I stopped at my parents’ house on the way back into town. I found my father sitting at the kitchen table, scowling down at a pamphlet.
“Hey, Daddy,” I said, landing a kiss on the top of his head. “Did Mama come home with you?”
“No. She says she’s not ready to come home yet. But she did let us in the house. And the three of us had a long talk.”
“Is she going to get help?”
He put the pamphlet down and took off his glasses and wiped them on the hem of his shirt. The pamphlet was called “Family Response to Alcoholism.”
“She says she will,” Daddy said. “We’ll have to wait and see. We’re going to go over and talk to this friend of James’s who works at Candler-St. Joe’s tomorrow. Marian promised she would go and at least hear what they have to say.”
For the first time, I noticed that Daddy had changed recently, and not for the better. His once brown hair had gone to gray while I wasn’t looking. His once cheerful face suddenly looked like unset pudding. And for the first time in my life, I saw that Daddy didn’t look taken care of.
His thick-rimmed glasses were held together with a Band-Aid, his short-sleeved sport shirt needed pressing, his pants were faded and shrunken, and most shocking of all, his black lace-up brogans needed polishing.
Once upon a time, Mama would never have let Daddy walk around looking the way he did now. But this was not something my father would talk about. It would seem disloyal to Mama, and he would have no part in criticizing her.
“Mama agreed to go,” I said, seizing on the positive. “And she let you in the house. And she admits now that she is an alcoholic?”
Daddy rubbed his eyes again. “No,” he said. “She won’t admit that at all.”
“She doesn’t think she has a drinking problem?”
“She says we’re picking on her,” Daddy said. “The only reason she has agreed to go talk to these people is so that they will tell us that she is not an alcoholic.”
“But Daddy, she is. She gets drunk near about every day. She has for years now. And it’s getting worse.”
“I know, sweetheart,” he said. “I know it and you know it and James knows it. He says Marian is in denial. But we have to start somewhere. So that’s what we’ll do.”
“She hates me,” I said. “This divorce of mine has been her undoing.”
“No,” he said quickly. “That’s the liquor talking. And the denial thing. She loves you more than anything in the world. But she’s hurt and upset, and she’s scared to death of going back to a hospital. We have to be patient with her.”
“Why won’t she come home?” I asked.
“She says she’s tired of people spying on her. Truth is, I think she’s ashamed to face us, now that it’s out in the open,” Daddy said. “She knows the drinking has gotten out of hand, and she feels bad about letting us down.”
I nodded, looking around the kitchen. Like Daddy, the house had seen better days. The café curtains hung limp and greasy at windows that hadn’t been washed in months. There were fingerprints on the refrigerator and dirty dishes in the sink, and the floor was feeling gummy. Why hadn’t I noticed any of this? Waxy yellow buildup on Marian Foley’s kitchen floor? That should have been a red alert that something was bad wrong with Mama.
I put my pocketbook on the kitchen table and went to the sink, getting out the mop bucket and the Spic and Span.
“What are you up to now?” Daddy asked.
“Setting things right,” I said, running hot sudsy water in the sink. “So Mama can come home again.”
“I’ll help,” Daddy said, getting up heavily from his chair. I watched speechlessly as he opened the cupboard and got out the broom and dustpan. Never, not once in my entire life, had I ever seen my father do a lick of housework. I couldn’t believe he even knew where the broom was, let alone how to use it.
He saw my amazed expression and gave me a wink. “Never too late to try something new, is it?”
“No sir,” I said.
I had one more stop to make on my way home. It was a little lingerie boutique on Whitaker Street downtown. I’d passed the place hundreds of times before and never stopped. Now I slipped guiltily inside the carved wooden door, hoping nobody passing by would see me.
My excuse was that I really needed a new bra, since Cousin Alice had swiped mine. Really though, I was browsing for more of a new me.
My days of white cotton were over. As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to have it—a black lace over blond bra with matching silk panties that reminded me of the negligee Lana Turner wore in an old pinup poster from the 1940s. My size, my new style, and together it made a ninety-dollar hole in my shop money. I bit my lip and paid cash. The salesgirl took her time wrapping it in peach tissue and then a peach shopping bag tied with peach chiffon ribbon, when all I wanted to do was grab and go.
At home I took a quick shower and dressed in pale yellow linen shorts and a matching linen top. I painted my toenails—just because. It had been a gritty, gruesome day. I was ready for red toenail polish…and the most expensive undies I’d ever owned.
Daniel rang the doorbell just as I was coming downstairs. He looked me up and down. “Aren’t you kind of dressed up for crabbing?”
“You never said we were going crabbing,” I pointed out. “You said shorts.”
“Not nice shorts.”
“I don’t wear grubby clothes when I go out on dates,” I said, starting to do a slow burn. Why did he have that effect on me?
“You look great,” he relented, “but don’t blame me if your clothes get ruined.”
I gave him a look and went back upstairs and threw grubby cutoffs and a T-shirt in a tote bag, along with a pair of beat-up sneakers.
“Let’s go,” he said, yanking me out the door. “We’ll miss the tide.”
The next thing I knew, we were in the middle of the Talmadge Memorial Bridge, which crosses over the Savannah River and divides Georgia from South Carolina.
“Where are we going?” I asked, slightly alarmed.
“Bluffton.” He glanced over to see if I would object. “It’s the only way I can pry you away from your family and your dog and your ex-husband.”
I looked down at the slow-moving brown water of the Savannah River. “Are you transporting me across state lines for immoral purposes?”
“I sincerely hope so,” he said. “A buddy of mine has a house with a dock on the May River, and I’ve got the use of it while I’m on vacation this week.”
“I can’t go to Bluffton for a week.”
“I’ve got the house for the week, not you,” he said. “I just thought you might like to see it. It’s kind of junky, like you seem to like. We’ll have a little dinner, go crabbing, maybe go for a swim afterward.”
“You didn’t say anything about a bathing suit,” I pointed out.
“Must have slipped my mind,” he said, keeping his eyes on the road.
“I’ll bet.”
It started raining just as we reached the South Carolina side of the bridge. The rain came slow at first, and steam boiled up off the sunbaked pavement. July had been bonedry, but now it was getting to be prime hurricane season. The sky darkened and the rain came down harder, quickly flooding the low-country roadway.
Daniel turned up the volume on the radio to drown out the sound of the rain. He had it tuned to his favorite oldies station again.
They were playing “Summer Rain,” an old Johnny Rivers number that I remembered from long years ago, when I’d gone to sleep-away camp and had a counselor who was lonesome for her boyfriend back home, and who played that song over and over at night after lights out.
Daniel hummed along with the music, and I watched the marshland flash by in a rich green streak, punctuated here and there by a fireworks store or a tomato stand.
He slowed the truck as we came into the town limits of Bluffton, and pointed at a small strip shopping center on the right. “Ever been in there?”
I looked where he was pointing. Half the shopping center had been given over to a place called La Juntique. Chairs and tables and dressers lined the sidewalk in front of the place.
“No,” I said, craning my neck to get a better look. “Is it any good?”
“I’ve never been there,” he said. “You want to take a look?”
This was something new. A man offering to stop at an antique store instead of speeding by, as Talmadge Evans would have done.
“Is there a catch?” I asked, looking at him suspiciously.
“I’m just trying to be nice,” he said. “Can’t a guy be nice?”
“You want something.”
The grin again. “Yes.”
“I’m guessing it’s not my cheesecake recipe,” I said.
“Maybe later.”