Claudia came outside and took the flowers from the front seat. She was laughing so hard I thought she was going to start having convulsions.
“Claudia! What ever on this earth could be so funny?” I said.
“My dee-ah! Do you need a chaise to recline until this hysteria passes?”
“Y’all! Y’all are not gonna believe what I did!”
“What?” I turned to Huey and said, “She’s been doing Nat’s laundry, and she’s not too thrilled about it.”
“Oh! Now I am! In fact, I’m so happy I got to wash and fold Nat Simms’s cheap U-Trow and socks that I could dance!”
“Clau-dee-ah!” Huey said. “What did you do to them?”
“Yeah, fess up, Dr. Mengele. What did you do?”
“Promise not to tell?” We crossed our hearts and she said, “Well, I left the attic door open, and when I went back to the third floor I noticed they had fiberglass insulation in the walls…”
“No! You didn’t!” I knew immediately what she had done.
“Yes! I did! Every last pair!”
“What am I missing here?” Huey said.
“Wake up, baby, and smell the chai!” Claudia said. “The fiberglass was dusty, and all I had with me was Nat’s clean laundry. I merely turned his socks and underpants inside out and dusted thefiberglass insulation. Then I turned them back on the right side, folded them and put them back in his drawers. That’s all. No biggie.” She smiled, turned away and then back to us. “And if y’all tell Rebecca,” she said with a south Georgia drawl, “I’ll jess haveta kill all y’all till yewr choked dead.”
Huey was astonished. His jaw was hanging open so wide I could count his caps.
“What a woman!” he said. “Wait until I tell Miss Olivia! She will love this story!”
“She’s a little dangerous. Come on, let’s get inside and finish up. Her children get out of school in less than an hour.”
Forty-five minutes later there were roses in place on the dining room table, a bud vase of gerber daisies on an end table in the living room and another in the kitchen window. The whole house smelled like lemon wax, the chocolate brownies that were baking in the oven and the spaghetti sauce that simmered on the stove. The living room pillows were in their correct positions, the beds were all made with fresh linens, the bathrooms sparkled and clean towels waited on the racks. Nat and all his bad aura had been scoured, dusted, Windexed and swept right out the door.
Rebecca said, “Now this house looks like it’s supposed to! Everything looks so pretty and clean! How can I ever thank you?”
“I might need an organ donor some day,” I said.
“I’ll go pack your stuff at the hotel, check you out and bring it back over here,” Claudia said.
“Why don’t you spend the night here with me and fly out of Charleston tomorrow?” Rebecca said.
“You nervous?” Claudia said.
“Yeah.”
Claudia looked at us for an opinion. I think we all felt that Rebecca’s first night back in her house and with her children should be hers alone. But we also understood why Rebecca was feeling as she was. If those were my kids, I’d have a good case of the jitters too.
“Tell you what,” Claudia said. “I’ll stay for dinner. How’s that?”
“That’s just great! That’s fine. Thanks.”
“Huey? I think I’m gonna miss work tomorrow,” Rebecca said.
“And the next. But don’t worry, honey. My door is always open to you. I’ll find a framer. But you just keep painting. You hear me?”
Rebecca and Huey hugged like they would never see each other again. “I’ll come up Saturday,” Rebecca said. “I have to empty Claudia’s condo. Get all my stuff.”
“Bring the children!” I said. “I’ll take them to the beach.”
I gave Rebecca a hug, and we sighed hard, looking at each other like trench buddies.
“We won,” she said.
“We won big-time,” I said.
Huey and I said good-bye to Claudia, and she promised to call us after dinner to give us the latest, and then Huey followed me back to the hotel.
Walking through the parking lot with me, he said, “God Almighty! I feel like I just married off a daughter!”
“Yeah, but boy, am I glad things turned out the way they did!”
“I could use a bourbon,” he said. “You know, a little celebratory shooter to mark the occasion? Hmmm?”
“Pass. I’d rather have a glass of wine on my porch at Pawleys.”
