Hilda didn’t want to come out to the beach this weekend, what with all the memories of her and Angus on Edisto. But the gals just insisted that she come, and she owes them all such a debt of gratitude. Especially Ray, who practically put her daughter’s wedding together single-handedly and pushed on through the weekend, car wreck, wounds, and all. And Hilda knows how badly Ray wants to show off the work she’s done on the Montgomery beach house in the last year. Plus, it’s Ray’s birthday next week, and Cousin Willy is having a big barbeque to celebrate, and Hilda’s already sent her regrets since she’s avoiding Angus and Trudi. Maybe he’ll notice her missing and come to his senses.
Hilda grew up vacationing at the house two doors down from the Montgomerys’. The yellow one right in front of the washout where the beach curves toward the bay and the ocean peters out and becomes the sound. Her older brother, Davy, used to shoot off Roman candles at the end of the boardwalk, and her mama would smile her hundred-watt smile and wave to them from the screened porch. Her mama always wore a wide straw hat at the beach and white rimmed sunglasses with black lenses, and she didn’t think Hilda could see her sleeping or weeping behind them.
When her daddy came home, Hilda’s mama took to the bed, where she watched Ed Sullivan and smoked NOW cigarettes with an empty conch shell for an ashtray on her lap.
“What are you thinking about, Hilda?” Sis says. They are sitting on the freshly painted white wicker furniture at the end of Ray’s porch sipping a strong pink drink that Vangie Dreggs whipped up in a blender.
“What are we drinking?” Hilda says, ignoring Sis. Maybe if she downs a couple of cocktails she can excuse herself to her room for the night.
Ray leans in to say “Cos-mo-pol-i-tan,” as Vangie bends Kitty B.’s ear about the properties she’s considering for her second home.
“Tell me that’s not the most ironic thing in the world,” Ray adds, shaking her head. The swelling has gone down around her eye and her stitches have dissolved, but Hilda can’t help but cringe at the fresh red scar above her friend’s right cheekbone.
“Ray,” Sis says in a hushed tone.
Ray lifts her eyebrows. Hilda takes another sip in hopes that the icy drink will calm her nerves. She’s just not used to being out like this, though she has to admit the sea air smells awfully good.
“I’m not over it,” Ray says as she leans in toward the wicker coffee table to pick up the bowl of stone crab claws to pass around.
Hilda rolls her eyes. Now who is Ray talking to? She isn’t exactly sure what transpired, but somehow Vangie Dreggs invited herself to the weekend, and Ray had no way of telling her no. Frankly, Hilda is thankful. It gets everyone’s focus off her.
“Why, thank you, Ray,” Vangie says, dunking her claw into the creamy curry dip. “I think South Carolinians are simply the most hospitable in all the country.”
Kitty B. says, “Well, that’s nice of you to say.” She sees no rattle on Vangie’s tail.
Ray bites the inside of her cheek and hands out her new square linen napkins. They have a pinkish-orange crab embroidered on them, and they match the white and salmon-colored striped cushions on the wicker furniture. Ray is one of those people who likes for everything to match in a cutesy kind of way at her beach house, and for some reason this annoys Hilda. The beach is one of the few places that can and should be rustic and random with a hodgepodge of furniture and decor.
“I just read the other day that Charleston was voted the friendliest city in this big national survey,” Sis adds.
“Maybe that’s why the Yankees are flocking down here like there’s no tomorrow,” Ray says.
“Mmm. Mmm,” Vangie says as she slurps her drink. “That’s true, but I’ll tell you those Yankees are going to bring a lot of money into this area, and we’ll all be better for it.”
Ray clears her throat and shakes her head.
“You’re from Charleston, aren’t you, Ray?” Vangie asks. “Tell me who your family is there.”
Ray sits up on the edge of the rocking chair, pushes back her shoulders, focuses on a patch in the screen just beyond Vangie, and says, “The Pringles.”
“Oh my, the Pringles,” Vangie says. “You know my sister says they are one of the oldest families in the city. In fact she pointed out one of their old houses to me—the pale yellow one on the high battery with the triple-story piazzas. My word, those ceilings must be fourteen feet tall!”
“Yes,” Ray says. “I spent a lot of time there.”
Sis lets out a nervous giggle, and Hilda feels like causing some trouble.
“Ray grew up in that yellow house,” Hilda says. “At least that’s what we’ve come to assume. I don’t know why she’s so guarded about the whole thing.”
Ray shoots a look in Hilda’s direction. “I’m not guarded.”
