Low Country Daddy

by Lexi Whitlow

  The most important thing to be grateful for is that Justin’s okay. That is a freaking miracle. That could have gone south so fast, and so horribly. But it didn’t. Things work out the way they do for a reason, and all the reasons are clear to me now.

  “Hey you.”

  I look up from my phone where I’ve been zoning on satellite images of the departing hurricane.

  Maddie stands ahead of me, holding Emma cradled on her shoulder.

  “I just fed her. I’m getting ready to put her down. Justin’s asking for you. He wants you to tuck him in.”

  Overhead, failing remnants of wind gust against Blanc-Bleu’s sturdy roof. I reach out for Maddie’s one free hand. She offers it and I pull her close, slipping my arms around her waist while I sit, resting my head against her belly.

  “I love you,” I whisper. “I love you so much. I love Justin. Emma loves you. And we’re all, already a family, so you just need to get your head okay with that.”

  I pull back, looking up at her. “I want to marry you. I want you to be Emma’s mom. I want to be Justin’s dad. I want you to be my wife, and my best friend. Can we do that?”

  Maddie gazes down on me, my daughter dozing on her shoulder.

  “You’re asking me to marry you, in the middle of a hurricane, with six feet of water flooding the island, with my kid upstairs not sleeping off the worst day of his life?”

  I nod, smiling very awkwardly. “That’s exactly what I’m doing.” I say.

  “Yeah,” she says, her eyes misting, then tearing up. “Yes. Of course. I love you, and you’re the best thing that ever happened to us. But first you have to tuck Justin in. He won’t go to sleep until he sees you.”

  Maddie is gonna marry me. She’s gonna be my wife.

  I stand up, circling my hands around Maddie’s waist. I kiss her, parting her lips, tasting her, drawing her breath into me. “I’ll tuck him in,” I say, whispering. “And then I’ll tuck us in. We both need some rest. Come upstairs and put Emma down, and let’s all go to bed.”

  The house beneath us quiets. Justin is sound asleep across the room. Emma snoozes in a make-shift crib at the foot of our bed. Maddie snuggles against me, her body warm and soft against my skin. The world outside is quieting. It’s stopped raining. The storms have passed.

  I hug Maddie close under my arm. She said ‘yes’.

  A few minutes later I drift off into a peaceful, dreamless sleep. All is well in my world. Finally.

  Chapter 29

  Maddie

  That’s it, you’re doing really good,” Justin says, hovering protectively behind his sister. Emma stands on an old wooden box at the wheel, threading the boat through a maze of wild oyster beds with the confidence of a seasoned pilot.

  Our kids are tanned, lean, and fearless; just like their father. Jeb is kicked back with his feet up beside me, a cold beer in his hand, watching Justin show Emma what to do.

  “You’re a natural, Em. You’re gonna be a heck of a waterman one day. The oysters’ll cry when they see you comin’. You can be on my crew anytime.”

  Emma smiles up at him, her bright face beaming. She’s six-years-old and she adores her brother more than flowers love the sunshine.

  “We’re gonna need another boat,” Jeb whispers into my hair, pulling me close, slipping his hand over my growing belly.

  ‘Another boat’ is the natural solution to every new challenge Jeb Ballentine faces.

  “How’s that?” I ask him, leaning in, enjoying the feel of his powerful arm wrapped around me, enjoying the early springtime sun on my face and the clean scent of salt air.

  “Justin’s gonna have his own crew next season,” he says, smiling proudly. “I guess I’m gonna give him this one. Then Emma’s gonna want one so she can teach her new baby sister to sail. I’m all out of boats. We’re gonna need another boat. Maybe two.”

  He’s got it all figured out. He’s got a plan for everything.

  Except none of this happened according to plan. It’s all just been one, great big, random happy accident, right down to this new baby inside me. Jeb never planned on being a father, but he’s turned out to be the best father in the history of Dad’s. He never planned on being a husband, but he’s also the best at that, and he’s my very best friend. We never planned on having anymore kids. We were satisfied with two, but we’re about to have three. She’s due in fifteen weeks, and Rose couldn’t be more over the moon. She’s the best grandmama ever, and my second-best friend. (Don’t tell Alley, she thinks that’s her!)

