The Land of Mango Sunsets

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  It should come as no surprise that Liz moved home to Birmingham and didn’t sell the farm. She was hoping something permanent would develop with James. And Kevin? Well, since I abandoned him, he teasingly said, he finally decided to take a job in Paris to style a chain of fifty department stores. He had been offered the job over and over.

  “It’s not the same without you, Petal. I mean, I adore Priscilla and Charlie, but it’s not the same.”

  “Go for it, Kevin, but you had better swear to visit me once a year!”

  “Or you come to Paris…when you get rid of that goat?”

  “Watch it or I’ll bring Cecelia with me!”

  I would miss him like crazy but he was going off to have an adventure. It was time for him to have a change of venue.

  When Charles got wind of Mother’s death and that I was staying permanently on the island, he tried to buy the town house from me for such a paltry sum that I laughed in his face.

  “What’s so funny?” he said. “I think that’s a very fair offer.”

  “Charles? In real life or on the screen or in any book I have ever read, never have I encountered someone like you.”

  “So I’ll take that to mean you don’t want to sell it to me?”

  “Yes, because it’s worth almost three times as much as you’re offering and we both know it. And Charlie and Priscilla are living there. Charles? Did you send flowers when Mother died?”

  “Um, I heard about it too late.”

  “Okay. Did you send a card to me or the children? Call them? Say you were sorry for their loss? Did you make a donation to any of Mother’s favorite charities?”

  “All right, all right. That’s enough. I was uncomfortable with it, okay? Death makes me very squeamish.”

  We wouldn’t want Charles to feel squeamish or uncomfortable, would we?

  In a very calm voice I said, “Well, what do dial tones do for you?” And I closed my phone.

  Harrison had witnessed this and he high-fived me with a burst of laughter and pride.

  “Take-no-bull Mellie is on the job!” he said, and laughed.

  Yes, Harrison and I had finally found our way to each other’s heart but not to the altar. I was in no rush, and besides it was more fun to make him worry and wonder about the depth of my commitment to him. Recently, he gave me a toe ring that absolutely symbolized nothing more than my transformation to a woman who would wear one. Or maybe it didn’t.

  “What’s this supposed to mean?” I said, recognizing it wasn’t for my finger. “I mean, if I wear it on my left foot, does it mean we’re serious?”

  “Why don’t we call it a starter ring and see where things go?”

  “You mean, like, you’re working your way up from my feet to my hands?”

  “Come on, Mellie. You know me.”

  Harrison’s issues with commitment were his problem, not mine. He would either overcome them or he wouldn’t. But honestly, I was satisfied with my toe ring and the relationship we had. We saw each other every day and night and were all but inseparable. Like Kevin had always been, he was my best friend except there were other meaningful benefits.

  All right, I know nobody’s going to be happy until they get the scoop on our sex life. Here’s the deal. We have one. It’s gorgeous and tender and delicious and he sends me right through the Milky Way. Satisfied? No? You want a full report? Well, I think it’s in pretty bad taste to kiss and tell, but just this once, I will.

  Here’s how it started. One morning, I was in the kitchen washing the breakfast dishes and he showed up with an enormous bouquet of flowers, wrapped in cellophane and dripping with ribbons. This was an unprecedented event. He was just standing there on the other side of the glass sliding door instead of just walking right in, like he usually did.

  So, recognizing his behavior as slightly strange, I opened the door and said, “Hey! What’s up?”

  “Today Miss Josie’s been gone for six months and I thought maybe some flowers might, you know, cheer you up. You know, girls like flowers.”

  “So do women,” I said, teasing him a little. “Thanks! They’re gorgeous.”

  “Well, actually that’s what I wanted to discuss with you.”

  “What?”

  “The fact that you’re a gorgeous woman…”

  “And that you’re a gorgeous man? I’ve noticed that, actually.”

  “Well, and there’s something else.”

  He put the bouquet on the counter and gave me the come-hither hook with his finger. I followed him outside to the bottom of the steps, where a leafy sapling stood in a two-foot-tall plastic planter.

