Chapter Two
“What do you mean you asked Maribelle Cravath to marry you?”
Grayson thrusts his hands in his pockets and leans back on his heels, his lips turned down in a sheepish expression. We are standing on the rickety old dock on Horlbeck Creek. The full moon is barely hidden behind gossamer-thin clouds and a blanket of mist hangs over the black, still creek. The air is heavy with the sweet scent of magnolia blossoms. I am wearing my beautiful (size six) Erdem gown and the toe-pinching stiletto heels I couldn’t afford. It’s the perfect setting for a Carolina boy to ask his childhood sweetheart to marry him.
I close my eyes and dozens of memories flicker to life in my brain, forming a sappy-sweet, romantic film montage. Ten-year-old Grayson sitting at the end of the dock, his baseball cap on backward, his jeans rolled up to his knees, holding my fishing pole while I skewered a worm on the end of my hook. Slow dancing in the moonlight with Grayson after freshman year homecoming dance. Lying side-by-side, our arms behind our heads, staring up at a cloudless summer sky, listening to each other’s dreams. Kissing each other goodbye and swearing we would still love each other no matter what just before we went off to college. The next picture should be Grayson getting down on one knee and asking me to be his wife, a diamond engagement ring in his hand.
I open my eyes, half-expecting to find Grayson holding a ring box with a big old gotcha grin on his face, but he’s still standing there, looking like a kid who got caught stealing coins from the Sunday school offering plate.
“Maribelle Cravath? You’re serious?”
Grayson nods his head. “Completely.”
“Why?”
“Excuse me?”
Why on God’s glorious green earth are you marrying boring old Maribelle Crawdad Cravath? She’s one of a million Lilly Pulitzer–wearing, flat-ironed blonde lemmings scampering around the South.
“Why?” I take a deep breath to steady the wobble in my voice. “Why are you marrying Maribelle?”
“Maribelle comes from one of the oldest, most respected families in the United States. She’s smart, socially-adept, well-connected, and philanthropic.”
“Sounds like the perfect running mate.”
He grins. “She does look great on paper.”
I see his mouth moving, but it’s as if I am watching a video with out-of-sync audio. Something in my brain is malfunctioning and it takes me a few seconds to assign meaning to the words I see his mouth forming.
Grayson.
Crawdad.
Engaged.
“You’re really engaged?”
“Yes.”
“To Maribelle Cravath?”
“That’s right.”
“When?”
“When?” He frowns.
“When did you ask her?”
“Tonight, just before coming here.”
A thick, bitter lump coagulates in the back of my throat. I listen to the tree frogs chirping and the katydids buzzing. The trilling night critters seem to be mocking me. Eh-eh-eh. Eh-eh-eh.
“I-I thought when you asked me to meet you here you were going to . . .”
“To what?”
He dips his head and stares at me through his wide puppy-dog brown eyes and for a second I almost forget that we’re not two teenagers sneaking out to steal kisses in the moonlight.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me,” he says, reaching for my hand. “You will always matter to me, Tara.”
I want to snatch my hand away. I want to snatch Maribelle Cravath bald! Instead, I smile real pretty as the love of my life absentmindedly strokes the back of my hand with his thumb and tells me how much he hopes I will attend his wedding to my oldest frenemy.
. . . a spring wedding, when the azaleas are in bloom. Maribelle wants her bridesmaids to wear azalea pink gowns. Five hundred or so . . . in the gardens . . . plantation. . . oyster roast . . .
A spring wedding. Pink bridesmaid’s gowns. Traditional low-country fare. So cliché. So Maribelle Cravath! Twenty bucks says she will serve spiked blueberry mint lemonade in mason jars and ask her bridesmaids to release live butterflies during her father-daughter dance.
I look down at my overpriced designer gown and my heart begins to ache something fierce. I splurged on the Erdem because it is a swoon-worthy, fairytale dress, the kind of dress that looks fabulous in photographs ten, twenty, thirty years after they are taken. I imagined myself with silver hair, lifting the lid of a heavy cardboard box, removing layers of scented tissue paper, and showing the neatly folded Erdem to my granddaughter. This is the dress I wore the night your grandad asked me to marry him. My dream is dissolving like tissue paper blown into a swimming pool.
Maribelle Crawdad Cravath has jacked my Prince Charming and my fairytale granddaughter bonding moment. When the lid of the heavy cardboard box is lifted, future generations of Calhouns will gasp and sigh over a perfectly precious (and uninspired) begonia pink Lilly Pulitzer sundress.
I want to grab Grayson’s shoulders and shake him until the nonsense falls from his brain like acorns from a tree. He can’t want to marry Maribelle Cravath. He just can’t. He must be joking.
That’s it! Grayson is teasing me. The Barton Boys must have told him I was expecting him to propose and my perpetual frat boy decided to have a little fun.
Bubbles of laughter stream up from my belly, bursting out of my mouth. Grayson stops talking and frowns at me.
