Skelly pulled her closer and was about to kiss her again, when she put a finger to his lips.
“Hold on,” she said. “Isn’t there something you want to tell me?”
“Oh.” He gave it a moment’s thought. “Is this the part where I tell you that I’ve been here all along, trying to convince myself I could somehow be happy with somebody else but at the same time patiently waiting for you to finally come home and fall in love with the skinny guy down the block who broke your heart a million years ago but who was secretly in love with you all along?”
She smiled. “Yes.”
She wrapped her arms around him and fell into him, and they kissed. When she looked up, fifteen minutes later, the sun had set, and a million tiny stars spattered the dark velvet sky.
“We missed the sunset,” Skelly pointed out. They were reclined on the sand now, and his arm cushioned the back of her head.
“I know, but there’ll be others,” she said.
“Does this mean you’ll marry me?” he asked.
“I think I have to,” Conley said, kissing him again. “Because if I don’t, G’mama will.”
Epilogue
HELLO, SUMMER
By Rowena Meigs
FEBRUARY 19, 2020
My goodness, but February has already been a month of happiness, heartbreak, housewarmings, and all-around change in our charming little village of Silver Bay.
Cupid’s arrows were zinging right and left this past year, resulting in a slew of engagements and nuptials.
Most recently the Beacon’s own star reporter and Silver Bay native Miss Sarah Conley Hawkins, daughter of the late Mr. Chester W. Hawkins and Melinda Conley Hawkins, and the granddaughter of Mrs. Lorraine DuBignon Conley and the late Woodrow Conley, exchanged wedding vows with Mr. Sean Patrick Kelly, son of the late Dr. Patrick Kelly and June Sewell Kelly.
Sean, of course, is also a Silver Bay native and the owner-manager of Kelly’s Drugs, a Silver Bay institution, who grew up two doors down from his blushing bride, who now prefers to be called Conley. Like many modern career gals, Conley says she will keep her maiden name as a tribute to her late father Chet, who was the longtime president of the now-defunct Silver Bay Savings and Loan.
The nuptials took place on Valentine’s Day, at sunset on the beach behind the bride’s grandparents’ home, The Dunes. Officiating at the service was the bride’s close friend, Branson “Butch” Culpepper, of Atlanta, who became a minister for the event. The blushing bride was breathtaking in a tea-length silk organza gown with exquisite hand-beaded pearls over imported French lace, which was handed down to her by her maternal grandmother, who wore it at her debutante ball. The bride’s bouquet consisted of a rosette of miniature palm fronds, white roses, and gardenias from the family garden. The groom wore a blue suit accented with a red bow tie which was his late father’s favorite. Neither wore shoes.
The bride’s sole attendant was her older sister, Grayson Hawkins Willingham, who wore a floral silk tea-length dress accented with a bouquet of miniature palm fronds and pink, yellow, and orange roses.
Following the ceremony, guests gathered under a festive tent and enjoyed an unusual repast of barbecued pork, coleslaw, chili dogs, and miniature ice cream sandwiches, all prepared for the reception by cooks from Kelly’s Drugs’ luncheonette. Dance music was provided by Mickey Mannington and the Mellowtones.
After the newlyweds return from their honeymoon they will be “at home” at the groom’s childhood residence on Felicity Street. A sad note to this happy occasion is that the wedding was preceded, by only a month, by the death of the groom’s mother, June Sewell Kelly, a beloved lifelong resident of this community, who passed, peacefully, in her sleep, at home. She was sixty-six.
In other Hawkins family news of note, our own Silver Bay Beacon managing editor and publisher Grayson Hawkins Willingham and her husband Tony recently completed construction of their new home on the site of her grandparents’ former family home on Felicity Street, just in time to welcome the arrival of twins Lorraine, called Lolo by her adoring family, and her brother Chester called Chet. With Grayson’s little sister Conley living just two doors down, and great-grandmother Lorraine a frequent guest, these twins will have plenty of family to cuddle and babysit them.
Although the Hawkins-Kelly nuptials have been in the works for some time now, your columnist admits she was caught off-guard by the whirlwind romance and subsequent marriage of Kennedy Marie McFall to Davis Whelan, of Panama City, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Whelan. The marriage represents a business as well as romantic union, as the groom’s family, who owns a chain of funeral homes in Northwest Florida, have acquired McFall-Peeples Funeral Home. The bride will assume the role of marketing manager for the newly formed partnership. Some may recall that Kennedy, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. George McFall, was briefly engaged last year to our town’s most eligible bachelor, Charlie Robinette.
