The Hurricane Sisters (3 page)

“Really?” Clayton said.

“Yes! The house was empty anyway! What’s the big deal? No one ever goes there, do they?”

“Because we all worry about melanoma,” Liz said. “You know that.”

“You’re
paranoid
about melanoma,” Clayton said.

“I am not!” Liz insisted.

I began feeling anxious. “They say we’re in for a busy hurricane season,” I said. No one answered. “There have already been six with names. Thank goodness they blew out to sea!”

Clayton just sat back in his chair and cocked his head to one side like the chairman of the Department of Decorum and laughed.

“Well, well, well,” Clayton said. “It seems at long last that my delicate son has grown a pair. This calls for champagne! Where’s that fellow with the list?”

Clayton ordered a bottle of champagne and as soon as the entrees were cleared away, it was poured.

“This momentous occasion merits a toast,” Clayton said.

“Are we really going to toast my family jewels?” Ivy said, snickering.

“Don’t be vulgar,” Liz said.

“In Ivy’s defense,” James said, smiling and poised, “it was Mr. Waters who introduced them into evidence.”

Liz gasped. Rarely had I seen anyone speak so boldly to Liz. I sort of loved it.

“Are you a lawyer?” Ashley said.

“Yes,” James said, smiling.

“Really? Where did you . . .” Clayton asked, but James answered before he could finish.

“Harvard. I don’t practice too much. But I do a lot of pro bono work.”

“Wow,” Ashley said. “Can I try on your Glass again?”

“Sure,” James said and passed the newest thing in gizmos across the table to her.

“Oh my goodness!” I said, staring at Ashley. “When you said that, you looked exactly like my Juliet!” Why had I never seen the resemblance before?

“Mother!” Liz said.

“What?” I said. “Don’t you agree with me? She was just about your age when we lost her, Ashley. Just a few years older.”

“Let’s not get maudlin, Maisie,” Clayton said. “This is supposed to be a happy occasion, isn’t it?”

“I’m not maudlin one little bit!” I said. “I was just startled, that’s all. I promise, y’all . . . Ashley, turn your head that way to face your daddy.”

James was puzzled and said, “Excuse me, may I ask, who is Juliet?”

“My perfect sister who died of an aneurysm at twenty-seven, thirty years ago,” Liz said.

“Oh. I’m terribly sorry,” James said.

“It was thirty years ago,” Liz said.

“Well, it’s like yesterday to me,” I said. “I always wonder what she would have become had she lived.”

“President of the United States, Mother. Now, Clayton, you were going to make a toast? Please, dear?”

I didn’t say anything to that. President, indeed. Juliet may well
have
become president. She was sure smart enough. And she could charm the birds right out of the trees.
At least she never made a living prancing up and down the runway in bathing suits,
I wanted to say. Clayton tapped the side of his glass with his fork.

“To Maisie! Happy birthday to the most amazing woman we know!”

“Hear! Hear!” everyone said.

And here came the cake with so many candles I thought if there was a sudden gust of wind we might burn down the restaurant.

“It’s so pretty!” I said. “Thank you! I really shouldn’t eat cake.”

“YOLO, Maisie!” Ashley said. “Go for it!”

“You’re not quoting that Canadian rapper to our grandmother, are you?” Ivy said and then leaned out to tell me, “YOLO means ‘you only live once,’ Maisie.”

“I don’t know about Canadian raptors, some kind of migrating bird, I imagine, but it was Mae West who coined the phrase.” I gave them my very best smile.

“And, Ivy? Just to set the record straight, you’re not the only man in the room who’s living in sin,” Skipper said.

“Not now,” I said, quietly. “We can tell them later.”

“Tell us what?” Liz said.

“Yes, what?” Ivy said. He seemed slightly miffed. “Not that I consider myself to be living in sin.”

“Sorry, Ivy,” Skipper said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“It’s okay,” Ivy said.

“Skipper has moved in with me,” I said, “and we couldn’t be happier!”

“L. O. V. E. I. T.,” James said, deadpan. “Totally worth the cost of the trip.”

“Maisie!” Ivy said and laughed.

“Sweet Jesus of Nazareth,” Liz said and while all the color drained from her face, she drained all the champagne in her flute. She held it out for Clayton to refill, which he did.

“Now, let’s have dessert, shall we?” I said, trying to gloss over the elephant in the room.

“Indeed, let’s!” said Ivy, suddenly filled to the brim with mirth.

The cake was very pretty, all covered in marzipan hydrangeas of every color, just like the ones I grew. All the waiters sang and my family sang along too. Ivy and Ashley took pictures with their phones and the Glass and I smiled, thinking again I was very lucky to be surrounded by so many lovely people who cared about making me happy in that moment. We weren’t perfect. I knew that. And I knew it was even more incumbent on me to see about Ashley’s welfare and state of mind. All I can tell you is that every family on the planet is dysfunctional and we celebrate occasions as generously as we know how to do. We were all doing our best to appear grateful to have one another. Weren’t appearances worth something?

CHAPTER 2

Ashley’s Opinion

The night after Maisie’s birthday party I was at the infamous family house on Sullivans Island making a bowl of pasta to share with my roommate, Mary Beth, who was also my best friend on the planet. I’m not kidding. She was practically blood. She wasn’t home yet. It had been a long day at the gallery with every tourist in town wandering in, wanting cheap posters in free cardboard tubes they could take home and frame. We don’t sell cheap posters in free cardboard tubes. Please! WTH? The Turner Gallery is a
serious
place on Broad Street in downtown Charleston. It’s practically a museum. I mean, if an artist gets a show at our gallery, it’s a very big deal. Bill and Judy Turner have dedicated their whole lives to building their business and the most important artists from the entire Southeast are in the house. My parents would have you believe I’m working at a dime store selling cheap crap from China. They make me so frustrated.

