“I’ll work it out, Ben,” I said, smiling so fake and so wide that my gums were showing, “and I seriously appreciate the opportunity.”
“We’ll talk tomorrow,” he said, and all expression of camaraderie had drained from his face.
“First thing.”
My body temperature must have been over one hundred degrees. Bruton had offered me the opportunity of my whole career and I had blinked.
I took the elevator all the way down to the street and began to walk toward Fifth Avenue. I was shaking with nausea and it was all I could do to keep from being ill. I kept walking, sweating all over, and realized after several blocks that I was heading home. I couldn’t work that day. I would be useless if I returned to my office. That was it. I would go home and take the day to sort this out. I pulled out my cell and called my secretary, Sandi.
“Where are you?” she said. “You’ve got a meeting five minutes ago with the Japanese investors—they’re in the conference room and…”
Crap. Crap. Crap. Wonderful. I had to go back. What was I thinking? Hadn’t I set this meeting up? How could I forget just like that? What was the matter with me? Okay, I was slightly traumatized! But if I blew the chance to see their presentation on public transportation in Tokyo after we had flown these guys in to meet with the Metropolitan Transit Authority and two of our senior partners, I would be in serious disgrace.
“I’ll be there in five. Tell them I lost a cap and ran to my dentist to cement it back in. Keep serving muffins and juice. Tell Paul McGrath to show them the slides of the Los Angeles project and to be brilliant, which he always is anyway. I’m on my way…”
It was going to be a rough day for “the belle.”
It was. By the time I got home that night at nine-thirty, after a dinner of steak and lobster large enough to feed the New York Giants and a family of six, I was exhausted. All the conversation across the huge table in the private room at the Gramercy Tavern had been about the future of the cities of Tokyo and Nara. For those few hours I had been able to relegate the Charleston assignment to a separate compartment in my mind. But once I was back home, Charleston and J. D. Langley came whooshing through the walls and windows of every room like poison gas. How on earth would I handle this?
I glanced at my wristwatch. It was almost too late to call Sela. Sela O’Farrell, the closest friend of my entire life, would be finishing up the last dinner seating at her restaurant in Charleston, buying some tourists drinks, and thinking about things on the next day’s menu she needed to discuss with her chef. Sela was a night owl, which was partly why the restaurant business was a perfect match for her in every way. Sela would know what to do.
She answered on the fourth ring.
“Hey, you! If you’re calling me at this hour, it must be drama. Aren’t you usually in bed by now?”
“I hate caller ID,” I said. “Takes all the mystery out of life.”
“Well, not all of it. What’s going on?”
“How busy are you? Should I call you tomorrow?”
“No, heck no. I’m in my office just signing a pile of checks…spill it!”
A long and mournful groan escaped my throat to set the stage and then I told her the story.
“Whew!” she said when I was finished. “So, what’s the plan?”
“I’m thinking that I have to do this or my career at ARC is freaking flattened, no pun intended. So, I’m coming down there, renting a condo in an obscure location, and bringing my smart assistant, Sandi, who can wear a wire and attend all the meetings with J.D. No one will know I was ever there. Ever.”
“Yeah, sure. That’ll fly.”
“No, huh? You don’t think I can do this and then slip back into the night?”
“No.”
“Crap. So what should I do?”
“Listen, you’re not going to like what I’m about to tell you, but it needs to be said.”
“Go ahead. I’ve been waiting years for an honest assessment of my life.”
Sela sighed long and hard. “Well, girl, here it is. It’s time you came clean. That’s it. You don’t talk to your daddy and he’s as old as Adam’s housecat. That’s wrong because if Vaughn dies before you two reconcile, you’ll have to live with it for the rest of your life. Your sister, Joanie, has completely demonized you and you let her. You need to seriously repossess her high horse, and her little soapbox, too. And, missy? You’re still dead in love with J.D. and you always have been. And here’s the killer—”
“Not true! Stop! I can’t listen to this now!”