And speaking of whirlwind, Vanessa Robinette stunned many here when she eloped recently with retired entrepreneur Osbert Tracy, less than a year after the death of her first husband, U.S. Rep. Symmes Robinette. Mr. Tracy, 80, is the billionaire founder of PayDay Pawn. A little bird tells us that the two lovebirds met through the online dating site Silver Singles, following Vanessa’s unsuccessful bid for her late husband’s seat in Congress. The new Mrs. Tracy has sold her oceanfront mansion on Sugar Key, and the couple will reside in the groom’s home in Palm Beach.
Vanessa’s estranged son Charlie Robinette has also quietly pulled up stakes and put his home here on the market, following his upset defeat in the general election by the Democratic candidate, popular Bronson County Sheriff Merle Goggins. Charlie has reportedly accepted a position with a Washington, D.C., firm of lobbyists.
Also saying a temporary farewell to our fair community is former railroad titan and would-be political king-maker Miles Schoendienst, who is due to report to federal prison following his conviction for mail and insurance fraud. The charges stemmed from Schoendienst’s filing of a spurious insurance claim last May, following a theft from Miles’s Mercedes while it was parked at the Silver Bay Country Club. Among the items he claimed stolen from the unlocked car was a pair of $36,000 diamond and sapphire earrings belonging to his wife. The insurance company filed charges against Miles after receiving a photograph of Candace Schoendienst, Miles’s vivacious wife, wearing the “stolen” earrings at a campaign fund-raiser for Charlie Robinette, sent by an anonymous source.
And now, dear readers, for a farewell of my own. Your longtime correspondent has decided to hand over the reins of Hello, Summer to her respected Beacon colleague Lillian King. But not to worry, Tuffy and I will still be keeping you filled in on all the local Silver Bay social notes as we start an exciting new chapter in our lives. I am pleased to report that we’ll be live and local on radio station WSVR with our brand-new Sunday night broadcast Talk of the Town with Rowena and Tuffy! So, #TTFN. (That’s ta-ta for now!)
Acknowledgments
Although this is a work of fiction, as always, I am indebted to many who were so generous and cooperative in sharing their knowledge and expertise while I conducted the research needed to build the universe of Hello, Summer.
Of course, Silver Bay is a speck on the map of the Florida Panhandle and exists only in my imagination. The Silver Bay Beacon is also a product of my imagination and was brought to life with the help of my old newspaper friends. Mega thanks to Andrew Meacham whose fascinating obituaries got me thinking. Dianne and Patrick Yost of the Georgia Morgan County Citizen, Bo Emerson of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Bert Roughton AJC emeritus, all of whom provided invaluable insight into the world of modern-day print journalism.
Many thanks also go to Albert Oetgen for his knowledge of network newsgathering, and Mara Davis for her insight into the world of radio deejays.
Huge thanks go out to Gwinnett County Medical Examiner Carol A. Terry, MD, and her staff who helped with the technical medical stuff, and also Carol Knox Lavender, RN.
Additional thanks go to Fire Chief Toni Washington and Assistant Fire Chief Ninetta Violante of Decatur Fire & Rescue for their firefighting expertise.
Leslie Anne Tarabella was my spirit guide in Fairhope, Alabama, while I researched small-town Gulf-coast life, who introduced me to former reporter Cliff McCollum, and Lori DuBose of WABF radio.
It’s been nearly three decades since I left newspaper journalism, but the friendships I formed, and the skills I acquired—reading upside down! Writing on deadline! Knowing the difference between robbery and burglary!—are ones I’ll always treasure. Writing Hello, Summer reinforced in me the absolute vital importance of a vigorous and independent press.
Speaking of treasures, my publishing team: literary agent Stuart Krichevsky at SKLA, marketing guru Meghan Walker of Tandem Literary, publicist extraordinaire Kathleen Carter, and all the folks at St. Martin’s Press, including but not limited to my publishers Sally Richardson and the essential Jennifer Enderlin. Thank you to Jessica Zimmerman, Tracey Guest, Erica Martirano, Brant Janeway, and as always, huge thanks to Michael Storrings, for another evocative cover.
