Low Country Daddy

by Lexi Whitlow

  “She’s not a firecracker,” I observe to Ronny once relative quiet descends on the bar. “That girl’s a uranium tipped warhead with satellite precision targeting capability.”

  Ronny’s eyebrows peak. “Who? Maddie? She’s alright. Some drunk biker grabbed her ass at lunch and it pissed her off. She’s still bristling from it. She’s cool.”

  Really?

  I can’t help myself. While Stu and I drink and banter about peaches, tomatoes, and the romance of bivalve shellfish, I watch her work from table to table, taking orders, chatting with patrons, checking the clock on the wall as the evening slowly ticks by. Several times I see her pause by the windows, peering out into the back parking lot behind the restaurant. Maybe she’s enjoying the view of the bay or maybe she’s just bored. Maybe she has somewhere else to be. Maybe her fiancée, Justin, is waiting for her to get off work. Whatever her story, she’s all-business at the bar for the rest of the evening and it’s clear to me that I crossed some kind of line by attempting to chat her up.

  Girls who look like Maddie get hit on a lot. She’s not dressed to call attention to her assets like some of the other waitresses are. She’s just trying to do her job. And even if her father is a judge or a doctor or lawyer or CEO, and even if she’s some rich college girl from the Midwest, she doesn’t deserve to be disrespected. It’s hard to know sometimes how to behave. She’s pretty, and obviously sharp. I find that damned attractive, but I should have let her be.

  “I’m done,” Stu says, pushing his glass away. “One more and I won’t make it out of town without winding up in jail.”

  I grin. “I drove,” I say, reminding him. “But I’m done too. I’ve got a shop full of coolers to see off tomorrow and the day starts early.”

  “You drove?” he asks, a little inebriated, his brow furrowed with confusion. “Oh. Yeah. You did. Cool.”

  “Get one bottled for the road,” I tell him. “I’ve gotta run to the head.” I grab a pen from the hostess stand on my way.

  When I’m done with my primary business in the men’s room, I wash my hands, then pull a clean paper towel from the dispenser. I have a note to write, and it takes me a few minutes to come up with exactly what I want to say and how to say it.

  Finally, I manage to scribble out the following;

  “Maddie,

  I’m sorry I offended you earlier tonight. You’re just trying to do your job and I was out of line, asking personal questions. It was rude. My only defense is that I don’t get many opportunities to talk to smart, confident girls. You’re both, and that’s a good thing.

  Anyway, please accept my apology and some added compensation for all the shit you have to put up with from assholes like me. Today was a very good day for me, and I’m just paying it forward.

  — J. B.”

  I fold three one-hundred-dollar bills inside the note, then fold it again so it fits nicely in my palm. As I cross the restaurant headed to the bar to collect Stu, I pass Maddie who is serving up a large tray of Sweet Maiden oysters, raw on the half-shell, to a table full of inebriated tourists. I lay the note on her tray as I pass, making sure she sees it and me before I move on. She gives me an odd look but carries on with what she’s doing. The restaurant is packed, and she’s got miles to go before she has time to pause and read my note.

  Stu and I make our way out to my old Land Cruiser parked at the foot of the parking lot. Its body is pocked with rust, the rear windows adorned with stickers for everything from the Nature Conservancy and the ACE Basin Task Force to big a “Salt Life” decal spanning half the window. My truck looks like a heap of rust, but it’s got a rebuilt engine with less than 50K on it, and a great stereo system.

  I pop in a Neil Young CD and crank it up, peering out the windscreen directly into the front end of an RV camper parked ten feet away. There’s a light on inside it and I see a small boy reading a book while resting on his elbow at the passenger side of the cab.

  “Jesus, who goes in to a restaurant and leaves their little kid out in the parking lot alone?” I ask, thinking out loud.

  “What?” Stu responds, looking up a little glassy-eyed from too many beers.

  I point to the kid in front of us. Stu squints, trying to focus. “That’s fucked up,” he mumbles. “Should we go back in and see who he belongs to?”