“Sure you are.” Hilda rubs the knobby outline of the pink crab on the linen napkin she’s draped across her knee. “In all the years we’ve known you, you’ve never once told us a story about your childhood.” “Oh, tell me a story!” Vangie says. She puts her cocktail down and spreads out her fingers like she’s in a jazz dance number. “You know I’m writing a book! About Texas and the healing ministry and my small group and South Carolina and real estate and all of the amazing things that have happened to me since I came to the Lord, and I want to include all of you in it!”
Ray shoots Hilda a look, then says to Sis, “Can you go stir the Creole for me?”
“Okay,” Sis says, “but don’t start the story without me.”
Kitty B. grabs the acrylic pitcher of cosmopolitans to refill the glasses, and all eyes are on Ray when she sits down in her large wicker rocking chair. The rocker’s back is tall and round and it fans out around her like a throne, and Hilda has to admit, she’s enjoying this. Ray, with her clandestine past and her whole life so maddeningly together. She’s bugged Hilda ever since the night she won the watermelon-stealing contest back in high school, all dressed up in her linen pedal pushers and her white eyelet shirt.
Instead of sitting back and rocking, Ray moves to the edge of her pink and white striped cushion and begins. “We lived with my great-aunt, Lindy Pringle. It was my sister and Mama and me. My father died in the war.”
As Ray’s face reddens, she pats it with her napkin and continues. “Anyhow, I remember when we bought our first television. It was the day before Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, and Mama had sewn Laura and me matching dresses to wear because Great-Aunt Lindy had invited all of her friends over to see the ceremony on the new television. It was a lovely affair—very formal and very Charleston with ‘Oh Be Joyful’ punch and cheese biscuits and cucumber sandwiches and candied pecans. Most everyone in Charleston is an Anglophile, you know?”
Ray looks down and brushes some sand off the side of her leg. Then she rubs her fingers back and forth across the woven arms of the wicker chair at least four times before they realize that this is the end of the story.
“Ah, well, that’s nice, Ray,” Vangie says. “I can picture it! Do you have any photos?”
“Well, not here.” Ray scratches around her fresh scar. “I’ve got some at home. How did that Creole look, Sis? Think we’re about ready to drop the shrimp in?”
“Yeah,” Sis says, sipping her drink.
“Say, Ray,” Hilda adds, “that’s not much of a story.”
Ray’s back bristles, and Hilda can’t imagine why she’s enjoying herself so much.
“You know, I have to agree,” Kitty B. giggles. “I’ve got a much better story about that coronation.”
“Let’s hear it!” Vangie says, her emerald eyes glistening in the porch light. “I’m all ears.”
Then Kitty B. tells a story about how her daddy, Mayor Hathaway, invited the whole community of Jasper to the Town Hall to watch the coronation on their new television. Shortly after a large group gathered, her brother Jackson tripped over the cord when her other brother, Buzz, was chasing him, and the television fell over and crashed. Then the whole town raced out of the building because kooky old Mr. Sandeman shouted, “There are fumes from inside that machine that can poison you!”
The gals all hoot and holler and laugh about how Kitty B.’s daddy and Old Stained Glass and the town doctor before Angus, Virgil McDougal, went ever so cautiously back into Town Hall wearing operating masks to survey the damage.
After they catch their breath, Sis says, “Look at that sunset,” and they turn to watch the fiery orange ball make its way behind the Pines of Otter Island in just a few short minutes.
When they sit down to dinner, Vangie Dreggs tells some crazy stories about her childhood on a cattle ranch in Grand Saline, Texas, that involved her spirited grandmother and a pack of angry dwarf goats.
“Now that’s a story!” Sis laughs as she passes the biscuits a second time.
Kitty B. takes two. “I’ll say.”
Hilda looks at Ray. “You could take a lesson in storytelling from Vangie Dreggs, Ray.”
Ray’s face reddens, and she stands up and picks up her plate and Sis’s.
“Hilda, I wouldn’t have invited you to come along if I thought you were going to be critiquing me every second.”
The table gets quiet as Ray takes the plates over to the sink and comes back for more. “There’s key lime pie on the counter for dessert,” she says, “and decaf brewing in the pot. I think I’m going to turn in for the night.” She picks up Hilda’s plate.
“Oh, Ray, c’mon,” Hilda says, lighting a cigarette. “We were just pulling your leg a little. I mean, you’re so durn tight-lipped about your childhood and all.”