My greatest blessing in life is and always has been my amazingly supportive family led by my husband, Tom; daughter, Katie; son-in-law Mark; son, Andrew; and the light of our lives, grandchildren Molly and Griffin.
A Letter from
MARY KAY ANDREWS
Dear Target Guest:
Sarah Conley Hawkins is an award-winning investigative newspaper reporter about to embark on the next chapter of her career—working for an acclaimed digital newsgathering organization in Washington, DC—when she gets a devastating text from her older sister, informing her that her new job, and her new employer, are no more.
The timing couldn’t be worse for Conley. At the moment she gets the bad news she’s about to cut the cake at her going-away party in the newsroom of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Her desk is packed, she’s broken up with her boyfriend—who’s standing just a few feet away in that same newsroom—and she’s given up her apartment.
That’s the premise, or setup for my newest novel, Hello, Summer. But it’s also the reality for journalists all over the country, who are encountering seismic changes in the newspaper business, with papers everywhere facing shrinking ad revenue, rising production costs, and a generation of readers accustomed to getting their news for free online.
As a former career newspaper reporter, who had her own going-away party in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newsroom decades ago, I’ve always gotten ideas for plots for my fiction from headlines. But this time, with Hello, Summer, I decided to give readers a peek behind the headlines.
When Conley’s job prospects are snuffed out, her only recourse is to head to her hometown—tiny Silver Bay, in the Florida Panhandle, where her family owns the struggling weekly paper, The Silver Bay Beacon, now run by her older sister, Grayson.
Her plan is to hang out at her grandmother’s beach house, send out some résumés, and wait for a job offer, but as soon as she arrives home, her grandmother, the family matriarch and publisher of the newspaper, insists she should go to work at the Beacon, a move opposed by both Conley and Grayson.
As is always the case, my research for this novel put me back into newsgathering mode. The research is always my favorite part of storytelling. This time, I interviewed the publishers of a small weekly newspaper in Madison, Georgia, turned up in the newsroom of the AJC after a nearly thirty-year absence, and talked to former and current newspaper, television, and radio journalists about the state of the business these days.
For inspiration for the book’s plot, I returned to a memorable story written years earlier by my oldest friend at my hometown newspaper, The Tampa Bay Times, a reporter who’d made a career of writing richly detailed obituaries. For this particular story, my friend wrote about a revered local politician, whose not-so-newsworthy death from cancer made national headlines when it was revealed that this man, a rock-ribbed family-values conservative, had, years earlier, walked away from his “secret first family,” including his high school sweetheart wife and children, after fathering an out-of-wedlock child with a decades-younger staffer in his office, whom he subsequently married.
I gave my fictional congressman, C. Symmes Robinette, a similarly complicated marital history, but instead of dying in a hospital bed, Robinette perishes mysteriously in a fiery one-car crash at three in the morning, on a remote country road miles from home. And the only witnesses are Conley and her childhood friend Sean, who happen on the wreck after a night of drinking at the local American Legion bar.
Not everybody in Silver Bay is in mourning for the late congressman. There’s Conley’s grandmother’s longtime housekeeper, Winnie, who blames Robinette for the death of her older sister, Nedra. The two sisters grew up poor in Plattesville, a nearby working-class neighborhood, whose soil and water were tainted by toxic runoff from a nearby railroad switching yard. After dozens of current and former residents of the neighborhood sicken and die from the effects of the chemicals, they unsuccessfully attempt to sue the railroad for damages. The railroad’s attorney is none other than Symmes Robinette, who deliberately drags out the court case until after most of the cancer cluster victims are dead or too sick to keep fighting.
The toxic waste plot was another thread inspired by a story about an ongoing cancer cluster in a small south Georgia community, and another in a poor neighborhood in Birmingham, Alabama.
My research for Hello, Summer included visiting and spending time with the medical examiner who runs one of Georgia’s largest county morgues. While grateful for her advice and expertise on determining the cause of death in an accident involving fire, I’ll admit I gave a hard pass to witnessing an autopsy. I also interviewed firefighters about protocol involved in fighting passenger-involved car fires, and an oncology nurse about dosages for terminal cancer patients.