“Look, Betts. I love you to death. You’re like the sister I never had. But this isn’t a bunch of baloney and there are other people here who deserve a fair shake.”
I knew she was right. “Oh Lord.”
“Are we in prayer?”
“Yes. I am deep in prayer.”
“You know, Betts, it’s time to pull the boogeymen out from under the bed and deal with them. Just deal with them.”
“You’re right.” I did not believe she was right.
“I’m guessing there will be a whole lot of hell-raising to follow, but I’ve got ten bucks that says it will be worth it in the end.”
“Ten bucks? That much? You’ve got more confidence than I do, Sela.”
“Nah. I just like a good scrap. And since when did you ever walk away from a challenge?”
“When I couldn’t predict the win.”
“You can’t see a victory here?”
“No. This looks like a minefield.”
CHAPTER TWO
Meet J.D. and His Tribe of Malcontents
Do we have a ceiling fan in the dining room? No. Why? Because five years ago, when we built this massive house, my wife, Valerie, insisted on buying and installing the largest and most expensive chandelier in the Western world. Was the room air-conditioned? Yes, of course. The whole house was air-conditioned. But it was turned off because Mother believed air-conditioning was unhealthy.
If it wasn’t a hundred degrees in the dining room, it was damn sure close to it. The wiry horsehair in the ancient cushions of the chairs coiled its way to freedom to itch and torment the backs of my legs through the thin seersucker cords of my trousers. Not that sweltering or oppressive heat was unusual for any Lowcountry July. But my short list of petty grievances seemed to have conspired to compromise my normally hearty appetite. That was a bothersome thing given the platter of roasted quail sitting right in front of me. These days, a man had so few pleasures left in life. You couldn’t smoke cigars, eat rare meat, drink too much whiskey…it was a tremendous disappointment. The glistening sliced tomatoes from my garden had the perfume of Eden, the parsley on the roasted and buttered fingerling potatoes…well, there it was. One of my favorite suppers was sitting right there and it was too damn hot to eat.
The weather had been stifling for weeks. An early riser, I woke at first light to a slice of hell combined with humidity so fierce that it steamed and actually burned the green from the grass. Our huge lawn that rolled down to the Wappoo River was pockmarked by large irregular brown patches of scorched earth. Even my old chocolate Labs, Goober and Peanut, usually howling with excitement to see me, were downright sleepwalking, having spent the recent days searching for shady spots and drinking bowl after bowl of water. It was even too hot to fish. If we’d had sidewalks, you could have sunny-sided up a slug of eggs. We did not have sidewalks, but I did have a neck, and you could’ve grilled a steak on it.
The mercury rose with each hour until around four in the afternoon, when the world would darken like a warning to prepare humanity to meet its Maker. With the first thunderclap, you would hear a sigh of anticipated relief from everyone around you. It meant that while the approaching storm would split the skies wide open with screaming lightning and pounding rain, it would end as quickly as it began, leaving the earth slightly cooler for a while. Just for a little while. I mean, I’m not trying to exhaust you with a weather report, I’m just telling you that you may be able to run from t
he federal government, but there was no running from the Lowcountry heat.
It was on an evening following a trail of such days that Mother found herself trapped in our home by the threat of a sudden squall. She decided to stay for dinner and took it upon herself to turn off the air-conditioning. Just as I opened the French doors to the portico, raindrops as fat as my fist began to splatter the dusty ground with a slapping sound. A meager breeze swept the room, offering little in the way of relief. Just for the record, should my mother and Valerie decide to reincarnate themselves into my next life, I hoped they would get along better than they did in this one.
“Since you’re up, will you pour more iced watah, J.D.?”
“Yes, Mother,” I said, moving around the table with the silver pitcher to refill her glass. “It is hotter than usual today.” The frost on the pitcher felt good on my hands and I wiped my forehead with the moisture.