“Tara?”
Like the endless stream of bubbles in a glass of champagne, the laughter keeps bubbling and bursting, bubbling and bursting. The more I think about it, the more I laugh. Maribelle and Grayson. Engaged.
“Tara? What is it? What’s so funny?”
I try to speak, but imagine Grayson on bended knee, presenting one of those enameled flower rings with the stretchy bands sold at the Lilly Pulitzer store to Maribelle Cravath and a new stream of laughter erupts from my lips. By the time I am finally able to catch my breath, I have laugh-cried away most of my mascara and splotchy grayish-black teardrops stain the front of my gown.
“You . . . you almost got me, Grayson Everett Calhoun! You almost had me believing you asked old bug-eyed Crawdad Cravath to marry you. Good joke.”
He frowns. “I am not joking, Tara. I asked Maribelle to marry me.”
“Yeah, right,” I laugh, wiping the mascara from beneath my eyes. “And you’re going to have a Gone with the Wind–themed wedding at your family’s plantation and eat barbecue beneath the magnolias, and dance waltzes, and—”
“Stop it, Tara,” he says, grabbing my hand and squeezing it hard. “Don’t be like that.”
“Be like what?”
“Petty and biting.”
Petty? And biting?
I pull my hand away and take a step back, the residual bubbles of laughter floating in my belly turning leaden, creating a sickeningly metallic taste in the back of my throat.
“You think I am petty and biting?”
“Not usually, but . . .”
“But what?”
“You’ve changed.”
“Changed? How? When?”
He shrugs.
“I haven’t changed, Grayson. I am the same old Tara Maxwell who likes to go fishing and eat Goo Goo Clusters.”
“Be serious, dahlin’,” he says, sighing. “When’s the last time you ate a Goo Goo Cluster?”
I shake my head. What is he saying? He’s not going to marry me because I don’t eat Goo Goo Clusters like an overweight, insecure pre-teen?
“You want me to eat a Goo Goo Cluster? I will eat a carton of Goo Goo Clusters. Just tell me you aren’t going to marry Maribelle Cravath.”
He smiles sadly and shakes his head. “What happened to you, Tara? You used to be so audacious and original. You weren’t like the other girls. I don’t know why or when it happened, but you changed into this eager-to-please Southern girl with your buttermilk baths and starvation diets. Underneath it all—the perfectly styled hair and designer dresses—I sense a sad, tired woman who just wants to kick off her heels and go back to being real. The effort it is taking for you to pretend to be the woman you think you need to be is taking its toll, dahlin’.”
Grayson’s words pierce my heart like an arrow shot from a compound bow, lacerating deep. It takes me a few seconds to catch my breath.
I shake my head. “I am confused. You say you want to marry someone audacious and original, but you asked Maribelle Cravath to be your wife? She’s the most unoriginal girl in all of Charleston.”
“This isn’t about Maribelle.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Did you think I asked you here because I was going to ask to get back together?” He smiles sadly and shakes his head. “We’ve tried to make it work for years, Tara, but we always end up apart.”
“That’s just the way we are.”
“It’s the way we were, but it’s not the way I want to be. Every decision I make from here on out will move me closer to, or further from, my end goal. I need someone on my team who wants to help me move closer to that end goal.”
“What are you saying? I have always encouraged you to go after your dreams.”
He looks down at his feet.
“Haven’t I?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“But what?”
“Jesus, Tara,” he sighs, running his hand through his hair. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings. Can’t we just wish each other well and go our separate ways?”
I am burning up from the inside out. My core is radiating heat, my skin aches, and my hair is plastered to my neck. It’s as if I swallowed fire. Once, I snuck a sip from a bottle in my Aunt Patricia’s liquor cabinet and felt the way I do now, hot and sickly. It turned out to be a bottle of Irish Poitin, a potent, illegal, home-distilled alcohol made from potatoes, malted barley, sugar.
“Go our separate ways?” The words come out strangled. “We’ve been in each other’s lives for as long as I can remember and you just want to go our separate ways?”
“We’ll always be friends.”
“Friends? What does that even mean? We will exchange Christmas cards, click like on each other’s Instagram photos, say hey when we run into each other at Poogan’s Porch?”
“Sure, that’s what childhood friends do, isn’t it? We had a great childhood together, Tara, swimming at Folly Beach, fishing off this dock, catching fireflies in your daddy’s backyard, but it’s time to grow up and pack those childish times away. Grown-ups are honest about what they want, what they need, who they are, and who they want to spend their lives with.”
“And grown-up Grayson Calhoun doesn’t want to spend his life with Tara Maxwell. Is that it?”
He dips his chin low and looks at me through his thick brown eyelashes and I realize with nauseating certainty that Grayson Calhoun is about to become a ghost in my life, relegated to the darkest, dustiest shelf in the basement of my memories. Out of sight, but not out of mind.
“That’s about it.”