  I consider it. Then I consider the idea that the kid looks content. Nobody’s going to bother him, and maybe he’s allergic to shellfish and can’t even be near them; there are people like that.

  “He’s okay,” I say, hoping I’m right.

  He reminds me of myself at that age; a tow-headed little kid who would rather be alone on a boat floating in the middle of a creek lost in a book than talking to anybody at all. That kid is probably on vacation, having the time of his life. He’s probably riding go-carts and playing on the beach when he’s not avoiding the anaphylactic hazards of shrimp and mollusks.

  “Let’s go.”

  I turn over the engine, shifting to first, pulling out of the lot, leaving a swirling cloud of dust to settle behind us.

  “Ally gave me her number,” Stu announces out of the blue. “Manuel won’t be pissed if we go out, will he?”

  “I dunno,” I admit. “He’s pretty protective of all his family. Tread lightly. It would suck mightily if my best friend and my best employee were trying to kill each other.”

  Stu looks off into the dark, going quiet, which is unusual for him.

  “I’ll tread carefully,” he says after a few minutes pass. “She’s pretty special. Law school and all that. I bet she’s fun to talk to.”

  Most people think Stu is just another redneck farmer who hit on a good marketing scheme with the local “slow food” scene at the precise moment it exploded in Charleston and around the country. The truth is that Stu was reading Wendell Berry when he was seventeen, planning on creating his own heirloom-only, GMO, pesticide, and herbicide-free, Garden of Eden by any means necessary. He knew what he wanted to do before he was out of high school. He had that shit figured out years before the world caught up to him. When the world came around, he was ready and waiting.

  I was nineteen years-old, sitting on sandbags in a desolate outpost in Afghanistan when I got an email from Mama saying Stu had been around asking about leasing land. My father was already so far down in the bottle by then he didn’t even factor into the decision. I said yes without even thinking. When I got home a few years later for my father’s funeral, I found twenty acres planted with peach and orange trees, already producing a tiny but succulent crop. After that it was just an understanding between us; if Stu could make that spent, wasteland of a farm produce something of value, he was welcome to whatever he could pull out of it.

  There are people who have a knack for finding a solution to a problem that no one has realized exists yet. Stu’s like that. He’s shrewd and diligent, inquisitive and determined. He’s also the most optimistic human being I’ve ever encountered.

  If Ally Guzman is as smart as her brother, she’ll see all that.

  “Hey, that girl Maddie, she was something else,” Stu says, piping up as we cross the bridge in the pitch dark. “She liked you.”

  “I don’t think so,” I say, dimming my brights as a car approaches in the oncoming lane.

  “No. She did. I saw her checking you out, talking about you to one of the other girls.”

  She was laughing at me, no doubt.

  “She likes you,” he says again. “Trust me. You roll over too easy. I bet if you asked her out, she’d go. She’d be crazy not to.”

  She would? “Why do you say that?”

  Stu shrugs. “I dunno. I got the sense she was a down on her luck type, like she might need some good news in her life. Nobody goes to work in a bar like Flo’s who doesn’t need to. And Ronny doesn’t hire people who can take it or leave it. He’s got a soft spot for strays.”

  That’s true.

  “That’s not the read I got off her. I figure she’s some rich college girl, slumming it be
tween college sessions. That’s what she looks like to me.”

  Stu turns toward me, regarding me with some curiosity and not a little bit of amusement.

  “You suck at reading people,” he says. “One thing, college sessions won’t be out ‘til the end of May. Second thing, she said she wasn’t ‘summer people.’ Third thing, she’s from Indianapolis. Rich girls from Indianapolis don’t come to Beaufort to wait tables in a local dive bar. They go to Chicago or Canada where they can earn real money. Her jeans were worn out and her shoes were holdovers from high school. That tattoo on her hand was old ink in a floral, baby script. My best guess is it’s a kid’s name. Maybe her kid. She’s just a regular girl trying to make a second chance in a new town as far away from wherever she came from as she can. Her bristly attitude is just fear peeking through. Whatever she left, she’s trying not to find any more of it here.”