  “It’s a mango tree,” he said. “They’re not supposed to grow here but I thought maybe Miss Josie’s oversight from wherever she is and ours, of course, might make the impossible happen.”

  That was when I thought my heart would burst. I threw my arms around him and hugged him with all of my might.

  “You wonderful man!”

  He hesitated for a moment and then he put one arm around my waist and ran his other hand down the back of my head, his fingers pulling through my hair. He put his mouth next to my neck and said, “I’m in love with you, Mellie, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “Just love me, Harrison. I’ve been in love with you from the moment I saw you.” Here came the tears, but this time they were different. I was finally safe and there was no doubt that Harrison was the man with whom I was going to spend the rest of my life.

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Because I thought you were my mother’s boyfriend? Weren’t you?”

  Harrison stepped back from me and started laughing, the deep kind of laugh that comes from the bottom of your throat in a burst and continues until there are tears and you have to rush to blow your nose or else you will never be received in polite company again.

  “Tissue?” I reached in my pocket and handed him one.

  “No, you silly goose! Don’t you know that your mother had chosen me for you? Why do you think I was here every time you came to visit?”

  “Oh, come on. You don’t think she was just a little sweet on you?”

  “Sure, maybe I do. But, Mellie, by the time I met her, she was sick as a dog. I took care of her because I liked her. It was the most natural and comfortable friendship with a woman I had ever known. Better than my own mother—what I can remember of her and certainly more than I’ve ever had with my daughter. And, I never in a million years expected to feel this way about you or about anybody for the rest of my life.”

  “Well, here we are. Now what? Plant the tree?”

  “I think we’re supposed to kiss now and plant the tree later. I thought six months was a respectable amount of time to wait to give you this news. About the way I feel, that is.”

  “Yeah, six months was good. I’m ready. I mean, I think I can handle this now.”

  So, right there, at the bottom of the steps on the pathway to my driveway, we kissed. At first it was tentative and then it became clear to both of us that we were five minutes away from scandalizing the neighbors. It was, after all, not even ten o’clock in the morning.

  By the time we got inside, the mood was broken a little because the impulse to launch ourselves into a full-blown sexual encounter right then and there suddenly seemed capricious.

  “Do you think maybe a little more cat and mouse is in order?” he said.

  “Yes, I hate it, but I do.”

  The rest of this may seem a little stupid to some, but you have to understand that we were both nervous. It’s one thing to have a, pardon me, screw with a dope like Manny Sinkler. I mean, sure it was immoral, but it wasn’t going anywhere. This, however, was the big one. What if we were horribly incompatible?

  It was best to learn these things after dark.

  For the rest of the day we puttered around talking about things like finding someone to take Cecelia and the chickens off my hands for good. I wanted to plant lots of flowers and a vegetable garden just for my
grandchildren, who would be four in number very soon, as Charlie and Priscilla were also expecting a blessed event. Harrison said he thought we should just deliver them to Manny Sinkler’s house and let him deal with it. I said it wasn’t worth the effort because who cared about him?

  We found a corner of the yard with the best possible sunlight, wind protection, and drainage for the mango tree. We planted it together and sneaked another kiss in the process. Finally, the day was winding down to a close.

  “So what do you want to do for dinner?” he said.

  Screw, I thought. But I said, “Why don’t we cook at your house tonight?”

  We grilled some tuna steaks and nothing happened except some heavy necking until Harrison changed his mind, that is. I was loading the dishwasher and he had the brilliant idea to scoop me up off my feet and carry me to his bed. Now this would be very romantic except that he tripped and dropped me, falling himself and throwing out his back in the process. I put his bruised ego on his couch with an ice pack, kissed him on the head, and said I would call him in the morning.

  I drove his car home, poured myself a nightcap, and said to Harry, who had grown back his feathers, “No sex. I thought it was gonna happen and then he dropped me on the floor. So, no sex tonight.”

  Harry looked at me this way and that and then he said, “No sex tonight!”

  Great, I thought. Hopefully, he’d forget it by tomorrow.

