The Southern Side of Paradise

by Kristy Woodson Harvey

  “Caroline,” Sloane said, “that was the best store opening in history.”

  “Until ours,” I interrupted. “Because Caroline will have made all her mistakes on the first one.”

  James burst out laughing. “Mistakes?” He pulled Caroline close and said, “My girl doesn’t make mistakes.”

  Yeah, that’s only you, I wanted to interject. I would forever be watching him very, very carefully.

  “Wait,” Mark said. “You’re not seriously thinking about opening a store in LA?”

  I couldn’t decide if his voice was accusatory or if it just sounded that way because I’d had too much to drink.

  “Of course we are,” Caroline said. “It’s going to be amazing. Why wouldn’t we open another store?”

  Mark’s cheeks were turning red, and I knew what was coming next. “Oh, gee. I don’t know. Maybe because we just had a talk about how Emerson was going to spend as little time in LA as possible and that we were going to try to make this thing work in Peachtree Bluff. Did we not just have that conversation, Emerson?”

  I saw Adam shift in his seat, and I could feel his big-brother protective instincts kicking in. “Dude, I don’t like your tone.”

  Mark looked him up and down like he was pond scum. “I didn’t ask your opinion, man.”

  Adam was silent and stock-still. Mark might not have known it, but that was when he was at his scariest, his most primal, a predator about to attack prey that never saw it coming.

  “It’s not that big a deal,” I said quickly, trying to ease the tension between the two men. “We’re going to own it and spend time there, yeah. But we will also have a whole team of people in place running it.”

  Mark scoffed. “That shows how little you know about business. It’s your business. No one is going to care about it like you do. And then it’s going to be the day before our kid’s second birthday, and the manager doesn’t show up, and you’re going to have to rush off to LA to check on your damn store.” He paused. “First I have to compete with acting, and now this? You’re such a selfish bitch, Emerson.”

  I didn’t even have time to react. I almost didn’t see it happening, it was so fast. In one swift motion, Adam was out of his chair and had Mark by the back of his neck, like a mother cat with a kitten. I heard the front door open and Adam say, “If you ever talk to my little sister like that again, she won’t be crying over what you said to her. She’ll be crying over whether to take you off life support.”

  Mark didn’t say anything back, which might have been the first smart decision he had made in a while. I heard the door slam shut.

  Everyone was silent as Adam walked back in, his limp seeming more pronounced. Sloane shot him a look, and I couldn’t tell if it was one of approval or disapproval. I didn’t know what to say. On the one hand, I felt proud that Adam thought of me as his little sister, that he had protected me like that. On the other, I felt sick to my stomach, because I knew he had humiliated Mark and I would be the one to pay for it later.

  “Sorry,” Adam said under his breath.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for,” Caroline said. “He shouldn’t speak to her that way.”

  I felt glued to the floor. Part of me wanted to run after Mark. The bigger part of me wanted to sit here with my family.

  “Emerson . . .” Sloane started.

  I shook my head. “I can’t, Sloane. It’s fine. He just had too much to drink.” I shrugged. “It’s my fault. I knew this would make him mad, and I did it anyway.”

  I let his words sink in, roll around. Because he wasn’t wrong. I was being selfish. Expecting him to agree with whatever I wanted wasn’t compromise, and it wasn’t a good way to start a marriage. I hated being wrong. But a part of me had to realize that I was.

  It wasn’t the first time I had made the wrong choice. I had played Edie Fitzgerald in that movie, and while, no, I hadn’t known when I first took the part that James was having an affair with her, I’d found out in plenty of time to back out of the project, and I hadn’t. That was selfish. Was this a pattern? It was more than I could process, and I didn’t want to think about it anymore.

  So to change the subject, I raised my glass. “To Caroline,” I said, “who has always been able to make Sloane and me miserable or ecstatic. Thank you for using your powers for good.”

  We all clinked glasses, but my sisters eyed me warily.

  “I just can’t talk about it tonight, OK?” I said pleadingly.

  Sloane rolled her eyes and turned to Caroline, silently obeying my wishes. “I can’t believe you’re doing this at all,” Sloane said. “It’s a lot of work. And if I know you, that hasn’t always been your thing.”

  Caroline smiled that smile I knew very well, the one of self-satisfaction, of a job well done. “You know, I realized that work makes me happy. It really does.” She shrugged. “Plus, it’s like shopping, but instead of buying stuff for me, I get to buy lots and lots of stuff for other people.”

  “But not on my credit card,” James interjected with a smile.

  “I never really realized how hard Mom’s job was,” Caroline said. “I sort of thought she played around with fabric samples and went to High Point Market, but it’s no joke.”

  “Let’s talk about how I’m going to sell more paintings at the LA opening than Caroline did at the New York one,” I chimed in.

  “Oh, yeah?” Caroline said. “You’re on.”

  “I like this,” Sloane said. “It’s excellent for my wallet. But I won’t continue to do this unless you two take a cut of the earnings.”

  “No,” Caroline said definitively.

  “Not a chance,” I seconded. “You are our sister. Making you famous is our top priority. You will eventually pay us back with exclusive dinner reservations.”