“I’ll see you at seven,” he said. “And I’ll bring dinner. Byron can help. We’ll tuck Mother in for the night with a sandwich and a sherry.”
I started to protest, thinking I would just steam a big bowl of shrimp, and then I realized how tired I was.
“Deal,” I said.
I began the drive up Highway 17, listening to Walter Edgar on NPR, and called Julian on my cell.
“Hey, babe! Thanks for lunch. Wanna come up to Pawleys for dinner?”
“It’s been a long time since someone called me babe. I have to be in court so early in the morning. Can I take a rain check for the weekend?”
“Sure. No problem. So guess what Claudia did?” I told him about Claudia, the fiberglass insulation and Nat’s underwear, and he had a hoot!
“Oh, Lord! You women are so crazy, wonderful, terrible! You make me feel like a college student! I couldn’t think of a nicer guy for that to happen to! Fabulous!”
We talked for a while about the settlement and about all sorts of other things and then about us.
“I’m becoming quite fond of you, Abigail, but you know that.”
“Yeah. Me too. It’s pretty incredible, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. You make me wish I was building a house on Pawleys instead of Wadmalaw.”
“Well, you don’t have to build on Pawleys. There’s no room to build anyway. But I can always find you a place to stay, as long as you behave.”
I could see him smiling through the phone. What we had was so easy, so good and so natural. And finally, the timing was right.
We hung up and I drove a while longer, realizing I had passed the place where Ashley died, and for the first time I had not even noticed. I had not even noticed! Maybe it was Ashley or some piece of him telling me to move on with my life, that he had forgiven me. Perhaps he had seen the courtroom, what had transpired, and maybe it was because I had gone back to Rebecca’s house to help her even further—maybe all those things combined had earned me some reprieve. Maybe it was Ashley and John together. My heart ached for them then as it did every day, but somehow, from somewhere outside of me, I was feeling better. Not a lot better, but even to feel the slightest increase in ease of mind was monumental. Healing seemed to come in tiny increments of peace. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if coming to the aid of Rebecca had been cosmically instrumental in lifting the cloud of my own despair.
I thought again about Rebecca and me removing our makeup on national television, and I had to laugh to myself about it. I had always been so prissy and buttoned up tight, worrying that the black thing I was wearing matched another black thing I was wearing. How ridiculous! My priorities had certainly changed. The networks probably wouldn’t even run the tape. It didn’t matter. By that simple act of defying the entire beauty empire and castigating its worth, some chain of bondage was broken. In a peculiar way, I was empowered by it. Maybe I’d go buy a red sweater.
When I arrived home, Daphne’s car was in the yard and she was at the top of my steps with her hands on her bony little hips.
“Where have you been? This phone’s been ringing off the hook! I was worried sick! I called your cell phone about a thousand times! Congratulations!”
“Thanks. You finished?”
“Finished what? Cleaning this house? This house is as clean as a whistle. You know it! Clean as a whistle. Here, give me that bag! You shouldn’t be carrying all this stuff at one time, ’specially when I’m standing right here, waiting to help
you!”
“Huey’s coming for dinner.” I handed her my hanging bag. “Who called?”
“Half the world! You got calls from all kinds of people from newspapers and radio stations—all the names and numbers are on your desk. What’s going on? Did Ms. Simms shoot her husband in the head?”
“Nope, he shot himself in the foot. We kicked his butt in court, he lost every piece of dignity he ever had and over fifty percent of everything else to boot, and guess what? I feel pretty darn good about the whole thing!”
“Well, all right then. I’m glad to know that Ms. Simms got her justice ’cause that is one very bad-to-the-bone man! Yes, ma’am! He is bad to the bone! But he ain’t done with his foolishness yet. Somebody needs to start reading Psalm Fifty-four and pray that man dead.”
“What are you saying, Daphne?”
“Humph. You don’t know about Psalm Fifty-four? David said, Let their death surprise them; let them go down alive to the netherworld. Shoot, my momma had a friend and her husband ran around like an old alley cat. Then he spent up all the money and beat her and the children till they all had to go to the hospital. She and my momma said that psalm every day for a month, and don’t you know that man dropped dead? Forty-one and he dropped dead on the floor.”