  Well, he didn’t.

  Harrison, who felt much better the next morning, arrived that night for dinner with a bottle of scuppernong wine, which I was actually becoming accustomed to drinking and enjoying. I had made some thick crab cakes and a salad.

  Harry made his announcement after dinner that the dessert wasn’t me, and Harrison said, “The hell you say, bubba.”

  I looked at Harrison and didn’t know what to say.

  “Come on, Mellie. We’re going upstairs. You talk to that bird way too much.”

  “Yeah, and he’s not discreet.”

  We went to bed like a married couple of twenty years and I assumed he was planning to stay the night. He was. When the lights were out, he found me in the darkness and pulled me to him. All I’ve got to say about what happened next was it was how it’s supposed to be when the man’s a real man who loves women and who has a healthy appetite for them. Every time we have been together since that first night, it’s been fabulous. And over the next six months, which brings us up to now, there wasn’t a hair on his body I didn’t know and adore. I was pretty sure he felt the same way. And there were tiny mangoes, too many to count, dangling from the branches of our tree.

  We were standing on the driveway watching Priscilla push a stroller toward us with my lovely infant granddaughter named—can you believe it?—Miriam Elizabeth, and next to her was Nan with her three in a wagon. They were coming back from the beach for tomato sandwiches and naps for the children. No doubt they had built sand castles and jumped the waves.

  “We can’t keep playing house like this, Mellie. It’s a bad example for the grandchildren.”

  I put my arm around his waist and squeezed him. That may or may not have been a marriage proposal.

  “Whatever you say, baby. The children are still young.”

  You see? Everything happens for a reason. My father’s death brought my mother back to Sullivans Island. Charles’s stupidities sprung me from a terrible marriage and have given me Kevin, one of my greatest friends, and Liz, who had given me all the subtle clues on how to love my daughters-in-law. My mother’s love for me had brought me to Harrison. And the island. It was all about the island. The tempo of the life, the sweet salty air, had even healed Harrison of his fear of love. And me of mine.

  If you had told me five years ago that this was the life I would be living, I would have said you were insane. I was the city slicker with cynical opinions for every occasion. But now there I was in the evenings, all my rocking chairs except one filled with loved ones of every age, watching the sun go down. The empty one, her favorite, I reserved for the spirit of Miss Josie.

  Sometimes Harrison and I would dramatically tango the length of the porch to make the children laugh. Penn and Mary would swing in the hammock and I would tell them stories, the same ones of my childhood.

  “This is truly a special place, Mom,” Priscilla said, and Nan agreed.

  “It’s unbelievable! Moving here and bringing us together was such a wonderful idea,” Nan said.

  We all agreed wholeheartedly to spend Easter, Thanksgiving, and a week together during the summer on Sullivans Island every year. At Christmas I would alternate between New York and California. Harrison was invited to everything.

  Perhaps I could persuade Liz to come from Alabama or Kevin to visit from Paris for a few days to take care of Harry when I had to leave. I would entice them for a visit, to arrive a few days before I had to depart, feed them steamed vegetables from my magical garden and grilled fresh fish that had been swimming that day, caught from the dock out near Awendaw where the ferryboat sails to Bull’s Island, and where Harrison most loved to drop a hook.

  We would catch up over dinner and into the night, rightfully reclaiming our special and chosen familial positions with one another over as many varieties of muscadine wine as we could find and pour—Darlene, Pam, Hunt, pineapple, and of course, scuppernong—along with a perfectly ripened organic goat cheese, spread on delicious organic crackers, topped with my own miraculous mango chutney.

  Tonight, when my sons and their wives and children were asleep in their beds, and Harrison was gently snoring in his recliner chair in the den, I would slip out to the porch for a dose of my mother’s spirit. I would sit in the rocker next to her favorite, breathe deeply, and just as I would at sunset, I would feel her all around me.