“It’s as hot as I can evah recall,” Mother said, fanning herself dramatically with both hands. “The air is so close! Thank you, dear. So close! The skies look grimly and threaten present blustahs…”
“The Mariner? The Winter’s Tale?”
“My smaaart son! Yes!”
Mother loved to quote Shakespeare.
Then Valerie piped up with one of her crazy non sequiturs. “Hmm. Do you all think the rain’s gonna hurt the rhubarb?”
Faces blank, Mother and I looked at her, waiting for Valerie to answer her own question.
“Not if they put it up in Mason jars!” Valerie began to laugh hysterically.
“Ah don’t believe Ah understand the punch line,” Mother said, drawling her annoyance.
“You don’t get it?” Valerie said, genuinely puzzled. “J.D.? You get it, don’t you?”
I scrutinized Valerie’s face, her eyes in particular. She was having some difficulty in focusing on mine. Something was wrong. She seemed to be growing drowsier by the second.
“Sure, Val. I get it. You feeling all right?”
“Nope.”
“Poor child!” Mother said, with a tsk-tsk. For very good reason, I doubted the genuineness of her concern.
“I feel a migraine coming on. Behind my eyes. I took a Vicodin. It wasn’t doing a thing so I had a li’l bitta vodka.”
“Dahlin’?” Mother said. “That’s not a good idea, especially when you all are trying to conceive…”
The gloom of failure filled the humid room and I knew at once that Valerie’s and my latest attempt at in vitro fertilization had been unsuccessful. How many times had we tried? Nearly a dozen. All of them resulting in heartbreak.
Valerie began to weep a little, as she always did when the announcement was made that she was not carrying the family’s heir. Mother looked up to the ceiling for relief. I’ll admit, even I was really weary of it all.
“Why don’t you just go on to bed, Val,” I said, passing her my handkerchief. “I can bring you something to eat later on.”
“It’s probably best,” Mother said.
Valerie looked back and forth across the table at us, wiping her eyes, uncertain if she was being dismissed in anticipation of poor conduct on her part or if we thought she would actually be better off resting in bed, in a darkened room. The truth was somewhere in between, and I knew how this act would play itself out. If Valerie stayed at the dinner table, Mother would become infuriated by her slurred speech and trancelike behavior, Valerie would feel like a small trapped animal, and I would be completely frustrated by my female bookends of discontent. And once more, I would be embarrassed by my wife.
I stood and went around to the foot of the table to hold her chair so that Valerie, my blond bobble-headed, bubble-witted Barbie, could leave the room with her dignity intact. That gesture also closed the door on what I knew from experience was Mother’s brewing criticism.
“It’s all right, Val,” I said. “It’s too hot to eat anyway.”
“Thank you, J.D. Mother. I’m sorry…”
“Don’t think another thought about it,” Mother said, and flicked her wrist in dismissal.
I walked Valerie to the door, listened as she climbed the stairs and finally clicked the door of our bedroom closed. My spirits sank. Our marriage was cruising in rocky water. When I turned back to the table I saw that Mother had risen from her place and assumed Valerie’s chair, which struck me as slightly Freudian, but then I thought perhaps she wanted to be closer to the doors for the stingy air. The room seemed more stifling than ever.
“I feel sorry for her,” I said, plopping back in my chair and picking up a quail from the platter with my fingers. I dropped it onto my plate and gave a moment’s consideration to eating it with a fork and knife or dismembering it with my bare hands.
“Well, who doesn’t? You know what, son? Maybe I’d prefer a tomato sandwich with a little tumbler of bourbon over ice to all this heavy meat and potatoes.”
I yanked a drumstick from the little fellow and the meat fell away as I sucked it from the bone in a single noisy slurp.
“You and your father. You all eat like mountain men!”