“Forget about that,” Kitty B. says, clapping her hands and reaching for a deck of cards on the table. “We’re just getting started having some fun, y’all. I was hoping we could play a game of hearts or ‘oh hell’ after this! Like we always do, Ray. And then we can start scheming again about how to get Sis and Capers Campbell together.”
“Oh, my.” Vangie blushes and chuckles nervously as Little Bit scampers over and hops onto her lap. “They would make a nice pair.”
“No thanks,” Ray says, staring Hilda down. “That accident’s catching up with me, and I’m plumb worn out from the wedding. It’s no wonder is it, Hilda?”
Hilda sees where this is going, and she narrows her eyes, “Ray . . .”
“Don’t ‘Ray’ me. Your friends here spent a whole lot of time, energy, and money getting your daughter married while you, Miss Princess of Jasper, stayed holed up in your home like a hermit crab and graced us with your presence for a few moments during the weekend.”
Hilda puts out her half-smoked cigarette, stands up, and stares Ray down. “That’s enough, Ray. After all I’ve been through . . .”
“After all you’ve been through? As if you didn’t bring it on yourself,” Ray says. “It’s no wonder Angus threw up his hands. He’s only human, you know?”
Vangie Dreggs is speechless. She bites her lip and looks down at the remnants of a half-eaten biscuit as Sis and Kitty B. turn to comfort Hilda, but it is too late.
Hilda storms out the porch door, running down the boardwalk and into the balmy night, the salt air lifting her hair and separating it into stringy strands. She is barefoot and she doesn’t care how hard the shells feel beneath her heels as she hits the beach. She runs toward the surf, crying and hoping to God she doesn’t see anyone she knows out here. When she gets to the water, she half thinks she’s going to jump in and swim out into the warm, dark depths until she can’t take another stroke. But she doesn’t.
Instead, she turns and heads toward the pier, letting the saltwater lick her knees. She walks for more than an hour along the beach with the water up to her thighs, wetting her khaki Bermuda shorts as the wind carries her tears toward her hairline, leaving thin sandy streaks across her cheeks.
“To hell with you, Ray Montgomery,” she says. “You think you know how it is, but you don’t. You have no clue, you finicky Charleston witch. It was you who tried to edge your way into the Jasper pack just like Vangie is doing now. You have no idea what my life has been like. Not the beginning of a clue.”
After Hilda passes the pier and the Edisto Motel, she realizes she can’t just walk to Jasper in this blackness, so slowly she makes her way back to Ray’s house. She tiptoes up the stairs and takes a seat on the little deck at the end of the boardwalk, where she lights a cigarette and hopes none of them will notice she’s returned. The lights are on in the upstairs bedrooms, and she supposes that everyone has retired to their own space to read their beach book instead of cackling on the screened porch in a game of hearts. She wishes she could just get in her car and leave, but of course, Sis gave her a ride and she’s stuck here in the first lady of Jasper’s made-over house with salmon and aqua-colored nautical knickknacks every which way you turn.
As she hugs her knobby knees to her chest, she watches two children come out of the yellow house where her family used to stay. They are carrying buckets, and the father jogs closely behind them with a flashlight.
“Slow down,” he calls. “Wait for me.”
~ JULY 19, 1956 ~
“Where the heck have you two been?” Hilda could hear her father calling to her and her brother, Davy, when they were hunting for ghost crabs one summer night.
Davy was twelve and Hilda was nine, and they had met up with a girl from Davy’s class named Marcia Tarleton who Hilda could tell had an awful crush on Davy. Marcia’s little sister, Bonnie, was a year younger than Hilda, and the four of them had so much fun chasing the crabs out to the surf that Davy asked the girls if they’d meet them back in a few minutes after they went up and checked on their mama, who fell asleep every now and then with a lit cigarette in her lap.
“Your mother has nearly worried herself to death,” her daddy hollered from the doorway of the screened porch, his hands on his hips and his lips pursed. The bright storm light at the top of the stairs illuminated his gray suit and the dark tie he had loosened at the neck.
Mama? Hilda thought. She had been snoozing in front of the television in her bedroom with an empty gin and tonic in a bright plastic cup, and Daddy hadn’t come home yet from one of his business dinners with the mill executives who flew in from New York from time to time to brief him about the union’s plans to infiltrate the company. The executives told him about Norma Jean, who had stood on her loom at the textile mill in North Carolina, and that he’d have to be prepared to pull folks down from the pulp machines if they pulled a stunt like that around here. Hilda’s daddy usually stayed in town when he had one of those meetings, and they weren’t expecting him to come out to Edisto that night.
