The Girls of August (2 page)

I did not know in whom the barrenness lay. Mac? Or me? And Mac was adamant that we
not attempt to find out. “No one person to blame,” he said.

Melinda supported Mac’s viewpoint that we should not know. And even though Teddy
and Melinda had been in the same boat as Mac and me, our twin situations gave me
no comfort.

Month after month went by and I grew ever more desperate because the pee stick test—no
matter how hard I willed otherwise—remained negative. When I’d had enough hurt, when
the pain of not having a child grew unbearable, I lobbied for us to go to a fertility
clinic.

But Mac stood firm. “There is no guarantee it will work. It can wreck your health,
Maddy. And I don’t want either of us at any time to look at the other and think,
‘If it hadn’t been for you…’ That’s a marriage killer, Maddy. Let it lie.”

And so, after a good long while, I gave up. Oh, I had deep aches for my unborn many
times, and I suppose Mac did too. But I alone had felt I would die of it. Our cure?
We both sank deeply into our work, me first as an elementary school teacher and then
as the busy owner of my own catering firm, and Mac as a deeply dedicated family physician.
We worked and we worked because it was the right thing to do. Sometimes it even kept
our pain at bay.

And of course there was Curry…

“Well, honey, of course you don’t know what it would be like to have friends as
long as Barbara, Rachel, and I have been together, because you’re only eighteen,”
I said to Curry that morning in her bedroom. I was being artificially cheerful because,
though I was pleased as punch that she was going to Harvard, I also didn’t want her
to leave.

“But you’ve known each other for twenty years. Maybe more. That’s like being married
or something,” she said, slipping her hand into mine.

 “Well, you know we haven’t seen each other in three years, not since Melinda…”
I trailed off and with my free hand traced a bloom on the magnolia-patterned spread.
“I sometimes wonder if we’re friends at all anymore.”

In the past two weeks, in our usual bent toward haste, Barbara, Rachel, and I had
decided—after a flurry of e-mails had turned into a blizzard—that in the wake of
Teddy’s new marriage, we would reprise the girls of August.

But sitting there with Curry, holding her hand and remembering Melinda, I wasn’t
sure it was such a good idea. Three years is a long time. And we were falling into
the old habit of allowing Teddy’s latest wife to enter our circle. None of us had
even met her because none of us had been invited to the wedding.

“Friends don’t stop being friends,” Curry said, “just because one of you isn’t around
anymore.” She said this with the authority of a much older woman and my heart broke
open in a rush of fresh love for her.

“I don’t know, honey. We’ve barely spoken since the funeral. And we don’t know this
new wife. What will we even talk about?”

“What did you used to talk about?”

“Oh, what we did together after we met,” I said, “and the guys. Of course we talked
about our guys.” I couldn’t tell her that we talked about sex. She, being of an age
at which it was impossible to think of “old people” having sex, probably wouldn’t
have even believed me.

“Well, yeah, Uncle Mac…I can’t imagine talking a solid week about him.”

“He wasn’t always just Uncle Mac, you know,” I said, smoothing back the unkempt
straw-colored hair that was her uncle’s off her forehead. “He was many things you’ll
never know about, back then. Now too. And besides, what makes you think he was the
only guy I had?”

“Oh, tell!” Curry squealed, throwing her long arms around my neck and pulling me
toward her just as the sound of raindrops pinged, fat and cold, against the beautiful
prismed panes of our old house on Church Street Charleston.

“Not on your very young life,” I said around a sudden and surprising lump in my throat.
“Even aunts are entitled to a little mystery.”

I gazed out the rain-splattered window as I rested in Curry’s embrace, and an odd
heaviness seized my heart. Yes, a little mystery…

T
he girls of August had decided, given our long hiatus and the introduction of a new
person—Baby Gaillard
née
LucyAnne Gaillard, to be exact—that we had best meet ahead of time at my house
to map out our strategy and make sure we all felt OK about Tiger Island. We were
to meet the second weekend of June, so we had plenty of time to reconnoiter if need
be.