  Stu is even more drunk than I thought he was. He’s describing the girl with the same imaginative pretense as he described the IPA earlier this evening

  “Thank you, Agatha Christie,” I say. “Jesus. You got all that from thirty seconds of small talk and a tattoo?”

  “I know people,” he says, yawning. “You’ll see.”

  I drop Stu at his place a mile up Sam’s Point Road, then take a left along the dirt lane leading toward Blanc-Bleu, thinking on all he said. He’s bound to be dead wrong about Maddie, but time will tell. The truth is that I am terrible at reading people. I tend to invest them with my own bullshit, long before knowing anything substantial about them.

  Maddie may be a monied girl from the city or she may be something else entirely. Whoever she is, I hope to find out, as she’s the most intriguing girl to cross my path in as long as I can remember.

  When I finally lay my head down to sleep, getting home long after Mama’s gone to bed, my brain spins with lists of things to do tomorrow, people I need to call, emails I need to respond to, and all the little, random things I should catch-up on now that I’m about to have a break from twelve-hour days on the salt. When I’m spun up like this is when the dreams come. It makes it tough to even try to sleep. I close my eyes and I can already see dusty, mud-brick hovels bombed-out by multiple air strikes. I see kids playing in streets piled with trash, planted with IEDs. I see armies of men holding RPG launchers and AK’s, all pointed at me.

  That’s what I see before I sleep.

  When I wake a little after dawn, it’s not with the choking taste of dust stuck in my lungs. Instead I sniff the soft perfume of coconut scented shampoo. My dreams are of another sort than what I’m used to. They’re of downy soft skin, as tender as a lamb’s ear, and the click of tiny metal earrings against my teeth. I taste her budding lips on mine; sweet, scuppernong wine flavored, finished with mint chewing gum.

  I roll over, clutching a pillow close to my chest, trying to remember what she felt like under me. Trying to hold onto the silky heat that embraced me. I’m hard, aching, with Maddie’s scent lingering in my head, her smirking, satisfied face seared into my brain. Oh, good lord. I haven’t had a dream like this since I was a kid, first discovering the mystery of girls.

  Chapter 3

  Maddie

  Our little RV smells like bacon, old fish, and dirty laundry. It’s a pungent combination. Justin jumps up and opens a window and I let it go without comment, even though it’ll let out the cool air still lingering from last night. In two hours it’ll be ninety-five degrees in the shade and this tin can heats up like a can of soup over an open flame.

  He’s munching on fried bacon and scrambled eggs while I count what’s left from my first week’s tips. After buying gas for the RV and propane for the stove, doing laundry, paying to get the toilet pumped clean, and buying groceries, I’ve got three-hundred and sixty-six dollars left. If that guy at the bar last night hadn’t dropped three C-notes on my tray, I’d have sixty-six dollars and a decision to make; feed my kid or keep working in shoes that have rubbed bleeding blisters on my feet. As it stands, I don’t have to make that choice, but it’s clear that unless the tips get a lot better and stay there, or I pick up a lot more shifts, it’s going to take forever to save up enough cash to get us out of this RV and into a real house without wheels.

  “You’re rich, Mama,” Justin observes, slurping a slightly undercooked egg. “That’s a lot of money.”

  It’s a lot of one-dollar bills.

  “Not rich yet,” I say. “Just starting to save a little bit.”

  “Am I going to start school here?” he asks. “I miss school a little. It’s boring hanging out alone.”

  I should enroll him in the elementary school in town. It’s a nice-looking school with a big playground and lots of equipment like padded monkey bars, a sliding board, and swings. He was in first grade back home in Indy, and as bad as the school was, Justin found ways to make it a good place for him. He had friends. He liked math and reading. He was ahead of most of the other kids in everything except kick-ball and tag. The truth is my boy is a little soft, preferring comic books in the library to the playground contact sports that make kids on the southside of Indy into juvenile scrappers.

  The thing is, if I try to enroll him in the middle of the year, they’re going to want his transcripts from Indy, and that’s going to send up a flare to anyone interested in where we’ve landed. I’m not ready to deal with that—not just yet.

