But once I moved back home to North Carolina and married your daddy Graham, his calming demeanor and being so close to nature soothed my soul like a raw potato on a cooking burn. I wanted to breathe deeply, feel the sun on my face, and watch my children grow.
I was dreaming about Graham and me rocking on the porch, watching Alex and his two little sisters—little sisters that he didn’t have—play, when I woke up that Sunday morning, my arm tingling numb from being up over my head. I looked down to see Alex nestled in the crook of my body, his arms splayed wide in that unencumbered, worriless sleep of children. He was snoring on one side, Graham snoring on the other, the three of us snuggling like a litter of puppies in the barn hay. I smiled at how the morning sliver of sun peeking through the small opening in the curtains glistened off of my three-year-old’s blond strands.
Graham yawned, opened his eyes, and leaned to kiss me. His muscular grip wrapped around me as I shook my practically dead arm, the pins-and-needles feeling burning through me. “Mornin’, Khaki,” he said.
My name was really Frances, but Graham had changed it nearly two decades earlier when I used to dress in head-to-toe khaki work clothes and ride around the farm with my daddy. It was one of those nicknames that had grown like creeping ivy and been impossible to escape.
I looked back down at Alex’s closed eyes, smiled at his legs propped on mine, and whispered to Graham, “Do you have any idea how many times we’ve had sex in the past two and a half years?”
“Mmmm,” he hummed, nuzzling his face into my hair, his unshaven chin pricking my cheek. “I like where this conversation is going.”
“No, I’m serious,” I said. “Four hundred sixty-two times.”
He nodded. “I’m glad to know that someone is keeping track. Are you saying that’s too much or not enough?” He grinned that boyish grin at me, his blue eyes flashing, and said, “Because I’d err on the side of not enough, personally.”
I rolled my eyes. “Come on, Graham. Why the hell am I not pregnant? I mean, how hard can it be? I wasn’t even trying for Alex, and ‘bam!’ just like that.” I snapped my fingers, ignoring the fact that I had been only twenty-six then. I tried to push away the thought of that declining fertility chart the OB-GYN had shown me at my last appointment. He had said, “Well, at your age it just takes a little longer.” He’d made Graham and me feel like a couple of forty-eight-year-olds asking for some sort of miracle, not thirty-one-year-olds on a very reasonable quest for their second child.
Graham shrugged and yawned. “Maybe my guys don’t want to swim in the winter. Maybe it’s too cold. Maybe we should wait until summer.”
I crossed my arms, my nostrils flaring. He pulled me in closer and kissed my cheek.
“Oh, come on, pretty girl, you know I’m just teasing you. We’re going to have lots more babies and fill this house up.”
I looked up at him, my lower lip protruding the slightest bit. He kissed it back in place, leaned his forehead on mine, and whispered, “I promise. I’d never let my girl go ’round not getting something she wanted.”
I smiled, my heart feeling that familiar, practically lifelong surge of love for my childhood sweetheart, when Alex rolled over, looked around sleepily, and laid his head on my lap. “Hey, Mommy?” he asked.
“Yeah, sweetie?”
“Can we have bacon for breakfast?”
I laughed and ran my hand through his shaggy hair. “You can take the boy out of the hog farm, but you can’t take the hog farm out of the boy.” I pulled him up and gave him a firm kiss on the cheek that was still plump and juicy as a ripe tomato.
“I think we might be out of bacon, but I know some grandparents who never run out of pork.” I pinched his side and said, “You go brush your teeth, and we’ll go over there.”
Graham perked up, and, rubbing his tight stomach, said, “I need a big ole Pauline country breakfast.”
Pauline had worked for Mother and Daddy my whole life on the farm, and she made the best homemade biscuits and gravy in the world. I shook my head. “I will take Alex to Mother and Daddy’s. Then, when I get home, if you impregnate me, you may have a Pauline breakfast as a reward.”