  “I think we need to have six or seven kids,” Jeb teases, rubbing my thigh. “That’ll give me a reason to buy six or seven more boats, and it’ll keep you fat and glowing.”

  “Fat, huh?” I observe. “I’m fat?”

  “Fat and sexy and soft,” he croons, snuggling me even closer. “And I can’t wait to get these kids home and put them to bed, then take you to bed.”

  “Always thinking ahead,” I say, teasing him right back “Never satisfied to just enjoy the moment. Always making plans.”

  He swigs his beer, grinning. “Darlin’, you don’t know the half of it.”

  I do know at least half of it. Jeb Ballentine never stops working, planning, challenging himself, encouraging all of us to do the same.

  After we got married, I could have stayed home and just taken care of Emma and Justin, but Jeb knew there were other things beyond being a mom I’ve always wanted to try. I went back to school, commuting every day to the College of Charleston. When I first started I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but soon enough I realized a degree in Historic Preservation and Historic Site Management made a lot of sense. Working together, Rose and I have managed to elevate Blanc-Bleu from a byway tourist distraction to a Living History site, where we educate visitors and scholars alike on what life was like for all the inhabitants working and living on a 19th century rice and indigo planation.

  From the blacksmith shop to agricultural demonstrations, restored kitchen gardens and antebellum cooking programs, fully restored slave cabins and outbuildings, antique farm implements and work horses (who live and work every day on the property), we immerse visitors in the experience of life on the farm the way it was two centuries ago. South Carolina awarded us a State Historic Site designation to accompany the National Register of Historic Places protection. With the state award, we also got funding for staff, programs, and maintenance, which has been a windfall, allowing us to do so much more than we ever imagined was possible.

  I have the coolest job in the world, and I’m raising my kids in a home that is – quite literally – steeped in their own and the nation’s history. If anyone had told me fifteen years ago I would ever be this fortunate in life, career, or family, I couldn’t have imagined it. Some days I look around at my world, and I still can’t quite believe it’s real. Then the baby kicks hard, and I know for certain, I’m not dreaming at all.

  “Let’s pack it in,” Jeb calls to our two junior pilots at the helm. “I’m hungry and we’ve got a cooler full of oysters, crabs, and flounder to get on the grill and get eaten before the sun goes down.”

  Emma turns back to look at her dad. “Don’t grill all the oysters, Daddy,” she says. “I like ‘em raw.”

  He smiles, winking at her. “That’s my girl.”

  Epilogue

  Jeb

  I reach into the tank, lifting a handful of tiny oyster spat, their slick shells measuring about a half a centimeter across. They’re cool and heavy in my hand, and they’re a miracle. Smart people who know more about biology and maricultural than me, said this couldn’t be done. They told me I was wasting my time. People have told me that before, and it just makes me want to prove them wrong.

  In East Coast oyster farming there are basically three kinds of oysters. There is crassostrea virginica, which is the common, wild bivalve I’ve farmed for years. There’s a thing called a Tetraploid oyster which has four sets of chromosomes instead of two, like the wild bivalve. And there’s a Triploi
d oyster, which is offspring created by pairing Tetrapoid’s with bivalves, resulting in a hybrid oyster that doesn’t spawn, grows fast, and is disease resistant, allowing the oyster to be harvested in the summer months when wild oysters are prone to carrying high bacterial loads that make people sick.

  Creating Triploid’s is expensive and controversial. There’s a lot of science that claims they are completely sterile, can never spawn, and therefore can never cross with the wild stock.

  But what if you had an outlier Triploid that did spawn?

  Eight years ago, I started a side project in the hatchery to answer that question. I ordered a large batch of Triploid seed and grew them out just like I do with my regular stock. When they were a year old, I brought them inside the hatchery, set up a spawning system, and started feeding them. That first year, nothing happened. I let the project ride, over-wintering them in Oyster grows outside. They grew fast and fat, each oyster (and I had twenty thousand of them) as big around as my hand. The second spring I brought them back in. My hunch was right, a few of those oysters spawned, resulting in just a dozen larvae. I knew I was onto something special.