I stood in my kitchen, barefoot, anxious, muddling the sugar and mint that would
spice the pitcher of mojitos I intended to ply the girls with. They would be arriving
momentarily, thus my nerves. Had we changed too much? Had three years been kind or
cruel? What if one of us had gotten wildly fat or depressed or mean-spirited? Why,
on earth, was I fretting so?

“Calm down,” I whispered.

I began juicing the limes. The aroma of citrus and sugar curled through the air,
and as I breathed in the tart sweet, I considered our different fates.

Me? I had married a man who would become—in terms of the medical establishment—the
least of them: a family practitioner. But in terms of the heart, he towered over
Oliver and Hugh and Teddy. Which isn’t to say I didn’t love and admire the other
guys. But I got lucky with Mac. He was, as Curry was so fond of saying, a keeper.
I tore off another handful of mint leaves, added them to my stone mortar, and thought
how ironic it was that a man who had dedicated his life to healthy families had no
children of his own.

As for me, after I quit teaching, I did nothing to serve that relentless baby need—no
charity work with homeless or orphaned children, no more volunteer work at the hospital.
The lack of kids in my life had made it too painful to be around other people’s kids.
Maybe that was selfish. But we all have coping mechanisms, and avoiding the sweet
voices of the young was my way. So I stayed busy with my catering business and was,
in fact, something of a celebrity in old Charleston. And no one suspected that the
yearly anonymous donation that kept the School for Children afloat came from Mac
and me.

Then there was Rachel’s husband, Oliver, who was one of Atlanta’s most esteemed oncologists.
The money had changed Oliver, if you ask me. It had made him antiseptic, a wee bit
arrogant, a tad remote, but done nothing to diminish his million-dollar smile and
his doting affection for the Italian greyhounds they bred and showed. Or maybe it
wasn’t the money. Maybe dealing with so many profoundly sick and dying people had
caused Oliver to lose some of that boyish charm and retreat into a safer space, a
space where he didn’t feel the world’s sadness quite so acutely. That was something
I could understand.

Rachel, however, didn’t let anything change her. She was a tough Jewish gal from
Hoboken, New Jersey, who had, quite simply, a heart of gold. She was sassy and sarcastic,
and suffered no fools. She and Oliver had met while he was just beginning his medical
residency and she was finishing up her final semester in nursing school. A pediatric
nurse with five children, she seemed to have chosen a profession that would serve
her offspring, if not herself.

And then there was sweet Barbara, who’d married Hugh, the heart surgeon in our group.
With a booming Birmingham practice (Cornelia Colleton’s father was among the patients
who called him Doc) and an aptness for society and its galas, he had—five years
into his practice—demanded that Barbara quit teaching school in order to raise their
three children with the help of an imported English nanny.

“Over my dead body, Dr. Fowler,” Barbara had told him. “You might love affectation
and fine china, but don’t ever forget that we’re two poor crackers from Marianna,
Florida, who happened to get lucky. I will raise my children myself, thank you very
much. And I will live out my days as a working woman.”

I poured the cold rum into the Waterford pitcher (yes, I liked nice things too) and
Barbara bloomed in my mind’s eye—her cola-brown eyes flashing with righteousness
as she gave Hugh what for—and my anxieties over their visit began to ease. In fact,
as I threw back a wee shot of rum, imagining our laughter and conspiratorial whispers,
I decided Rachel and Barbara couldn’t arrive soon enough.

“I’m not spending a week on an island with anybody named Baby,” Rachel said grumpily,
looking at the photograph of the house. “I don’t care if it’s the most perfect beach
house on earth.”

I watched Rachel from my spot on the sofa and decided these past three years had
been good to her. Her chestnut hair still gleamed and her blue eyes shone with that
endless curiosity I so loved about her. And, after five kids and twenty-some years,
she’d kept her figure. Tall and buxom, she was what you called a handsome woman.

“Just look. The house is to die for. Puts the Colleton house to shame. But really!
Baby?” She shoved the photo at Barbara, who had just arrived from Birmingham and
had barely had time to put her luggage down before I stuck a mojito in her hand.