He whistled and rubbed his hand down the back of my silk gown. “Oh, baby, I love it when you get so romantic with me.”
I slapped his thigh and pointed my finger at him. “I’m not teasing you. I’m getting Alex ready, and you better concentrate on producing some of that fine Jacobs baby-making sperm.”
When we pulled up to the end of Mother and Daddy’s driveway, I took a moment to marvel at how the giant oaks, each of them having been there for centuries longer than the home itself, grew together into a green canopy, the ideal frame for the white plantation home that graced their ending. I had an entirely new feeling about this house now, its white columns of Pantheonic proportion that were so quintessentially Southern.
When I was younger, coming home equated to poorly chosen words and hurtful digs from my mother. Maybe it was becoming a grandmother or the general smoldering of temper fire that comes with aging, but my once impossible-to-please mother—though still a force to be reckoned with—had become much, much more pleasant.
Alex unsnapped his booster, jumped out of the car, and flew through the front door before I could even say, “Hey, wait up!” or wrangle him into his coat.
He always got as excited as a jewelry collector at a Christie’s auction to see his grandparents. It was the same way I felt when I saw Daddy, that mixture of love and pride that swirls together like a backroom science project. Mother stepped out onto the front porch, her sassy hair perfectly styled in keeping with the same Chanel suit she’d been wearing for decades. I felt myself unwittingly roll my eyes. She leaned over to hug my son. We still didn’t always see eye to eye, but Mother could have slapped some butter on Alex and eaten him right up like one of Pauline’s homemade biscuits.
Instead of following Alex through the front door, I walked around to the side, smiling at Pauline’s imposing figure turning bacon on the griddle at the opposite side of the blue-and-white tiled kitchen while she hummed “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” When she heard the screen door slam, Pauline wiped her molasses-colored hands, almost the same size as the eye on the antique stove, on the apron puckering over her thick waist. She wrapped me in a hug and said, “What’s wrong with my baby?”
I had a smile on my face and hugged her back as hard as I could, and Pauline still knew something was wrong with me. “I was just wondering why you’re back here frying bacon when I tried my damnedest to bust you out.”
She laughed heartily and shrugged. “Had to come back. You was the one that introduced me and Benny, after all.”
Pauline had met her second husband and late-life love when she, Mother, and Daddy had come to New York to help after Alex was born. They had started their life together there, but, as I knew all too well, you simply can’t take the South out of the girl. Much as I would imagine one would want to escape the claws of my momma, not a year later, Pauline was back like a homing pigeon, Benny in tow. When I confronted her, jaw agape, about why she hadn’t run far, far away, she said simply, “You know, baby girl: You and Miz Mason and Daddy Mason’s my family.”
And so we were, which was even more evident when Pauline said, “Come on, baby. You can tell Pauline.”
I sat down on the stool beside the range, my lifelong Pauline-talking perch, and said, “I can’t get pregnant.”
She looked me up and down. “’Course you cain’t.”
I crossed my arms. “Why on earth not?”
“Girl like you cain’t get pregnant. You ain’t nothing but skin and bones.”
I looked down at myself. I was naturally thin. But maybe the stress of traveling back and forth to New York for work was getting to me. Or perhaps the vegan diet and yoga kick I’d been on was too much. The hormone-balancing book I read said it would help me conceive.
But every month I was more disappointed than the last when that minus sign appeared on the EPT. “You think that’s all it is?”
“’Course,” she said. “You was lookin’ healthy when you got pregnant with little man.”
I nodded, thinking that, who knows, maybe I was just too thin. Pauline might not have been a doctor, but she was always right. Feeling sorry that I was kissing three months of sprouts, flaxseed, and leafy greens good-bye, I grabbed two crispy pieces of bacon off Pauline’s drip pan and crunched. I was a hog farmer’s daughter, after all. Bacon was my birthright.
“Good girl.” She nodded. “Now you get on outta here and come back for some breakfast when you’re good and pregnant.”