  “How do you feel about an extra-long summer vacation?” I ask. “And then being the smartest kid in your class next year, and a head taller than everybody else?”

  If I hold him out and enroll him in first grade in August, they won’t need his transcripts. I’ll tell them we were on the road and he’s never been to school. They won’t like it, but they won’t send a Swat Team after me. They won’t tell Joe where we are.

  “That’s a terrible idea,” Justin states, deadpan. “But if that’s what we’re going to do, then I can live with it if you get me a library card and a bike.”

  I blink, my eyes growing wide. The library card I can live with. “A bike?” I ask. “Where are you going?”

  Justin looks at me like I’m as dense as a stone wall. “The library,” he says. “I can ride a bike to the library. It’s only four blocks from here.”

  “We can walk to the library together,” I tell him. “I know you think you’re seven going on thirty-four, but you’re not wandering off alone.”

  If a local librarian sees him wandering around by himself, I’m on the CPS radar down here. And I can’t have that shit either.

  Justin gets quiet, sitting pensively over eggs dangling from his plastic fork. Finally, he brightens a little, gazing up at me. “It’s okay,” he says. “I don’t want Joe to find us. It’ll be cool to be the big kid in class for once. I’ll already know everything already and I’ll be smarter than the babies just starting. And no one will know we ran away. It’ll be good. And I don’t need a bike. Walking saves money.”

  Jesus. Where did this little boy come from? He reads me like an open book.

  “I’m off work today,” I say. “I was thinking we could go to the beach.”

  Her perks up with this news. “Really?!”

  We’ve only been to the beach once since we got here, and that was late in the afternoon after a long lunch shift. It started getting dark soon after we got there, and Justin didn’t get much playtime. He loved it though, even in the fading light when everyone else was coming out of the water.

  “Yeah,” I say, feeling the need to make this situation better for him the only way I know how. I’ve dragged him across the country far away from his home and friends, into a strange, unstable existence where he’s left alone way too much while I work. I made shitty choices before Justin was ever conceived, looking for stability in all the wrong places. I should have picked better. Justin deserves a father who isn’t a psychopath and a mother who isn’t a calamity.

  “I need to stop and get some work shoes first, but then we’ll go to the beach.”

  Justin is just about
to give me his best, glowing, baby-boy grin when a sharp knock comes on the RV door, making both of us just about vault through the roof. Once I recover, I peek out the window, seeing Ronny standing outside. I open the door to him. He looks up, not coming in.

  “You wanna pick up an extra shift?” he asks. “Donna called off and I’ve got a tour bus coming it at twelve-thirty with two-hundred hungry seniors. Tips already included. It’s a two-hundred-dollar lunch and all you have to do is serve pre-orders and clean up afterwards. You’ll be done by four.”

  A two-hundred-dollar lunch is a windfall, and not the kind of thing that’s easily surrendered to new people like me. But four o’clock is way too late to give Justin a day at the beach, and I promised.

  I turn back to him. He’s looking at me like he knows what this means.

  “It’s okay, Mom. I’ve got my book, and we can go another day. Go get some shoes before you go to work so your feet are better. If you keep wearing those old shoes you won’t be able to work at all.”

  He finished that book days ago and started it over again.

  Ronny looks at his watch. “If you’re coming I need you on by eleven-thirty. If not I’ve gotta get on the phone and see if someone else can cover it.”

  “She’ll be there,” Justin says. “She’s just got to go to Wal-Mart and get some new shoes.”

  Ronny looks up at me, then at Justin. “You sure, little man?”

  Justin nods. “We’re saving up for a house with a yard. She’ll be on time. I swear.”

  My son makes me want to cry.

  When Ronny’s gone, I turn to Justin with regrets. “I would have taken you to the beach, Kiddo.” I say, feeling like the worst mother in the world.

  “I know,” he says. “But we can’t afford to turn down shifts. The more you take, the more they’ll give you, the faster we get a nice place to live. I stayed by myself in the apartment back at home when you worked. It’s no different. It’s just nicer here, with water and trees and the food you bring home every night.”