“It just about is. Perfect, I mean,” Barbara said, her long, beautiful fingers cupping
the photo. “Look at that beach. Look at those roses. Actually, Rachel, it
looks
like the Colleton house, only…I dunno…more lived in, a place you could really get
used to.” She sighed, as if even the mention of the Colleton house filled her with
memories too sweet to bear, and then tossed the photo on the coffee table. “Better
Baby than Cornelia Colleton, if you ask me,” she said, her eyes widening at the mention
of Teddy’s ex.

“She has another name,” I said. “It’s LucyAnne. Two words, but all together. Teddy
told me.”

“Oh, Teddy.” Rachel waved her drink dismissively through the air. “Anybody who’d
marry a Baby…,” Rachel said, and then looked over at me. “Sorry, Maddy.”

Before I had dated and married Mac, I had been with Teddy Patterson for almost a
year. It was my first year out of Vanderbilt and his first in his residency at the
teaching hospital there. I was a brand-new Pink Lady in the evenings, dispensing
everything from chewing gum to cigarettes (those were the old days) to hugs, hoping
I was providing some measure of comfort to the sick and grieving after my teaching
stint at Harrowbrook Elementary was done for the day. Teddy was just starting his
long climb toward becoming a pediatric surgeon. We were totally and groggily in love…I
more than he, as it turned out.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said to Rachel. “It was doomed from the start. Baby pointed
that out to me not a week ago.”

She and Teddy had spent a few days on Tiger Island at the house in the photo, which
was Baby’s family’s summer home, dating back to the early nineteen hundreds. He’d
brought her over for supper so she could meet Mac and me before they headed back
to Lexington the following day. They actively engaged in a hard sell. Indeed, both
Baby and Teddy seemed desperate for us to use the house for our August outing. I
suspected Teddy wanted us to accept Baby into our circle because if we did, he would
think we’d forgiven him for the accident.

Rachel delicately picked a strand of rum-scented mint from between her teeth. “What
do you mean?”

“Well, I was in the kitchen, putting the final touches on my shrimp and grits, and
she followed me in there like the proverbial puppy dog, wearing nothing but a dress
so short you could see her coochie if you were willing to look. She helped herself
to a shrimp right out of the pot, licked her fingers, wiped them on her thigh, and,
laughing merrily, said, ‘Well, of course you couldn’t have married Teddy. You’d have
been Madison Patterson. Can you
imagine
?’”

“Little bitch,” Rachel snapped.

“What did you say?” asked Barbara, who, I had noticed, seemed to be settling into
a middle-aged spread, something I was fighting with every ounce of my being.

“Nothing. As I’ve gotten older, I’m not so good with the comebacks.” I grabbed a
couch pillow and drew it to me, cradling it as if it were a fat baby.

We were silent for a moment. I suppose, each in our own way, we were taking stock
of not being twenty-three any longer.

Barbara tossed back the sandy-blonde hair that she’d grown out to past her shoulders
and, breaking the silence, said in her lovely north Florida drawl, “So, besides being
a little bitch, what’s she like?”

I gazed down at my drink and thought a moment. I wanted to be fair. And honest.
And true to Melinda. Doing all three was going to be impossible. “Well, let’s see.
She is very, very, very young.”

“How young?” Rachel said, slitting her eyes.

I looked first to Rachel and then to Barbara. “Hang on to your panties, girls.”

“Oh, gawd! Please tell me she’s not jailbait,” Barbara said, her plump face revealing
hope and shock.

I took a sip and my time. I admit, I relished the suspense. “Well, almost. I’m not
sure exactly. But if I had to guess, I think she’s legal in most states but probably
won’t see her third decade for a good long while.”

Rachel harrumphed. “No wonder Teddy didn’t invite anyone to the wedding. He’s ashamed.”

Reaching for a sesame cheese straw, Barbara said, “Now give us the really bad news.
How beautiful is she?”

“She’s pretty, real pretty. And she’s got a great body. Even Mac said so and he
hardly ever comments on other women. To me, anyway.”

“Brunette?” Rachel cocked her head at me.

“Nope. Long blonde hair, deep-green eyes, pert little nose, great boobs. If she
were taller, she’d be a model.” I wiped the condensation off my glass with my thumb.
“She’s a traffic-stopper, I’ll tell you that much.”

