It’s no great feat for a television crew to distract my mother. But when distraction is accompanied by airtime, well, it technically isn’t a distraction anymore, now, is it? At least not in her world. Call it what you will. In my book, it was my chance to escape.
As I returned to Jake’s, I turned around for one more glimpse of the square. Wright Square was the second square laid in Savannah. It was originally named for Lord Viscount Percival. But in 1763, it was renamed for Savannah’s royal governor, James Wright. Of course, now he’s buried in Westminster Abbey, and Tomochichi, the Yamacraw chief who helped Oglethorpe establish Savannah, is buried here in Wright Square. And the large rock from Stone Mountain that sits atop his grave—something I avoid at all costs—was given by the Colonial Dames on the sixtieth anniversary of his death. Of course General Oglethorpe, a poor man who came here to deliver us from craziness, has his statue in one square and his name on another. Go figure.
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.