“What?”
“Yes, ma’am! It’s a fact. Ask Byron. Poor Ms. Simms. Her husband buying his trashy girlfriend all those body parts! What’s the matter with men these days? Hmm? Tell me that if you can, but you can’t, ’cause if you knew the answer to that, you’d rule the whole world!”
Wait a minute, I thought. I had never discussed Rebecca’s case with her.
“How do you know all this about Mr. Simms?
“How do you think? Byron, of course! Shoot, he’s worse than an old washwoman at the clothing line! Besides, nowadays we all got clothes dryers, so who’s he gonna tell? And who am I gonna tell? Nobody but you, ’cause you’re the only one I know who even cares!”
She had followed me to the bedroom, and the first thing I noticed was that the furniture was rearranged.
“I moved it like this for very good reasons,” she said.
It looked a thousand times better, I had to admit, but still!
“Let’s hear,” I said.
“Well, the headboard was between those windows. Winter’s coming, and if you have a draft—and you do in every single window in this place—you can get sick. And with the headboard on the back wall, the room looks better from the porch. Before, it was all chopped up. Besides, you can get in bed and watch the ocean roll in and the sun rise too. That’s the best part. What time is Mr. Huey coming?”
“Seven. He’s bringing Byron to help.”
“Maybe I’ll stick around and help my brother. I haven’t seen him in a while.”
She was right about it all. I’d had many a stiff neck in January. The room looked so much larger with the bed away from the middle of the room. This arrangement made the bed look important, and if there was anything I wanted, it was for Julian to think my bed was just that.
“Yeah, hang around. You’re right about the room, Daphne. Thank you. But how did you move all this heavy furniture by yourself?”
“An inch at a time. That’s how. An inch at a time.”
What a proverbial statement, I thought. How many things happened in our lives one inch at a time? Certainly weight loss, spiritual growth and the arrival of a repairman of any kind. And healing from the death of your loved ones.
As nervous as Rebecca was to take the helm, it was probably a good thing that Nat had not given her too much time to think about it. As an added bonus, Nat’s decision had not given him any extra time to poison the children’s minds about how Bad Mommy had wasted him in court.
I hung up my clothes, looked through the mail and the phone messages and was tempted maybe, hmm, a thousand times to call Rebecca. I couldn’t shake the thought of her. How had it played out? Did the children run into her arms, crying, saying how sorry they were and how glad they were that she was home? Probably not. Were they angry to see her and discover she had regained custody? No, they were probably just on guard. Were they strange and distant? Probably a little. Did they notice there were no more potato chips in their beds and that their bathrooms were clean? Definitely not.
I couldn’t wait for Claudia to call, and I kept checking the reception on my cell phone to see if she’d have a problem getting through. The signal was strong. She would have no problem. I clipped the phone to my belt because this was one call I didn’t want to miss.
Just as the sun was slipping away for the day, Huey and Byron arrived with a picnic basket.
“What fabulous things have you brought, Mr. Wonderful?” I said and pecked his cheek.
“A meal from the gods to toast the victorious!”
“Meat loaf and mashed potatoes?”
“Silly girl. Caviar and blinis—three hundred and twenty-five delicious grams of it, pâté de foie gras with toast points and petit cornichon, and two bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne to wash it away!”
“Veuve Clicquot Reserve!” Byron said.
“Holy Moly! Fabulous!” I said.
“I’ll set up the table on the porch,” Daphne said. “Come on Byron. You can help me.”
“You get the dishes and I’ll bring the basket.”
“Um, I don’t have a table on the porch,” I said.
“You do now,” she said. “The judge had it delivered yesterday.”
I followed her outside, and there it was. A small square glass-top table on a black wrought-iron frame and two wrought-iron chairs. It made the rest of my rocking chairs look decrepit, but I knew I could solve that with a paintbrush. There was a card in an envelope taped to the top.
“I didn’t read it,” Daphne said.
