So, maybe today isn’t the first day Savannah has done something ridiculous.
“Mr. Phillips, you can trust me. I’ll have you a new dishwasher in here first thing tomorrow morning.” The young man in a blue uniform picked up his tools on the other side of the kitchen door.
“That will be great, Ron. I’ll be here around seven thirty, so if we could get it earlier that would really help us out . Tomorrow’s liable to be a crazy day.” Dad peered out the window toward the spectacular spectacle across the square.
“I know. I’m going to spend the night out there with everyone else tonight. Need to make sure these people trying to steal our rights know what we stand for, you know, Mr. Phillips.”
“Yeah,well, thanks, Ron. Do I need to pay you anything today?”
“Oh, if you could pay for half today, you can give me the rest when I get it installed in the morning.” He bent over to pick up the pen he had just dropped. Poor child showed more of his exposed behind to Dad’s staff than anyone should be forced to endure. Louise let out a groan. Her twin sister, Mervine, a snicker. Richard cleared his throat and slid his ebony hand over his eyes. Duke whined as if in pain.
Ron stood and hiked up his britches. I couldn’t have been more thankful than a seventy-five-year-old Southern woman on beauty-shop day. Because after all, this city has enough attractions.
Dad wrote a check for Mr. Ron, who left a receipt on the counter. Dad proceeded to help himself to the coffeepot, which brewed underneath the blackboard that featured “Jake’s Thought for the Day.”
“Watch your words and hold your tongue; you’ll save yourself a lot of grief.”
I didn’t really care what it said today. This man calmly pouring himself some java, as if the entire world hadn’t turned upside down on his front lawn,wasn’t going to quiet me with his renowned blackboard wit. “Surely you are not going to stand here pouring coffee while your wife is chained to a monument large enough to crush a small village?”
He kept pouring. I picked up Ron’s receipt on the counter. An emblem of a fish was embossed across the entire piece of paper.
I set it down and then followed my question in case it was lost on him in some form or fashion.“Have you noticed that no one is even here?” I said, motioning to the empty tables and coffee bar. “Every other creature within a thirty-mile radius and probably other states is over there, watching her . Why aren’t you?”
“Savannah, your mother doesn’t need watching.”
“Obviously you are mistaken. The woman is chained to a monument, for crying out loud. I think she has needed watching for years!”
He walked to a window table and sat so he could view the spectacle from his chair. Duke followed close behind. Duke has been a virtual “store prisoner” since the incident last summer when mother caught him coming home carrying a bag of empty beer bottles and pork & beans. She wasn’t the only one that saw him, however, and the whole episode had the city abuzz with rumors of Victoria Phillips’s dog, “the tootin’ alcoholic.” That, accompanied by last week’s dip in her pool, has pretty much kept him staring out the window too. He looked up at my father as if ready for an explanation of this crazy afternoon as well.
“Your mother is using her free will to express herself, well . . .freely.” He laughed at his own amused self.
Duke came over and nuzzled his head up under my hand. I obliged and rubbed his ears. “You laugh . Well, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but I don’t need this right now. I just started my job at the paper. Shoot, half of them don’t even think I should be writing human-interest stories, and the other half look at me as Victoria Phillips’s daughter, the human-interest story. So, however you want to break this debacle down, she should be restrained.”
I stared into those green smirking eyes that had produced both Thomas’s and my own.
“She is, actually.”
“Ever the comedian, aren’t we?” I looked out the window myself only to see two other television trucks make their way to our newly adorned square. “Great, now every network’s covered. CBS and FOX have arrived.”
“Savannah, the world doesn’t revolve around you, in case you haven’t noticed.” I heard the twins and Richard make their way to the back room.“And this has nothing to do with you, personally.” He turned his attention back to the window.
I walked to the front door and opened it, trying to hide what was boiling inside me.“Well, that is where you’re wrong, brother. It has everything to do with me. And you. And my mother. And the fact that we are already talked about in the paper more than your average criminal, and in this city, more than the mayor himself.”
“That’s not true.” He took a casual sip of his coffee.
“It is true. And it is about me. And whether you like it or not, it’s about you too. Because half of you is across the street in mules and pastels and will have your name and my name on every nightly news network before our heads hit our pillows.”
“Don’t you need to get back to work, Savannah?”
“Actually what I need is a Valium.”
His head jerked around to scold me.“What did you say?”
“If you would have let me finish, I was trying to say,‘Actually, what we need is to go tell ’em to stop this madness.’ But I guess no help is going to come from this side of the square.”With that inane salvage I walked out the door.
The Ten Commandments of our Lord were being defended by the same woman who came with me to basketball tryouts and spent the entire time yelling, “Good shot, darling!” while I was dribbling. She sat in the stands on a towel, holding her hands out to her side, not touching anything. I don’t know who they found more amusing: me, or Vicky and her antibacterial gel. By the time she started hollering “You go, girl!” and all I was doing was sitting on the bench, I decided to cut myself from the team.