  “Exactly,” Caroline said.

  “It’s a good thing I have a rental storage unit full of paintings,” Sloane said. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t even have time to eat over the next few months.”

  Caroline gave Sloane the up and down. “This might come as a shock to you, but I’ll allow it.”

  We all laughed again, but my mind was somewhere else, out in this great, wide city, with Mark. Although I was thrilled about the store, I knew already that I might have to let it go. Marriage was a compromise, and I knew I wasn’t holding up my end of the bargain by spending more time in LA. I could only hope that wherever he was, Mark could forgive me.

  SEVENTEEN

  ansley: the only answer

  When I look back on the months of my life during and after conceiving Sloane, only one word comes to mind: consumed. Not by thoughts of my baby, of the person I wanted to create, but by thoughts of Jack. I counted down the moments until I could sneak away and call him, simply hear his voice. And those days we got to be together . . . well, there were never enough of those. Twenty times an hour, it seemed, I would decide, breathlessly, recklessly, that I couldn’t live without Jack. I would leave Carter for him. I had to.

  Then I would see my husband, really look at him, kiss him, watch the way he was with Caroline. And I would know that he was my family. He was the one I was meant to be with, and I would never leave him, never want to lose him. And so on and so forth, until I thought—no, assumed—that I was crazy.

  For months, I convinced myself that what I was doing was not having an affair. My husband knew about it, for heaven’s sake. If I got caught, then this was what he had asked me to do. Well, maybe not this exactly. But if those months taught me something, it was that the human mind can rationalize absolutely anything. Even how it was OK to be in love with more than one person and to know that no matter what you did or how you tried, you would most likely be in love with both of them for the rest of your life.

  As bad as it was for me, I knew it was worse for Jack. In some ways, I wondered why he didn’t call the whole thing off. In other ways, I knew why. He, like me, felt addicted to this life. To the secret meetings, the sneaking around, the wanting to be together out in the open bu
t knowing it could never be. But I’d like to think that it was more than that. The affair wasn’t so hard because of the longing, the lust, the wanting something you may never fully have. It was hard because of the love.

  If I thought it then, I knew it now. Because all these years later, sitting on the steps of the Plaza hotel, my heart still raced for Jack like it had all those years ago. I still couldn’t bear to be away from his arms. I still longed to sneak away to him to share those particular moments of passion that I had never quite experienced with anyone else.

  As I leaned into him that night, the hot summer day giving way to a warm, pleasant evening, he kissed my forehead. “Can I take you somewhere?” he asked.

  It was only then that I realized how tired I was, how much I wanted to slip underneath the crisp, high-thread-count sheets upstairs and fall asleep beside the man I had waited to fall asleep beside for what seemed like a lifetime.

  “Upstairs?” I replied.

  He lifted my chin and kissed me. “No,” he whispered. “Somewhere else. Somewhere I think you’ll like.”

  I sat up and peered at him. “I told you, I am not going to have sex with you in Central Park. I’m sorry that’s your lifelong fantasy, but you might have to put that one aside if you’re going to be with me.”

  He laughed and stood up, reaching his hand out to me. “First of all, you’re my lifelong fantasy. Second of all, we’re not going to the park.”

  We walked hand in hand down the street. When Jack stopped and held open a door for me, I didn’t recognize where we were at first. But then I walked in and gasped for the second time that night. Two things hit me right at the same time. One, this old wooden bar was completely empty, save for one bartender and the most beautiful arrangement of flowers and candles I had ever seen. Two, I hadn’t been here in more than thirty-seven years.

  “Jack!” I said. “This is the bar!”

  “This is the bar,” he repeated, kissing me.

  I guess the flowers and the candles should have been a dead giveaway. But still, I heard yet another gasp escape my throat when Jack got down on his knee.

  “Ans,” he said, “I sat at that booth across from you thirty-seven years ago, and I asked you to come back to Georgia with me. I didn’t get to say all that I wanted to say then, but I’m going to say it now. I love you, Ansley. I’m pretty sure that I have only ever loved you. I’ve wasted a lot of time in my life not saying what I meant or doing what I felt. I’ve spent a lot of time pushing aside what was right in front of me. What I wanted to say to you that night was that I wanted you to come back to Georgia with me as my wife. And that’s what I want now. I want to marry you, Ansley. I want to spend every day and every night with you. I want to breathe every breath I have left in my body with you. So will you, Ansley? Will you marry me?”

  My hands flew to my mouth, and I could barely see the ring he produced from his pocket because my eyes were so glazed over with tears. But, oh, it was beautiful. He was beautiful. I thought for a moment about all those years, all that time I’d had to fight to keep myself away from him, first because of my husband, then because of my daughters. I wouldn’t have to fight that anymore. I would never again have to hold myself back. I could be with him the way I had wanted to be for all those long and confusing years. I could be with him in the dark of night or the light of day. I could be with him until I closed my eyes for the very last time.

  It occurred to me to be scared or conflicted. But there was none of that now. Only the perfect clarity that on his knee before me was a man who had loved me for most of my life, who had been by far the most confusing and convoluted chapter of my life story but, in some ways, the simplest, too. Because when you sifted through the sins and the bad choices, the things we should have done and the things perhaps we shouldn’t have, it came down to one thing: that man had always been there for me.