  “Justin, come look,” I say.

  He walks over, standing beside me, gazing down onto the pile of spat in my hand.

  “You’re like Dr. Frankenstein,” Justin observes dryly. “Except the monsters are tasty.”

  We’re looking at an oyster that’s selectively bread – like a watermelon or blueberry – using no genetic modification at all, that is for all intents and purposes is a crassostrea virginica (a bivalve, with just two sets of chromosomes), but grows twice as fast as the wild oyster, has all the disease resistance of its distant Tetraploid ancestors, and retains its body fat through the summer spawning months.

  I’ve had them genetically tested, and genetically, they are indistinguishable from crassostrea virginica.

  I can grow and harvest oysters year-round (effectively increasing our farm income by at least forty-percent), as long as I can convince the folks at the Department of Natural Resources to approve summer harvesting. That may take a few more years, but in the meantime, I’ve got a business model ready to launch, selling these oyster seed to growers in North Carolina and Virginia, where summer harvesting is permitted. The growers I’ve shown them to are chomping at the bit. The chefs who have tasted them think they’re the best tasting oyster on the planet.

  I scrape the babies back into their tank and dry my hand on my jeans.

  “So, what do you think?” I ask him. “You take over the farming ops, and I’ll give my back a break and take over the hatchery expansion?”

  He smiles, shrugging. “Whatever you say, dad. We both know I’m gonna be working for you ‘til we’re both old.”

  I shake my head, getting serious. “No,” I say. “I mean it. We should split the business – legally. I can’t do it all and I don’t want to. You’re twenty-years-old and you know this operation as well as I do. I want to get off the water and do this. I can build a better oyster and sell them to the whole world.”

  “You’re really serious?” he asks. “Paperwork and all?”

  I nod. “The only thing I ask is you keep me on the payroll until I can get the hatchery producing enough income to sustain itself, and keep employing locals like I’ve always tried to do.”

  “I wouldn’t do it any other way,” Justin says. “But I’m gonna buy another boat.”

  I grin, clasping his shoulder, giving him a sturdy shake. “I sure as shit wouldn’t expect anything less. But don’t tell your mother about the new boat just yet.”

  When I was younger I had bad dreams. I foolishly went off to war trying to prove something, and when I came home, I brought the war back with me. Then I met Maddie, and she took the war out of me.

  I still dream plenty, but my dreams are of my wife, who’s still as beautiful and firecracker sharp as the day I first met her. I dream of our kids, who have grown up so fast. Justin barely remembers a time when he didn’t call me ‘dad’. Maddie and I got married and then signed dual adoption papers the next day. She’s the only mother Emma’s ever known, and while Emma knows her birth mother is out there somewhere, and might even contact her one day, I don’t think she thinks much about it. She’s a happy, almost fourteen-year-old who’s boy-crazy, lives to go shopping with her Mom and Grandmama, and who knows she’s my princess – even though she can pilot a boat as well (maybe better) than most of the grown men on the ACE Basin. Rosy, our ‘baby’, is just five, but she’s a firecracker in her own right, and the apple of my eye. She’s also the smartest out of all of us. She’s got me wrapped around her pinky finger, and she runs Maddie in circles.

  I have a lot of dreams; all good ones. I’ll never stop dreaming. I have a big family of Ballentine’s, and a lot of friends like Stu and Ally and their kids, and Manuel and Maria and their kids and grandkids, to pass my dreams onto. I’ll never run out of dreams, and I’ll never run out of people I love to share them with.

  The End

  Excerpt from King Size

  Owen

  A fucking art opening, Duncan?”

  “Why, yes sir. It’s the kind of thing you said you liked to do in Paris.”

  “When exactly did I say that?” I grab a martini—or whatever they’ve named the martini style drink of the evening in this overwrought, annoyingly trendy Paris gallery—and down several gulps. The vodka is mixed with something else—melon, grapefruit—and it’s surprisingly refreshing.