“We were just on the beach hunting crabs,” Davy said, sprinting up the stairs to the porch doorway. When he met their daddy, he placed the bucket on the rail and spread his palms out wide to show they had nothing to hide.
“Well, I hope you had one rip-roaring good time, Son, because neither of you are going out of this house at night for the rest of the week.”
“Dad, c’mon,” Davy said. “This is our vacation. We aren’t doing anything wrong.”
Their daddy stuck out two fingers as if to make the peace sign and poked Davy right in the collarbone, where he lost his footing and scuffled down two steps.
Then Davy’s outstretched hands turned into fists, and he grabbed the bucket on the rail and threw it down at his father’s wingtip shoes, where two ghost crabs and a heap of wet sand spilled out across the wooden planks.
Her daddy grabbed Davy by the collar and shoved him down what was at least ten stairs, where he landed at Hilda’s feet with a thud.
“I hate you,” Davy said under his breath as he picked himself up and reached out for Hilda’s hand.
Before he could stand back up, their father was down the stairs, grabbing him by the collar and taking him out on the end of the boardwalk, where he pulled down Davy’s pants, grabbed a cast net by the fishing rods and swatted Davy over and over on his hips and backside, the little metal weights at the end of the net making welts on his bare skin.
Hilda stood stone still, watching her brother yelp and shout for mercy as Marcia and Bonnie’s flashlight made its way up the beach to meet them. When their beam shone on Davy’s welts and his daddy’s arm coming down with the blows of the swinging cast net, Marcia shrieked and dropped her glowing light, and Hilda tried to make out their shadowy outlines as they ran back down the beach toward their home on the other side of the pier.
Through the bedroom window that opened onto the screened porch, Hilda heard her mama stirring in the bed, but she never emerged from her room, and Hilda was the one who brought an ice pack to her brother as he lay belly down on the hammock beneath the house, vowing to run away as soon as he had the money.
The Princess of Jasper. Hilda shakes her head as she watches through the sea oats while the children’s flashlights scan the beach for ghost crabs. Maybe I did think of myself that way when I was young.
Hilda’s father, David Savage, opened the Jasper Paper Mill that resuscitated the dwindling businesses in town in the 1950s. Over three hundred people came to Jasper to work at the mill, and the Savage family lived on boss man’s row in an antebellum house at the edge of the mill village drive. The village was made up of shotgun houses on cinderblocks with no running water and big, brown barrels for bathing, but Hilda’s house was grand with its tall white columns, and her family had a cook and a housekeeper and running water and a television set, and as a child she really did think they were like royalty in a crude little kingdom where trucks carrying limbless pine trunks barreled by their home each evening.
When her mama would give her a dime and send her down to Condon’s department store to buy a new pair of shoes or a milkshake at the lunch counter, the black men in Jasper as well as the poor men would literally move off the sidewalk to let her pass.
“Morning, Miss Hilda,” the men would say, tipping their hats or nodding their heads before stepping off the curb.
Maybe Ray is right. I assumed I ruled the town—back then, anyway. Her mama didn’t help matters much. When she was coherent, she would sit at Hilda’s vanity and brush her hair for a half hour at a time, lifting it up to the morning sunlight pouring through her bedroom window. Her mama drove to Charleston and bought fine fabrics for the local seamstress, Mrs. Chalmers, to make smocked dresses and slips and pantaloons for Hilda with little lace borders and thin satin ribbons. She would send Hilda down the mill village row with the fabrics and over to a little apartment above the sweet-shop on Main Street, where Hilda would sit for hours and watch Mrs. Chalmers cut the fabric according to the patterns and sew her exquisite wardrobe together. One day when Mrs. Chalmers’s arthritis was acting up, she called Hilda over to her sewing table and said, “Why don’t you help me with this, child.”
Hilda’s mama never cared when she and Davy went down to the beach at night. She would put on her lipstick and a long bed gown and sit on the sofa doing the crossword puzzle before pouring herself a second cocktail.
Looking back on it, Hilda figures that her mama was just miserably homesick and depressed with her small-town life. She was from Richmond, Virginia, and claimed to have bluer blood than anyone from South Carolina. David Savage had met her at a Virginia Military Institute game where her father served as the president of the college.