Probably my favorite part of the research for this book was creating fictional characters inspired by the quirky and unforgettable personalities encountered years ago in Savannah and Atlanta newsrooms. The Beacon’s aging Southern belle society columnist, Rowena Meigs (and her dog Tuffy) were inspired by the late Yolande Gwin, who, according to local legend, once avoided being fired from the AJC by enlisting the help of her wealthy friends. They supposedly called the owner of Atlanta’s largest department store, Rich’s, and threatened to cut up their Rich’s charge cards unless Yolande’s firing was retracted. Since Rich’s was the Atlanta paper’s largest advertiser, and the indomitable Yolande was still writing her column well into the 1980s, I can only assume the tactic worked.
I first met Yolie, as we all called her, after I was assigned the desk next to hers when I joined the AJC’s features staff in 1982. She was in her late seventies by then, but still regarded as the grande dame of Atlanta society, who’d covered the 1939 Atlanta premiere party for Gone With the Wind. She loved to tell of being in the ladies lounge at the very elite Piedmont Driving Club when a snippy young thing asked to borrow her lipstick. “Of course I said no,” Yolie told me. “A lady doesn’t loan out her lipstick.” She was chagrined to learn, later, that the would-be borrower was Vivien Leigh, who played Scarlett O’Hara in the movie.
As for Buddy Bright, the fictional night-loving deejay in Hello, Summer, I’ll again plead guilty to theft, this time using Buddy as a fictional stand-in for a long-ago photographer I met at my first newspaper job at the Savannah Morning News. The late Bob Morris was a chain smoker who never dressed in anything but black and drove a vintage Corvette with a homemade working press license plate. Like his fictional counterpart, he roamed the streets of his town, long after quitting time, always in search of that next elusive breaking news story.
All my novels bear some of my DNA, but Hello, Summer, for me, is a valentine of sorts, to the world of newspapers and newspaper reporters everywhere. Writing this book reminded me that like Conley, even after all these years, I still have printer’s ink in my blood.
An Exclusi
ve to Target
deleted scene from
Hello, Summer
July 1956
“Lookit here,” the older girl whispered, extending her hand. Winnie bent over, breathless, waiting for her big sister to reveal her prize. Nedra slowly uncurled chubby fingers, the ragged nails caked with grime. Nested in the palm of her hand was a cigarette lighter, its brass case illustrated with the silhouette of a beautiful naked lady, her legs folded beneath her and a sailor’s cap perched on long red hair.
“Whoa,” Winnie gasped. “Where’d you get that?”
“Found it,” Nedra said, a little too casually.
They were standing in their clubhouse, a long-abandoned toolshed at the edge of the rail yard that ran smack through the middle of their neighborhood. Just a week earlier Winnie had been the one to spot the place where the railroad’s fencing had rotted out. They’d been picking blackberries along the fence-line, stabbing at the prickly vines with stout sticks to scare off rattlesnakes, and Winnie’s stick went clean through the board. But Nedra, older, braver, bolder, had been the first to kick a hole in the boards and clamber through.
She stuck her head out the jagged hole. “Come on.”
Winnie pointed at the orange lettered sign bolted to the fence not three feet away. POSTED: NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
“It’s private property.”
“Who cares?” Nedra’s head disappeared and Winnie had no choice but to follow.
The toolshed, just a few yards from the fence, was barely visible beneath the tangle of kudzu and blackberry brambles, but the two girls had spied it, and Nedra used her stick to whack at the rusted-out hasp of the lock until it and the padlock fell away from the door. She’d declared it their clubhouse, and they’d immediately busied themselves sweeping out the cobwebs, leaves, and rat turds and ferrying in supplies; a six-pack of grape Nehi soda, a wobbly three-legged wooden stool they’d rescued from a ditch, along with a rust-speckled cast iron skillet, and three dented cans of Spam and a bulging can of peaches—all from the trash pile back behind the Silver Bay IGA. These had been augmented with the items the sisters liberated from home—a couple of cracked china plates with smudgy painted rosebuds, a can opener, and Winnie’s most treasured possession in the world, a turquoise transistor radio, purchased with ten books of S&H Green Stamps as a birthday gift from her Mamaw.
Hello, Summer Page 47