  “Well—sir—this morning.” Duncan puffs up, and I give him a wide grin. Normally I don’t act too terribly princely with my ever-patient bodyguard, but I can’t quite help it. Duncan glances at my face and gives me a long-suffering sigh.

  “I like art. And art galleries.” And the artists themselves, sometimes.

  I survey every face and figure in the room as I walk through and take in the art. There are tall black-and-white photographs of the city, initiation impressionist paintings with modernist flair, and some interesting sculptures in a style I don’t entirely know how to describe. The women are usually the more interesting aspect of gallery openings and big events like this one.

  Even last year, I’d find a girl to take home in a heartbeat, but this gallery is full of women of a certain sort… I should have known before I even had Duncan drive me here. In the corner, I spot three towering goddesses, each on stiletto heels. Beside them stands a creature built for the Paris runway—a doll. Her figure has been starved for the benefit of designers and photographers who prefer the look of a young child to the figure of a grown woman. Her lips are full and puffed with restalin or collagen or whatever people are using these days.

  “Go home, Duncan,” I say, waving him off. “I don’t need any company.”

  Duncan gives me an appraising look. He’s been told to accompany me on this trip to Paris as a protective measure. He doesn’t want the type of paparazzi reports from my last trip to Amsterdam to visit my cousin Matthias. And he doesn’t want to bear the weight of responsibility if I take off on my own.

  “Seriously,” I urge him. “I just need to find some art for the new apartment here. Just… go.”

  I feel the need to be overly formal with Duncan—my princely self. I’m not really that person. And this whole art event isn’t what I had in mind. Come to think of it, I don’t quite know what I wanted. Not one of the long-haired goddesses, or one of the Paris fashionistas. Maybe—as my mother told me many long years ago, I simply need someone to have a decent conversation with.

  Funny idea, Mother. That’s not exactly who I am.

  I laugh at the idea as Duncan hesitantly leaves me. I watch as he walks out into the cool Parisian night. I know he’ll sit in the car, waiting for me a block or two away.

  I wait for him to round the corner, and then I take a step outside myself, taking one of the contraband cigarettes out of my jacket pocket and putting one between my lips. I breathe in the smoke, cognizant of the fact that I’m probably actively taking thirty minutes or so o
ff of my life with just one puff, but that’s the beauty of it. I’m doing something just because I want to.

  I glance over my shoulder at the women inside, each one more beautiful than the last—and all of them “acceptable” dates for a man like me.

  “Boring,” I mutter. And even more boring if they know who I am.

  I fish around in my jacket for my iPhone, and I open up the screen. There’s one app I’ve been meaning to try—Sparc.

  It’s for dating—well, fucking, primarily. I’d certainly be banned from doing something like this, which is why I want to. I have a dead profile with the fake name “Collin” on the thing I set up months ago, but I open it up anyway.

  “The whole of parliament would have a fit,” I say, laughing. “And the tabloids…”

  I type a few words about myself as I smoke the last of the cigarette and stub it out against a tree. I don’t expect to find anyone intriguing as I scroll through the profiles with the little green circles attached to them. Since it’s based on location, a few of the women inside the art gallery opening pop up. Apparently the girl with the collagen lips is “ready to party.”

  That might have been appealing at one time in my life. But, as I stand out and face the glittering Paris night, I can’t help but feel that I’m done with all of that. Done with models and stiletto-heeled goddesses of all kinds. I’m about to close the app when a new green light pops up, a couple of blocks away.

  I click on her profile, and there’s a picture of a girl with sandy-blond locks of hair, cascading around her shoulders. She’s standing next to a painting, and her whole shirt is smeared with the paint.

  Artist-adventurer-thrill-seeker. That’s all it says.

  I click the yes button on her profile and wait. After several minutes of staring off into the night, the phone buzzes again. She’s seen me, and she’s clicked yes as well.

  I tuck the phone inside my jacket—along with the pack of cigarettes. And I step off into the night towards the slightly seedier part of Paris downtown, just a few blocks away. The galleries there are nothing like this one. And Duncan wouldn’t mind—after all, I am just going to look at art. I keep my pace brisk and my head down. I don’t want to be seen by the people from the opening I was just at.