I laughed, and she added, “I’ll keep an eye on little man.”
Lying in bed an hour later with my legs propped on the headboard—I had read somewhere that elevating your legs helps the sperm find their target—Graham kissed me and said, “I just feel like it took that time, babydoll.”
I smiled weakly. “I sure hope so.”
He nodded. “I’m going to go get ready for church while you . . .” He paused, circled his finger around where I was lying, and said, “While you do whatever it is that you’re doing there.”
An hour later, sitting in church, light streaming through stained-glass windows, Graham’s arm around me, Daddy beside me, and Alex playing down the dark wood pew, I felt the strongest message from heaven that I had before or since: I was going to be a mother again. Of course, I thought, naturally, that I was pregnant. Turns out, God had other plans.
Keep reading for an excerpt from
SLIGHTLY SOUTH OF SIMPLE
Kristy Woodson Harvey’s all-new novel
out April 2017 from Gallery Books!
Seagulls
ANSLEY
I still have dreams about that yellow-and-white-striped bikini, the one I was wearing the night I met Jack, my first bona fide summer love. I was fifteen going on sixteen, the perfect age, when your hair tints that summer blond that hairstylists become superstars for emulating. You have filled out enough not to be gangly but not so much that you can imagine a one-piece being in your future.
We spent those bikini summers in Peachtree Bluff, my family and I, at my grandmother’s waterfront home, the one that I didn’t realize until years later was truly something special. It was always blissful, always enchanted, but that summer, Sandra and Emily, my two best friends, and I spent nearly every day at Starlite Island across from Grandmother’s house. It was only a few boat lengths across the sound, but you couldn’t swim there and needed at least a kayak to go. It felt like freedom.
Those summers were all about seeing how close we could get to the wild horses on our favorite island and gauging if any of us could tame the wild boys who seemed as native to the beach as the crabs scurrying about. Skin tanned dark and hair sun-bleached, they sipped Pabst Blue Ribbon all afternoon, throwing footballs and telling (mostly false) stories about how cool they were back home, wherever they had come from.
I imagined then that no matter where my life took me, Peachtree Bluff would always be a part of my story. But it never crossed my mind that one day things would change so quickly and so fiercely that I would end up moving to my childhood paradise, my sanctuary from the real world, full time.
Wherever it may be, you always tell your kids that they can come home again. It’s the thing that, as a parent, you’re supposed to say. But maybe this is why so many people downsize when their children go off to college. Maybe this is why they move to condos on the lake, not the sweeping clapboard home that their grandmother left them in a harbor town in Georgia. If you don’t have five bedrooms and a three-bedroom guesthouse, there is no way that all of your children—families in tow—can descend on you like seagulls on the day-old bread the grandkids throw out on the dock.
But change is the only thing I’ve ever been able to count on in this life, the only thing that hasn’t let me down. And I am quite proud to say that although I may not always have done the right thing, I have survived it all. Hit after hit, storm after storm, I have weathered, I have protected. Like that dock across the narrow street from my house, I have withstood hurricanes, tornadoes, and even the occasional hailstorm.
When I was too scared to go on, too shaken to stand, too rattled to know which way was up, I carried on for the three best parts of me, for the girls who almost ruined my life yet somehow ended up saving it.
As I hear the voices upstairs, some happy, some mad—they are sisters, after all—I open the refrigerator door and wonder, not for the first time, how I got here. How is it possible that a couple of months ago I was in my grandmother’s house on the sound, enjoying the splendor of the silence? I would open my fridge to find exactly three Smartwaters, one canister of coffee, two yogurts, and some old ketchup.
Now I open that same fridge in that same house to find it nearly spilling over, each item a reminder of one of my girls. The bottles of breast milk are the biggest surprise, the choice to nurse at all an unlikely one for my beautiful, smart, but somewhat selfish Caroline. But it is these very bottles that helped her gain back her trim, toned figure nearly instantly, the prenatal vitamins making her long dark hair even silkier and shinier.