Hilda’s parents had two versions of the “how we met” story. Her daddy’s was that at the end of the game when the cadets threw up their hats in a victory gesture, Hilda’s mama ran across the stands, knocking over drinks and tripping over legs, to catch his hat, and she carried it over to him and said, “Hi, I’m Martha Louise Staunton.”
Her mama’s version was practically the opposite. That she was sitting there, cheering on the team for the final touchdown when her daddy took off his hat and threw it like a Frisbee into her lap.
At any rate, her parents met at the game. David was from a poor tobacco farming town on the Tennessee border, but he was handsome and driven, and Martha Louise fell for him and followed him up and down the East Coast as he made his way up in the paper mill industry. Hilda was seven when they landed in Jasper, and her mama took one look at their beautiful new home and said, “This is it. We’re not moving again.” Her mama liked being in the Lowcountry at first, but the heat and the bugs and the reptiles weren’t nearly as romantic as she’d imagined, and she didn’t have a friend in the world except for her afternoon toddy.
Hilda’s daddy was almost always mad and ranting. He was trying to keep the unions out. He was fighting off the employees’ demands. And he was fending off the KKK, who put a burning cross in their yard after her daddy promoted a black man to manage the pulp production.
Hilda’s brother did try to protect her from her daddy’s wrath. Once when their father was shouting in a harsh tone for Hilda to get in the house and look after her mama, Davy tackled her and hid her beneath the camellia bushes, her smocked dress picking up the leaves and dirt and the stains from the dark pink petals.
“He’s in a rage,” he whispered. “If you go in now, you’ll get it good.” “But I can’t stay out here all night,” she mouthed, picking the petals from her dress.
“He’ll storm out when he sees how bad off Mama is tonight,” Davy whispered. “When he gets in his car to drive around, you can sneak in and go straight to bed.”
Hilda nodded and Davy walked toward the porch to tell Daddy that she must be out with her friends.
~ SEPTEMBER 18, 1962 ~
Shortly after her fourteenth birthday Hilda woke up in the middle of the night with her daddy in bed next to her.
It had been six months since Davy ran away. He hopped on a train headed west with some money his grandparents had sent him for his sixteenth birthday, and they had not heard a word from him.
Hilda was not entirely surprised to feel her father’s touch beneath the covers. Old Stained Glass had preached the Sunday before that depravity knows no class boundaries, and she knew David Savage was an angry, desperate man.
For the first several times, she pretended like she was asleep, but as the months went by and she entered high school, she would turn over to him, her body drawn to the warmth of his groping hands in her half-sleep haze. It was strange and awful and sad.
Of course she knew she couldn’t fight her daddy off, but the worst part was that her body responded to the power of his touch. She will never discard the shame of this, nor will she forgive the body she inhabits or the God who created it to respond to such a thing.
Angus never knew. No one knew, except for her daddy, what went on those two years. And once just after her sweet sixteen, her mama called to her daddy from one of her rare, lucid moments in the night.
“David?” she said from their room shortly after he had slipped under Hilda’s covers. He stood up, wiped his brow, and went back to the bed he and his wife shared, and he never came back after that.
Now as Hilda watches the father chasing ghost crabs with his two children up and down the beach, she listens intently to their laughter. One of them is shouting, “Daddy, over here! Look at this one!” The other is shrieking with both fear and delight, “Get him! Get him!”
Before long, the mother comes down with a baby on her hips, and she watches her children and her husband chase the translucent little crustaceans that dart in and out of the holes along the surf. When they call, “Did you see that, Mama?” she hollers “Yes!” with wonder and encouragement.
“Hey, gal,” Sis and Kitty B. call as Hilda looks up to find them shuffling down the boardwalk toward her with an extra cosmopolitan in their hands and a bowl of boiled peanuts.
“You okay?” Kitty B. says as she and Sis sit down on either side of Hilda and pat her bony shoulders.
“Yeah,” Hilda takes a gulp of the fruity drink before reaching for a peanut.
“Here you go.” Sis lifts the bowl. “A little Carolina caviar for you, Your Highness.”
They laugh a deep laugh as Hilda splits the seam of the shell with her thumbnail and nibbles on the soft, salty meat cradled inside.
“You know Ray didn’t mean it.” Kitty B. pulls Hilda close.
“She did so,” Hilda says as the salt air blows their hair in all directions. “But you know, she’s right. It’s no wonder he left.”
“Hilda.” Sis squeezes her bony shoulder. “Don’t say that.”
Hilda throws the damp shell into the dunes. “I was a terrible companion.”