I decided to take up a quieter sport. A sport where the people in the stands weren’t allowed to say anything. I became a tennis player. I told her it was uncouth to talk at all while people were playing tennis. I didn’t even let her think she could cheer between points. So, for four solid years, at every match,Victoria sat on the stands, on a cushion, and never said a word. It was heaven.
And now here she is, fighting for a piece of it.
I looked across the street, and mother was nowhere to be found in the madness. Camera lights were beaming everywhere and microphones were waving in the air, and my life offered more excitement than a recovering beauty queen. Or maybe not. Because the former Miss Georgia United States of America, nestled across the street in chains, was evidently having a pretty exciting afternoon herself.
I walked to the back of Dad’s coffee shop and climbed into Old Betsy. The parking space belonged to the apartment above Jake’s, an apartment only a paycheck away from being mine. I, Ms. Savannah Phillips, or “Savannah from Savannah” as my mother calls me,was getting her own apartment. Granted, it was above my father’s business, but it was out of my mother’s house. Liberation, no matter how you defined it. Even though I had only been out of graduate school and back home for just a little more than two weeks, the walls had closed in and were strangling the life from my vibrant, young soul.
My next-door cubicle buddy and self-appointed affliction greeted me in the narrow passageway before I had a chance to enter my redecorated haven of cardboard. I had attempted to make it more homey with the addition of a few books and one Paige Long “original” oil painting. A gift from the painter herself, who happens to be my best friend.
“Have you heard what’s going on at the courthouse?” Joshua’s annoyingly overconfident, perfectly white smile gleamed down at me, and a loose black curl hung in front of his left eye. I didn’t much like men anymore. Since Paige informed me last week that the only man I had ever really dated—or even loved for that matter— is marrying some chick from an all-girls’ school, I have sworn off men in general. So, men in general have moved to my tolerable category of relationships.
“Could
I at least get through the door and sit down?” I pushed him aside.
“You don’t have a door . You have a cubicle.” He let me pass.
“Is this comedy hour?” I tossed my satchel on the floor next to my chair. I dropped into it and it squealed.
“My,my,my. To have had such a good morning, you sure deteriorate fast.”
I stared at my blank computer screen. Now was not the time to discuss the last hour with The Man among men who irritated me so . Turning to look over at his tanned face, piercing dark eyes, and frantic curls, I said,“You know, I really don’t need your analysis of my moods, or my days . We both have jobs to do, and that should keep us busy enough to stay out of each other’s way. Don’t you have a deadline or something?”
“Or something. Okay, well, if you don’t want to tell me, I’m sure I’ll find out in the morning with the rest of the city.”
“I’m sure you will.”
“But I could tell you my news if you told me your news.”He invited himself in and pulled up the lone chair that rested underneath Paige’s painting.
I didn’t even look at him.
“So you don’t want to know who’s coming on Friday?”
I picked up the phone to dial anyone who would rescue me, even though there was no one I knew well enough that would . My only friends here so far were the receptionist, Marla, the sweet little pixie who got her job because she befriended my mother on a trolley car, and this man next to me. Other than these two, few people around here desired my presence at all.
“I guess that means you don’t want to know. Okay . Well”—he stood, performing a pitiful attempt at dejection—“I guess you don’t care that the president is headed this way Friday for a visit before he heads off to Sea Island for a meeting with world leaders. Word has it the mayor was going to invite your mother to attend the president’s luncheon.”
My head swiveled in time to see his right hand grab the corner of my cubicle, showing off the well-defined muscle that ran from his hand to his elbow and disappeared underneath his shirtsleeve.
He knew exactly what was going on in this city. He knew that my mother was at the center of it all. And he wanted me to be the one to tell him all about it . Well. He could read it in the paper. But no matter how perfectly toned his bicep was, he wasn’t getting it from me.
CHAPTER THREE
On the drive home, I avoided Wright Square and the dead man’s tomb. But I could not avoid the fact that Savannah had officially turned upside down. And this time it had nothing to do with a best-selling book about a murder, or a University of Georgia win.
The behavior that rippled through Savannah today was so unorthodox. I mean, there is only one time a year that the people of Savannah attach a scurry to their step, and that is in preparation for the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. Other than that, this town’s pace is set apart by its ability to accomplish even the most pressing tasks in slow motion. Stores actually close for months at a time with nothing more than a note in their window:“Got an itch and will return when the fall clothes arrive or the beach gets too cold.”
Truly, there is nothing electric about this place, except what you might see during a thunderstorm. Or during any activity related to my mother. And occasionally during a well-publicized murder. But today, I could practically see the electricity buzzing along the very sidewalks and alleyways.
Pulling on to Abercorn Street, I glanced at Clary’s restaurant across the street from my parents’ home . The absence of a dinnertime rush offered more proof that something was amiss in the South.