“Teddy!” Barbara spit his name the way she’d spit his first wife’s name moments before.
“He can be such a jerk.”

“And a fiend for pretty blondes.”

“If it’s any consolation,” I said, topping off our drinks, “God gave her all body
and no brains.”

“He went from beautiful, brilliant, grown-up Melinda to a child with no brains?”
Rachel looked indignant, and I thought it was a good thing Teddy was in Lexington
and not in this room because Rachel might have given him a finger-wagging what for.
“What is he thinking!”

“He’s not,” Barbara said.

“I don’t know. He might be,” I said, “but it’s not with what’s up here.” I tapped
my skull.

“Yeah…he always did think with his pecker,” Rachel said, her slight acquired Atlanta
lilt sloshing into her New Jersey tough-girl accent.

“And there’s another catch,” I said.

“Oh-oh. What’s that?” Rachel was just about to wiggle out of this deal. I could
see it in her face, which was beginning to harden against the whole idea of Tiger
Island.

“It’s not a week.”

“What! But it’s always a week. It has to be that way,” Barbara said, setting down
her drink.

“Something about the guy they hire to ferry them to and fro. He’s not going to be
available on the seventh day out.”

“Why not? Then let’s just hire somebody else.” Rachel’s practical streak was admirable.

“They say there is nobody else. We’re going to be out there for fourteen days.”

“A two-week vacation!” By the tenor in Barbara’s voice, you would have thought she’d
never heard of such a thing.

“It’s not what we do,” Rachel said.

“I agree. It seems unthinkable. But those are the cards they’re dealing.”

“Two weeks,” Rachel said, tilting her head in that wistful manner that dispelled her
toughness.

“Yep,” I said, warming to the idea even though a part of me feared the whole universe-tilting-on-its-axis
threat. “Just the beach and the sun and”—I held up my mojito—“good drink and food.”

“Oh well,” Barbara said, picking up the photo and studying it. “What are we complaining
about? A longer vacation for free? And it’s a great house. I vote we live dangerously
and take it.”

Then she looked at us, levelly, and I thought I caught a glimpse of Barbara the seventh-grade
French teacher. “Besides,” she said, with not a hint of a grin, “we can always drown
Baby.”

And that was that. We were going to Tiger Island, or so I thought until Mac and
I got into bed that evening. I snuggled under the sheet and rested my head on his
bare shoulder. He smelled slightly of shrimp and vodka and I was caught off guard,
as I often was, by how thoroughly I loved this big-hearted, Scots-Irish, six-foot-three,
rumple-haired, lanky man.

“It’s funny,” I said.

“What’s that?” he asked, gently gathering my hair into a single swath that cascaded
over my breast.

“It’s as if no time has passed. I mean, Rachel, Barbara, and I just took up where
we left off before Melinda died. Or, actually, before we even met Melinda. Three
against one…first Cornelia and now poor little pitiful Baby.”

Mac traced my collarbone with his index finger. “Poor little pitiful Baby has enough
money to buy Cornelia and then some. Teddy…I tell you what, that man can smell money.”

“Yes, and in his case money smells just like trouble.”

Mac’s laughter sounded more rueful than joyful. He kissed my cheek and remained
so close I felt his breath against my skin with each word uttered. “Listen to me,
Maddy. Why don’t you girls just stay in Charleston? Have a good time here, getting
reacquainted. Hell, I’ll steer clear.”

“Honey, that’s not how it works.”

“In the first place, I think Baby is a nut case,” he said. “I don’t see how you
could spend an hour with her, much less two weeks. And I don’t like the idea of Tiger
Island. It’s just too wild. The weather is crazy. The animals…I don’t even have a
good idea of what’s out there anymore. Rabid coons, for all we know. Besides, it’s
too hard to get to from Charleston. What if something happens?”

“Sweetheart”—I cupped his face in my hand—“nothing is going to happen. It never does.
And believe me, we can handle Baby.” As I spoke, an image of Melinda loomed—insouciant
and smart and smacking down that young newcomer with one pointed glance of those
startling eyes. “And we like the idea of Tiger Island because there isn’t anybody
on it, nothing, really, except the house. What could bother us there?”