“Then how’d you know he sent it?”
“Um, um…”
“Don’t ever lie to your attorney,” I said and smiled at her. There was probably not one thing about me she didn’t already know.
“She’s a nosy thing,” Byron said. “Don’t waste your energy on privacy, Miss Abigail!”
I opened the envelope. It had a pencil drawing of St. Phillip’s church on the front, and inside he had written, For a million shared sunsets and sunrises! Love, Julian.
Well, the old boy was having a Hallmark moment, wasn’t he? Then I quickly calculated how many years a million days was and thought, was this a marriage proposal? Nah, no way. He was just trying to be romantic.
Time crawled along as Huey and I rehashed the whole court case, stuffing our mouths with the delicious treats he had brought. We laughed about Charlene’s appearance but then finally concluded that she was the hero of the day. It was her assessment of Nat’s character that had really shown the entire courtroom what kind of despicable person he was.
“Some people are just like that, Abigail. If it’s good for them, then it’s good. If it’s bad for them, then it’s bad. They rearrange morality to suit their ambitions. Nat simply thought he could do what he wanted and never suffer any consequences.”
“You are absolutely right. But you know what? I understand a little of what Nat felt. When I met Julian years ago, the feelings I had were so euphoric and all-consuming that part of me couldn’t understand why I shouldn’t have this happiness. I mean, how could something so good be so wrong?”
“Honey, it’s just lust. And you know lust ain’t nothing but the devil dressed up to be beautiful. The Bible doesn’t say he’s a trickster and a liar for nothing, you know.”
“I prefer to remember it as bad timing.”
“Tell yourself whatever you want. Lust is lust. The difference is that you and Julian had the strength to walk away from each other. That stupid Nat blew up his whole family and acted like a disgrace.”
“Well, Huey, the truth is that my family eventually blew up too.”
“Yes, but that wasn’t because you had a brief dalliance with Julian! Good grief, Abigail! Are you still feeling guilty? Put it aside, gi
rl! There ain’t anything you can do anyway!”
“Dalliance? Oh, Huey! I love that. It makes my scandal sound courtly. You know what, Huey? It was a chain of unbearable pain that began with Julian. First, I met him and fell for him. Then John and Julian’s wife, Lila, found out about us. Lila left Julian and he left me. John became depressed and started drinking. Then I drank with him because I felt guilty and I missed Julian. He never called.
“John and I fought like all hell. He gained an enormous amount of weight, all the while withdrawing from me. I had been drinking when I got in the accident with Ashley. John blamed me for his death and for everything wrong with his life. His knees went bad from the weight gain, but he just kept piling on the pounds. He goes in for knee replacement surgery and his heart stops. You think I don’t feel guilty?”
“Yes, but Abigail, my dear Abigail, you didn’t skim the business and speak ill of John to everyone you knew. Nat committed the worst kind of sins here. Look what he tried to do with Rebecca’s relationship with her own children! The odious, heinous skunk!”
“Well, I broke John’s faith and trust in me. I broke his heart, Huey.”
“Let me tell you this, Abigail Thurmond, and you remember this too. Maybe you were weak, but when you realized you could walk away from Julian, you did. If John never forgave you, that’s on his Christian soul, not yours. You were sorry; he couldn’t forgive. Isn’t pride a sin too?”
I hadn’t considered John’s unforgiving heart. I reached over and covered Huey’s hand with mine. “You are such a dear man, Huey Valentine, and I love you so much.”
“Well, I love you too,” he said. “You’re the best woman friend I’ve ever had. And you do so many good things. I can’t stand it for you to torture yourself over the past. Besides, if the good Lord hadn’t wanted you to be with our friend, the judge, He wouldn’t have brought Julian back into your life. So, go think about that for a while!”
“Well, Huey darling? It’s one of those things that I’m never going to know for sure, isn’t it?”
“It doesn’t matter, Abigail. Really, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you and Julian found each other again and you had one helluva day in court today! I am so happy for Rebecca, I just can’t tell you. And I am so proud of you.”