  So it was obvious what I would say. I pulled him up off the floor, wrapped my arms around him, and kissed him long and hard, like maybe it was the first time or maybe the last. I broke away and looked him right in the eye so that he would be sure to hear me, sure to know how serious I was, that all the confusion and the games, the push and pull, the ebb and flow, that had been our relationship for all these years had been worth it, that they had led us back to this same bar in this same city but with a different conclusion.

  “I want to make sure that you hear me when I say this,” I said. “I love you with every ounce of who I am. I have loved you since the moment our hands met over that plate of brownies on the sandbar, and there hasn’t been one day since then that I haven’t thought of you. Sometimes I wish I could change the past, but I can’t.” I paused and took a deep breath. “You gave me everything, Jack. Even when we couldn’t be together, you still gave me the life I had always wanted.” I kissed him again and said, “There is some messiness for us to clean up along this road, but I want you to know that no matter what that looks like, no matter how it happens or how hard it is, I am going to be there by your side to make it right again. I am going to love you until the day I die, and then I will love you for an eternity after that. So yeah, Jack, I will. I will marry you any old time.”

  It reminded me of a song that Vivi played in her room a lot, by a young man named Jason Mraz, whose content was sometimes a touch suggestive for me but whose voice I was awfully fond of. One of his lines went, “It’s like taking a guess when the only answer is yes.” It finally made sense to me now. Yes was not an answer. It was the only answer.

  Jack laughed and picked me up in the air and kissed me again. “You will not marry me any old time,” he said. “We are going to have a celebration to remember. It is going to be epic. Nothing less.”

  I smiled and nodded. “OK, I can handle that.”

  Then he handed me the ring. It was a gorgeous round stone in an antique setting with sapphires and diamonds. “So do you want this old thing or what?”

  “Hell, yeah, I do.” We both laughed, and he slipped the ring on my finger. I held out my hand to admire it. “It is the most beautiful ring I’ve ever seen.”

  He nodded. “I saw it in a window today, and I knew you had to have it.”

  I could feel my mouth hanging open. “Are you serious? You just decided to propose to me today?”

  “Oh, Ansley. I decided to propose to you forty-three years ago. It just wasn’t until today that I was pretty sure you’d say yes.”

  We reminisced and drank champagne. I finally kissed him in that booth where we had sat all those years ago, where our story once had a different ending.

  “I would like to show you my appreciation for this lovely piece of jewelry now adorning my left hand.”

  He grinned. “I would like that very much.”

  As we walked back out into the dark night, with fewer people on the street than there had been before, I said, “Don’t you think it’s kind of ironic that you didn’t want children so we didn’t get married, and then we had two children together anyway, and now we’re getting married and you’re going to have three daughters? And God only knows how many grandchildren?”

  He stopped and pulled me close to him. “The biggest regret of my life is not wanting children back then. I spent years thinking that if I had decided to give you children, we could have been together all these years. We could have had this family and this life so long ago. I wasted so much time.”

  I shook my head. “No, Jack. That isn’t it at all. This was how it was always meant to happen. I know that now.”

  I felt a bit guilty in that moment. I tried to push it away, but I didn’t want this to diminish my life with Carter. Yes, I had loved Jack, and yes, there was a bad patch in there when I had contemplated throwing away my marriage for him. Aside from that, Carter and I had had a terrific life together. Before he died, I had been sure that he was all I would ever want in this world, that we would be together until our dying breath. But his dying breath had come sooner than I had anticipated.

  But then I smiled again. Because
this wasn’t a time to feel sad or guilty. This was a time to feel happy. Elated. Life had given me a second chance.

  When I saw Mark sitting on the steps of the Plaza, alone, I couldn’t help but wonder if Emerson had rethought the second chance she had given him.

  I rolled my eyes at Jack and mouthed, Really? We’d had, what, two hours of peace?

  Jack sat down beside Mark, and I sat down beside him.

  “Trouble in paradise?” Jack quipped.

  Mark put his head in his hands, and that was when I realized he was crying. And I kind of felt sorry for him, even though in my heart of hearts, I thought he had been a touch obnoxious lately.

  “I am never going to be enough for her,” he said. I was sure my daughter was somewhere very upset right now, which worried me.

  Jack and Mark were talking, but I wasn’t even listening. I was just admiring the ring on my hand and feeling grateful.

  Sitting on the steps of the Plaza that night, I felt like everything happened for a reason, like someone had put these puzzle pieces together in a very specific way to make sure that we ended up where we were supposed to be. For a moment, a beat of a beat, I couldn’t help but feel like maybe God hadn’t forgotten about us after all.

  EIGHTEEN

  emerson: a little like love

  The plane ride home was awkward, to say the least. Mark had apologized; I had apologized. But this wasn’t our typical fight and make up. It was bigger than that, maybe because it was one of the first times that, instead of glossing over everything, we had both taken stock of what we had actually done wrong and what we needed to do to fix it. I had, anyway.