether or not Charlene had altered her appearance with surgery.

  Huey couldn’t finish dinner fast enough. His eyes twinkled with devilment anticipating what he was about to see.

  “Well?” he said, sitting back and wiping his lips with his napkin.

  “All right,” Rebecca said, “let’s have a look.”

  I passed the magazine to her and she pulled them out, gasping and passing them to Huey until she came to a really graphic one.

  “They were in my bedroom!” she said. “What kind of nerve!”

  “Let’s see, hon,” Huey said.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Rebecca said. “I’ll just keep this one to myself.”

  Huey shot me a look, and I shook my head to say, Let it go, Huey.

  “I’ll go get the magnifying glass,” Huey said and got up from the table.

  We went over them again and again until Rebecca finally said, “There’s no question about it at all. She’s had massive work done. Those aren’t even her teeth! He wouldn’t pay for marriage counseling, but he paid for this?”

  “Heavens!” Huey said.

  “I mean, I could understand if Nat left me for someone who was beautiful and aristocratic, but this tramp Charlene is the trashiest thing you can imagine! I mean, y’all, she’s as thick as a brick! Dumb as a post! She’s stupid! She has nothing, I mean nothing, going for her!”

  “She’s got something,” I said. “She probably makes Nat feel like the king of the world.”

  “Well, next to her, he is!”

  Then the funniest thing happened. Rebecca began to laugh, which of course, gave us the signal to laugh with her.

  “It’s just, I don’t know, absurd!” she said.

  “People can be so stupid,” I said.

  “Lord! She’s tacky!” Huey said.

  When we all finally regained our composures, I said in my theatrical attorney’s voice, “Mrs. Simms? Can you say with reasonable authority that those are new breasts?”

  “Absolutely! Goodness! She went from Little Orphan Annie to Dolly Parton!”

  Huey suppressed another giggle attack and so did I.

  “And these ears are different?”

  “Honey? She had ears that stuck out so far you’d have thought she could take off in a stiff wind and fly the whole way to Florida!”

  “And these buttoc—I mean her rear, um…”

  “Her derriere?” Huey offered.

  “Yes! Thank you, Huey! Her derriere?”

  “Abigail? Her booty, her teeth, her ears, her bazooms—the whole woman has been rebuilt! How can she pay for this when she earns minimum wage? Well, she didn’t, did she? Y’all know what? Now I am officially pissed off in purple. Abigail, will you help me at least recover some of my money?”

  “Rebecca? This is the most egregious and appalling misuse of marital assets I have ever seen in all my years. I will represent you and with pleasure! And on the house! I’ll extract my fee from your sorry excuse for a husband as I scrub and polish the courthouse floor with his arrogance and stupidity.”

  “But call Jeff Mahoney first, okay?”

  “What would you like me to call him?”

  “Abigail! I haven’t ever seen you quite so animated!”

  “Huey, baby? You ain’t seen nothing yet!”

  I looked at Rebecca again and my eyes went to her hands as she flipped through the pictures once more. Her wedding band was gone.

  “Rebecca? Did you toss your wedding band into the Waccamaw?”

  “What? No! Heavens! It is gone!”

  “Alice Flagg, cupcake. Alice Flagg came and stole your ring. Happens all the time,” Huey said.

  “Well, if she wants Nat Simms, she can have him!”

  “I think Alice has better taste,” I said. “Even from the grave.”

  NINE

  ABIGAIL’S GOT GAME

  REBECCA reminded me to call Jeff Mahoney to advise him that I was taking over her case. In any other circumstances I would have made the call simply as a matter of course, but I was already convinced her Jeff was such a moron that I didn’t feel like extending any courtesy to him. I mean, what did this guy ever do for her? Let’s see…lost her house, her children, her life? He probably got his law degree online while watching live cams of coeds. And, what contribution could he make toward the win? Probably nothing. It didn’t matter. I simply added his name to my daily agenda of things to do.

  I got up with the sun and walked the beach. What in the world was making me so cranky? Well, for one thing, I had this intense reluctance to enter a courtroom. I kept seeing myself pushing through the oversized doors, walking up the center aisle, dropping my briefcase on the floor and my folder on the table, looking up, over or back into the face of Julian Prescott and then falling off the cliff of propriety into the abyss.