  Her breath would be sweet and I would almost hear her whispering right into the center of my heart. My darling girl, she would say, bringing your family together to love each other is all that matters. In the next instant I would think of how much I missed her and then I would be reminded beyond a doubt that she had never left me at all. I would reach over, touch the arm of her chair, and give her a little push to rock in time with me.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to my dear friend Marjory Heath Wentworth, South Carolina poet laureate, whose spectacular words enrich mine. We are all so proud of you, Marjory, and I am particularly honored to offer one vehicle to share your glorious talent, that of a living American woman, with readers everywhere. Bravo!

  To my New Jersey literary friends, the geniuses: Pamela Redmond Satran, Deborah Davis, Debbie Galant, Benilde Little, Mary Jane Clark, and especially Liza Dawson, who knows why. Huge thanks for your support and your friendship, which I value more than you could know. And my love to all the members of MEWS, which is run by the indefatigable Pamela Redmond Satran, who keeps the four-hundred-plus writers who live in the Montclair area informed on all issues pertinent to the fun and games of a writing life.

  To my South Carolina literary friends who constantly inspire me with their endless wit and the choir of their authentic southern voices: Josephine Humphreys, her sommelier husband, Tom Hutcheson, Walter Edgar, Anne Rivers Siddons, Sue Monk Kidd, Nathalie DuPree, Jack Bass, Tom Blagden, Barbara Hagerty, Robert Rosen, Mary Alice Monroe, William Baldwin, Robert Jordan, Roger Pinckney, and especially to the sainted one, Cassandra King, who most of you know is the long-suffering wife of my favorite old grizzly bear, Pat Conroy, who gave me the courage to write and continues to explain the publishing world to me, one drop of ink at a time. To Jack Alterman, for my youthful author photo and for his photographic genius in general.

  To Gerald Imber, M.D., my plastic-surgeon pal, who has yet to make me resemble Jack Alterman’s work, who is fabulous, hilarious, a genius, and an artist, but who will not give you free plastic surgery unless you are the pope or something, or Oprah, who, as I understand it, doesn’t need it or the charity, and let me assure you I have sucked up to her in other acknowledgments with zero resul
ts. To the other real people who appear in this book—Kathy and Mike Rumph, Woody, Elizabeth and Caroline Wood, and my other two favorite doctors: George Durst, M.D., and Gordon Ferguson, DDS—huge thanks, and, folks, if their characters act out of character for them, it’s my fault, not theirs. And as always, to the out-of-state belles—Rhonda Rich, Mary Kay Andrews, Patti Callahan Henry, and Annabelle Robertson—love y’all madly

  Again thanks to my agent, Gail Fortune, for years of friendship and excellent guidance, and all best wishes to Gail’s partner, John Talbot, a heckuva guy.

  To the William Morrow dream team, beginning with my fearless and brilliant editor, Carrie Feron, whose truly stellar thoughts and suggestions were invaluable in shaping this entire work—Carrie, darlin’, if they like this book, make sure you take a large chunk of the credit! Thank you for everything! And to Jane Friedman, Michael Morrison, Lisa Gallagher, Brian McSharry, Virginia Stanley, Carla Parker, Michael Morris, Michael Spradlin, Brian Grogan, Donna Waitkus, Rhonda Rose, and Lord knows, to Tessa Woodward—whew! Thank you over and over! And to the marketing and publicity wizards—Debbie Stier, Ben Bruton, Buzzy Porter, Pamela Spengler Jaffee, Lynn Grady, and Tavia Kowalchuk—huge thanks! I curtsy to Liate Stehlik and Adrienne DiPietro from Avon, to Rick Harris in the audio division, and to the visionaries, Tom Egner and Richard Aquan, for my gorgeous covers.

  To Debbie Zammit—what can I tell ya? We’re still alive! Thanks for everything, especially the endless hours of scrutiny, your wonderful friendship, and your humor that saved many a day. To Ann Del Mastro, Mary Allen, George Zur, and Kevin Sherry—you know how much the Franks love all of you and appreciate your keeping our mother ship afloat in so many ways. And to Penn Sicre, my friend of many years, for taking the leap (we hope!) from page to screen with Plantation.