I walked through the second-floor doors of our rather substantial home. Some would consider it a mansion. Vicky considered it a compromise. She had wanted to live in (I kid you not) the Victorian district. But my dad, wanting as uneventful a life as possible with a woman who calls her daughter “Savannah from Savannah” refused to spend the next twenty-some-odd years listening to his wife introduce herself as “Victoria from the Victorian district.” So, she settled on this lovely house, a house on the Historical Register large enough to accommodate a small village. Don’t tell her I said that. She would think I was making some snide reference to Hillary Clinton’s first book.
Home has a smell. Well, it used to. It used to smell like beef roast with potatoes and carrots and gravy with a side of butter beans and macaroni and cheese. But not today. No pungent aromas accosted my senses when I opened the front door. No flurry of activity in the kitchen, no loud conversations. It was then, for the first time, my mental faculties registered the fact that no Victoria meant . . . no dinner. No one else in this entire family knew how to do much more than pour a bowl of cereal.
We discovered this absence of talent the night my father had the brilliant idea of informing my mother that “the only thing someone inherits who stirs up undue trouble in their own house is the wind.” In essence, he informed my mother she was a bag of hot air. All because he wouldn’t eat the crumbs at the bottom of the potato-chip bag before he opened a new one.
And I do believe he capped it all off by calling her Vicky. My mother hates nothing more than being called Vicky. But when it came from my father’s mouth, well, let’s just say, “Hold on, Hannah!”
My mother had paused briefly at this comment. She attempted to regather and reload. But nothing came out. She tried. She tried hard. Even stamped her foot a couple times like a horse about to charge. But the poor woman didn’t have a comeback. A verbal comeback, that is. She came back all right. She didn’t cook for a week. And after he tried to make us a dinner of canned tomato soup by mixing it with water, well, let’s just say I didn’t even like him much myself at that point. So we ate cereal . Three times a day. I suggested that next time he should make only those observations that would result in his sole punishment.
I walked up the stairs to the sound of my own feet. No patter of paws followed. No,“Dinner’s ready!” No smart comment about the fact that my body was actually encased in a dress. I would have welcomed the persecution. But none came.
As I entered my bedroom and proceeded to my bathroom to wash my face, the stress of my mother’s antics finally captured me. Toothpaste from the morning brushing had not completely made its way down the sink, and a blob of blue Crest lay on the oil-rubbed bronze drain.
I couldn’t help it. I grabbed the Comet, a toothbrush, and a few extra-strength Tylenol and busted up in that bathroom like it hadn’t seen in a good two days. I scrubbed faucets. I scrubbed shower tiles. I scrubbed floor tiles. I scrubbed things you wouldn’t even know existed unless you got down on all fours and examined the plumbing. By the time I was through, that placed shined as if Mr. Clean on steroids had come through.
The chime from the door alarm declared someone’s entrance. I figured I should greet the intruder. My twenty-four-year-old frame felt the two hours of squatting and cleaning, and I required extra care in removing the kneepads and rubber gloves. But you can rest assured, there was not a microscopic remnant of any germs, fungus, or hardened toothpaste to be found.
Thomas, Duke, and Dad came up through the downstairs door from Thomas’s floor of the house, otherwise known as a basement. The child inherited it after I refused it. He’ll be there ’til Vicky buys him a house or Dad kicks him out. The former will only happen because of the latter.
I met them in the kitchen. No Vicky. No hope for normalcy inside these four walls this evening.
“Where have you three been?”
Thomas went straight to the refrigerator and pulled out a Dr Pepper.“We’ve been talking to Mom. She is so into this thing!”He was acting as if this was the greatest thing he had been a part of since he shaved his head for his “knob” year at The Citadel military college. I couldn’t hide my disgust.
“When is she coming home?”
Dad looked at me with undisguised disbelief.“Savannah, your mother is staying there until they remove her or the monument.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I think it’s great,”Th
omas quipped.
“Ever the juvenile, aren’t we,Thomas?”
“Ever the girl with the stick up her—”
“Thomas,” Dad interrupted.“That’s enough.”
I nodded. “I think you need to get out more.” I turned my attention back to the once-sane leader of this questionable family. “Seriously, Dad, she can’t stay there . What’s she going to do, sleep outside all night?”
“It looks that way.”
His calm demeanor dismayed me. “You mean, you are going to let her sleep out there all night?”
“Savannah, I’ll take care of your mother. You don’t worry about her. Now, I’m going to get her and me something to eat.”
He began to make his way to the stairs to perform his usual after-work ritual of a shower and change of clothes.“You want to come have dinner with us?”
“What? And risk a picnic caught on tape? I don’t think so.”
He continued upstairs.“Have it your way.”
“What are Thomas and I going to eat?”
My brother headed downstairs only to call back, “I’m going with Dad.”
I looked down at the golden four-legged creature next to me.“I guess we’re on our own.” Duke remained for one brief second, and then became a golden blur as his flapping furry tail followed Thomas downstairs. Even Duke knew who would really eat dinner tonight.
The kitchen was empty.“Like I said, I guess I’m on my own.”
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