Kitty B. and Sis look to each other like they want to say something to make her feel better. Hilda senses neither one of them can find the words.
“And now I might just spend the rest of my life alone.” Hilda rubs her hands together. “I might die alone. Do y’all realize that?” Sis bites her lip, and Kitty B. pokes at the boiled peanuts with the tip of her index finger.
“I was a horrible companion, but I never dreamed Angus would leave.”
“We know,” Kitty B. says as she puts the bowl of peanuts down and wipes her finger on her Bermuda shorts.
“Sometimes I imagine he’ll come back,” Hilda says. “Come right through the door with that old leather suitcase he bought when we were in Greece on our honeymoon. Do you think it’s crazy for me to think that way?”
Just then Ray hollers from the screened porch, “Kitty B.! Katie Rae is on the phone, and she says it’s an emergency!”
LeMar, they are all thinking, and they run toward the porch door, where Ray hands Kitty B. the cordless as they stand like a wall around her. Hilda too.
“What?” Kitty B. shouts in disbelief. “You’ve only known him for six weeks, darlin’!”
“Heavens to Betsy! Do you think Katie Rae’s engaged?” Ray murmurs as Vangie and Little Bit step out onto the porch to see what’s going on.
“She can’t be,” Sis says as Kitty B. listens and says, “Mmm. Hmm. My, that sounds nice,” into the receiver.
“Do you think she swallowed a watermelon seed?” Sis whispers nervously.
“I bet she did,” Hilda says almost before she can stop herself.
“A watermelon seed?” Vangie asks as Little Bit yips around their legs until he pushes through their wall of bare legs and reaches up for Kitty B., who has already shown him some attention.
“Sounds like Katie Rae is engaged,” Sis whispers. “And since she’s only known the boy for a short while, we wonder if she’s expecting.”
“Well, that would explain it,” Ray says to Hilda. There is a softness in her eyes, and Hilda knows that what transpired between them earlier is over and Ray is sorry.
“No, I can’t!” Kitty B. continues, “Why in the world do you want to get married so soon? Have you talked to your daddy?”
When she hangs up, the gals lead her over to the couch and bring her a thick slice of key lime pie.
She takes a big bite, sits back, and says, “Well, y’all, Katie Rae’s engaged to that religious reptile man, and she wants to be married by Christmas.”
“Do you think she’s swallowed a watermelon seed?” Vangie asks. Hilda swallows a secret grin—Vangie is clueless. This is not something you just come right out and ask the mother of the bride.
Four distinct worry lines form across Kitty B.’s forehead. “Maybe,” she says. “She’s only known this boy since June.”
“She met him on the computer,” Ray informs Vangie.
“Oh, yes, my cousin met a man that way,” Vangie says, scratching Little Bit beneath the chin. “And I might do the same if I can’t win the affection of a local.”
Kitty B. shakes her head in disbelief. “Of course I have no idea how LeMar will react, and goodness knows we have no money to put on a wedding. He’s been out of work for years now, and y’all know we’ve about run through my inheritance.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” Vangie says. “We’ll all pull together in this, won’t we, ladies?”
Ray rolls her eyes at Vangie. “Of course we will. We have for decades and decades, haven’t we, gals?”
Sis and Hilda nod, and Kitty B. gets a faraway look in her eye and then smiles. “Well, I have to say, as crazy as it sounds, I’m kind of happy for her. I never thought she’d find anyone, and she sounds more excited than I can ever remember.”
Ray pats Kitty B.’s knee. “Good.”
“Tell us more,” Sis says. “How did he propose?”
“On a picnic at the Columbia Zoo,” Kitty B. says. “Right in front of the orangutan exhibit—Katie Rae’s favorite.”
“Aww.” Sis cocks her head to the side.
“Odd, but sweet,” Hilda adds.
“They’re both animal lovers,” Kitty B. says. “He has more pets at his house than she does, and she says he’s always rescuing some dog or cat from the shelter. Of course he runs that reptile place over on the ACE.”
“Sounds like they’ll have one lively home life,” Sis adds as Ray pulls out a pad and a pen, turns on the porch light and says, “Let’s start brainstorming.”
Vangie claps her hands in glee, and Little Bit jumps off the salmon-colored couch and barks around her ankles.
“I’ve already got some ideas.” Ray clicks the top of her pen and starts writing.
Hilda fights back a yawn. “Let’s hear them.”
“Yes!” Kitty B. shouts as she sits up and pats her brow with a linen napkin. “I can’t wait to hear them all!”