The chocolate milk, which you would think was for Sloane’s young sons but actually is for her, comes next. That middle daughter, doe-eyed like her older sister, her hair a light brown, as though the dark hair gene got lighter with each girl until it eventually gave up and allowed Emerson, the youngest, to be fully blond, has loved chocolate milk since her first taste. Sloane is the least concerned with appearances and has adapted to the role of mother easily, as the hot dogs, grapes, string cheese, and Capri Suns will attest.
The fresh-squeezed green juice beside those bottles, stored in an unusually narrow yet still shapely carafe, reminds me of its blond-haired, blue-eyed owner, Emerson, with her high, sculpted cheekbones that still manage to make her look soft and feminine. Her looks and talent have combined to put her on her way to the acting career she’s always dreamed of. She is the one that, finally, looked like me. Though my hair is now clipped right at my shoulders, the way hers runs long and free down her back reminds me of my younger days.
The takeout containers and the wine? Well, those could be for any one of my girls. The rows and the list go on and on.
But this is how it is, I’ve come to see. Sometimes you don’t know how empty your fridge—or your heart—can be. You don’t realize it, that is, until at long last, you find them full again.
Civilization
CAROLINE
I was the only one who wasn’t really into the whole Peachtree Bluff thing. It’s kind of like being the Grinch at Christmas. My sisters would be beside themselves about riding on the boat, shrimp boils on the beach, and roasting marshmallows all summer long, but I was more in a severe depression because I had to leave my friends in Manhattan and the subway and the lights and, well, you know, civilization. There were no museums—unless you count that pitiful excuse for a boat warehouse they call a museum. There was no theater—unless you count the high school’s horrific performance of Fiddler on the Roof or the annual drag queen fashion show. I’ll admit, that one was fairly Manhattan. But Rent on Broadway it was not.
Most of all, I couldn’t stand the idea of missing out on an entire summer’s worth of fun and gossip, even if it was just sitting around Jenna Franklin’s mom’s house when she was at work, talking about boys and painting our toes. All summer, every summer, I missed everything. And don’t get me started on the year my mom kidnapped us and made me move down there for a whole semester. It was like prison. Well, prison with a good view, I mean.
Looking back, I realize that most of the reason I didn’t want to leave Manhattan was that I didn’t want people to talk about me when I was gone. I couldn’t deal with feeling left out of the circle that I had worked so hard to insert myself into.
I used to thank God every night that I only had to live in that hick hellhole for six months. Only six months before I could escape back to NYU, aka civilization. I got that my mom was scared and all of that after 9/11. But honestly. The city rebuilt. Why couldn’t she?
I felt guilty leaving my two sisters to rot there. Emerson especially. She was only a baby, for heaven’s sake. Well, I guess ten isn’t a baby. But it’s young enough that you don’t know what you don’t know. And what she didn’t know was that our selfish mother had taken her out of the city of action and opportunity and dropped her into the cultural desert.
So I made it my life’s mission to encourage her passion for art and acting. And I guess somewhere in there, I forgot to work on my middle sister, Sloane. Bless her heart, as those degenerates say with their slow accents, she stayed in the damn place. Went to college in Georgia with all those peaches and practically no teeth. Married a guy in the military, which, I mean, yeah, is admirable and all that.
But we’re Murphys. We were destined for greatness.
Greatness was what I thought I was getting when I met James. His hair was great. His plane was great. His Fifty-seventh Street apartment was great. Even his mother was great. For fourteen whole blissful years, we were great, too. Just great. Until he decided to come home and tell me, six months pregnant, no less, that he was no longer in love with me. He was no longer in love with me, you see, because he was now in love with a twenty-year-old supermodel who subsisted on squeezy applesauce and whipped cream vodka.
Lies and Other Acts of Love Page 30