  His face played in my head like a CD with a deep scratch. What would happen if I saw him? The one indiscretion of my entire life. In the daylight I regretted our affair with my whole heart, but there were many nights I would have given anything to have it happen all over again. But I’m not here to tell you about that chapter in my past. I only mention it so that you won’t think I’m trying to paint myself as Joan of Arc, some sexless icon of the battlefield. I understand desire and lust as well as I know betrayal and the pain it brings. I’ve known nothing but guilt and remorse since then.

  We were married to other people. Ashley had just died and John was drinking too much, which was his way of dealing with it. I was considering divorce and I wound up in bed with Julian at a conference in Chicago. I couldn’t help myself. Neither could he. There was this invisible thread between our hearts, something that in another place and time would have been a beautiful thing…We knew it was wrong, that the stakes were high and that if we continued, we would be found out. And, to our surprise, we were.

  His wife was devastated, had a complete nervous breakdown, including the nastiest case of shingles I have ever heard described, and had to be hospitalized. Julian was so stricken with guilt that he completely stopped talking to me, saying only that it had to be over. And my John? It broke whatever was left of his spirit and I know it contributed to his death.

  No, I had no desire to ever hurt anyone again. My love for Julian Prescott and my ambitious law practice swallowed my life whole. I had not only allowed it, I had invited it. Now I was completely alone. In one way I believed it was a sentence I deserved, that the penance for my sins was to be paid right here by being alone.

  If any one thing was to be said of Pawleys Island, it was that it reminded you of what was true in the most basic terms. You were born, you lived and then you died. And while that was no revelation to anyone, I was always amazed at how many people just banged their way through year after year, never giving a thought about what their lives meant. Or how they intended to make them mean something.

  All along the shores of Pawleys Island stood houses that had been there for a hundred years or more. The families who occupied them were the same ones whose ancestors had built them. Oh, sometimes they were sold to someone outside the family, but for the most part they stayed in the hands of the original family. If any of the houses were blown away by a hurricane, an improved duplicate replaced it.

  Pawleys Island residents walked land soaked with the memories and dreams of their relatives who had gone on before them. It was an awesome reality. The tide rose and fell anyway. It didn’t matter which generation occupied the house.

  It was hard not to think about your
allotted years with that kind of continuum staring you in the face. Of course I thought about my beautiful Ashley and how I missed him. And of course, John.

  In many ways I had been a willing zombie, acting so fine, so well for my tiny audience of Huey and the others. Inside I was dead, thinking somehow that I had already lived my life and lost what happiness I would ever have. And that it served me right. I was waiting for death to find me—that is, until this whole business with Rebecca Simms found its way to my plate. Now I could feel the strength of my heartbeat and I was somewhat glad to be useful again.

  I sat on my bottom step and knocked the sand from my sneakers and went inside to begin my day with a phone call to Jeff Mahoney, Idiot Attorney.

  To my utter astonishment, he was a gentleman. As soon as I explained the reason for my call, his first words conveyed certain tenderness for Rebecca and genuine despair over her unbelievable predicament.

  “How is Rebecca? Mrs. Simms, I mean. Where is she? Is she well?”

  “How is she? Well, I suppose she’s as well as any woman could be in her situation.”

  “May I be candid with you, Ms. Thurmond?”

  “By all means.”

  “In all my years, not just my professional years, but in my years on earth, I have never seen anything to match the ruthlessness of her husband or the animosity of her children. Just incredible.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jeff Mahoney began to gush like a bloated river, charging over its banks, swirling in every direction at once.

  “It’s just that I heard all these terrible stories.”

  “For example?”

  “Nat Simms went to Clemson and played football for them, right?”

  “And so?” Don’t get me started on football, I thought.

  “And so, his daughter, who adores him and could never play football, only wants to be a cheerleader for Clemson.”

  “What’s so terrible about that?”

  “Well, the scuttlebutt is that Mr. Simms promised her breast implants to improve her chances of becoming one if she would sign papers stating her preference to live with him. I don’t think she’s even sixteen. She’s in my daughter’s class.”