“I’ll ask Rosie to make you a sandwich.” I got up without apology, picked up the platter of tomatoes, and headed for the kitchen. Rosie was our housekeeper and cook; she had been in our family’s employ for nearly fifteen years. She was a single parent and lived on our property in one of the sharecropper cottages. Her fifteen-year-old son, Mickey, was one the sweetest kids I had ever known, probably because he had a healthy curiosity about everything and a great disposition. I pushed open the swinging door that separated the dining room from the kitchen.
Rosie was stooped over the sink, scrubbing the roasting pan.
“What can I get you?” she asked. When I told her she said, “Your momma’s right. It’s even too hot for sinning! Tell Miss Louisa I’ll have that sandwich to her in a jiffy.”
“Thanks, Rosie. It’s easier just to give her what she wants. So, what’s Mickey up to tonight?”
“Reading. What else? That child! He always has his nose in a book!”
“That’s not a bad thing,” I said. “Not a bad thing at all. Maybe I’ll have a sandwich, too. We got any basil mayonnaise?”
“We will in two minutes,” she said.
I went over to the wet bar on the pantry side of the kitchen and poured Mother a drink. I stared at her tumbler for a moment and then poured a short one for myself.
“The quail is delicious,” I said to Rosie on the way back to the dining room, and she smiled at me, giving me the “okay” hand signal over the whir of the pale green mayonnaise in the blender.
I placed Mother’s drink before her with a minor clunk and went back to my seat, taking another quail to munch on until the sandwiches arrived.
“Poor thing,” Mother said, raising her glass to me and taking a long sip. “Is she evah going to give me a grandchild?”
“Doesn’t look very promising, does it?”
“Maybe you should take her to someone up in New York.”
“Maybe. I mean, it has to be a difficult thing to endure all the procedures she had with no positive results—you know, an assault on the value of her reproductive system or something like that.”
Mother sighed hard enough to sway the Spanish moss that hung from every camellia bush and live-oak tree on our three thousand acres.
“And to think I chose her for you! I should have had her examined by a doctor!”
What a thing to say, as though we had been in the market for a broodmare. But it was true. In effect, we had been.
I drained my bourbon in a long swallow, swished the ice around, and drained it again. There and then, I decided I’d had my fill of hopelessness in my life.
“We’ve been discussing adoption,” I said. “Now and then it comes up.”
“What?” Mother gasped and put her hand to her heart, or where one’s heart would be if one had one, and here came her most southern accent, the one reserved for dramatic presentations. “Ah think, no, Ah am certain that Ah heard
you incorrectly.”
It appeared that perhaps I had shortchanged myself in the cocktail department.
“May I freshen up your glass?”
“You cert’ly may!”
I nearly collided with Rosie and the sandwiches on the way back to the kitchen.
“I’ll be right back,” I said to her, and she nodded, understanding from my tone that a skirmish was about to ensue.
Rosie was a silent veteran but a witness nonetheless of many family differences of opinion. Sure enough, when our paths crossed again in the next minute or so, she asked to be excused for the night.
“No problem,” I said. “Give my best to Mickey. Ask him if he wants to go fishing tomorrow. Early, before it’s a thousand degrees.”
She smiled at me and once again I realized I had crossed the line, encouraged a personal relationship with her via her son. My early-warning system told me this was dangerous. Not my type, but a nice gal. I ignored my conscience and smiled back at her.
“I will. Thanks. I’ll put the rest of dinner in the fridge, and if you could just turn the dishwasher on…”
“I can do that! You go on and have a pleasant evening now…” She was a nice gal. Around Valerie’s age.
“Good luck!” she whispered, with the crisp understanding that while my mother was taking polite bites of tomatoes on white bread with basil mayonnaise, she was also poised to sink her talons into my jugular. Rosie never missed a trick.
“All right, Mother. Here we are,” I said, putting her drink before her and taking my seat yet again.
“There is something I want to say, so I am just going to say it.”
Incoming. I took a huge bite of my sandwich and gave her my most innocent look.