They would also have you believe that I’m living in the Taj Mahal when this creaking old house hasn’t seen a plumber, an electrician, or a coat of paint in twenty years. Maybe longer. I’ve been carded in better-looking dive bars. But I love the beach house. I love every rusty nail in every rotten board. Like so many places in the Lowcountry, it oozes history. In the 1860s it served as a Civil War barracks. How awesome is that? I can imagine boys with whiskers and dirty hair eating from a giant pot of stew on tin plates and I can see iron bunks lining the walls upstairs and twenty or so soldiers tossing and turning at night. And I can envision them straggling back from a battlefield, all sweaty and dirty. Worst of all, when I’m miserable myself, I can feel their fear. Most of them had to be just young boys. Boys who were my age or younger. How terrible.

The land where our house stands isn’t too far from where the Pest House used to be, a
truly
horrible place where some kind of officials examined slaves arriving from Barbados and West Africa to determine if they were healthy enough to put on the selling block in downtown Charleston. The old people used to say that they heard from their grandparents that if the slaves were too sick, they got thrown in the shark-infested waters. How unforgivably horrendous and uncivilized is that? Crimes against humanity! Everything about the South isn’t pretty. At all.

These are two truly excellent reasons why I have always felt the island was so haunted. Sometimes, when I am alone on the porch looking out over the water of Charleston Harbor I can feel a heavy sadness in the air. And sometimes at night I think I hear the muffled voices of people quietly crying, struggling with some inexplicable grief. At first, Mary Beth thought I was really crazy but after a while she began to feel it and hear them too. I mean, just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Right? Isn’t it a little bit like believing in angels?

But when we aren’t feeling the mythology of the house, mostly it is just what it is: another wooden clapboard house with warped heart pine floors, perched on towers of cement blocks, with an ancient tin roof that only leaks in the laundry room when it is a superheavy rain and screened porches all around that hold millions of secrets. Upstairs there are four bedrooms with beaded board walls and ceilings and one creaking bathroom in the hall. Downstairs there is a giant open living space with a dining table and a fireplace that hasn’t worked in all my life. We have an old grand piano in the corner of the living room that was given to my father from some long-dead aunt. It is so out of tune it’s ridiculous. In fact, I can’t remember it
ever
being in tune. During the holidays when we were kids, Ivy would try and bang out some Christmas carols and we’d wind up laughing our brains out from the rusty noise the poor thing made.

But the house isn’t without merit. The best feature of the house is the big portico on the ocean side. There is almost always a breeze and every ship that goes into or sails out of Charleston Harbor passes right by. It is where I make the world go away, just like the dumb song that Maisie says Skipper sings when it’s cocktail time.

So after the mental workout from the Impossibles (a.k.a. my parents) last night, I just wanted to hang at home and get over them. Ivy and James were supposed to come by for a glass of vino after dinner but I wasn’t counting on it. Ivy had so many friends downtown that I knew by the time he said hello to everyone and ate something here and there it would be too late. I’d text him and meet him tomorrow for coffee before he and James left for New York.

I heard a car door slam in the yard, the familiar clunk of Mary Beth’s old reliable Camry. Her car had over a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it. My Subaru had a mere hundred and twenty-seven thousand. In one minute, she would be in the kitchen staring inside the refrigerator like it spoke English and was going to tell her what to eat that would (a) satisfy her and (b) not have any calories. Good luck with that. Ever since we’d met on the first day of classes at the College of Charleston, she’d been on a diet. Not that she needed one. Well, maybe a little bit.

“Hey! What’s up?” she said, dropping her bag on the table and, like I said, opening the refrigerator. “What are you making over there, chopping away like some nut on
Top Chef
?”

“Enough pasta primavera to feed this whole island. And my day totally sucked, but thanks for asking.”

“Oh? Carb alert. That’s not good.”

“Jammed with touristas. And, just to make sure my head explodes, we’re hosting a reception for Senator Galloway next week.”

“I know. We’re doing the job. He’s like the Prince Harry of South Carolina. Everyone says he’s going to be the president someday.”

“I’m going to die when I meet him.”

“You and every other woman in the room.”

Mary Beth worked for a very cool catering company downtown. She had a degree in elementary education but there were no teaching jobs to be had in the entire Charleston area except in schools that looked like meth labs. So, like me and everyone else we knew, except those who went to law school or medical school, she made ten dollars an hour passing hors d’oeuvres. She was also a closet chef. And Porter Galloway was the youngest person ever elected to the state senate, not that that has anything to do with anything. I just thought you should know he’s practically age appropriate and that I had a mad crush on him but alas, only from afar.

“And I’m a wreck. What am I going to wear to make him fall in love with me?”

“Wear what you wore last night.”

“Are you serious? That dress almost got me thrown out of the will. Here, taste this. How is it?”

She picked out a piece of pasta and popped it in her mouth, wincing.

“Too blah. Let me fix it. It needs salt and lemon zest. And garlic powder. This isn’t primavera. It’s pasta salad, but not primavera. Usually, primavera has roasted squash and peppers.” She went back to the refrigerator and took out a lemon. “Where’s the Microplane?”

“All of a sudden you’re Giada de Laurentiis with a Microplane?”

We watched the Food Network like some people watched
Game of Thrones
.

“Food is my religion,” she said, with such a serious face that I started laughing.

“Religion. Well, at least you believe in something,” I said and giggled. “I’ll find it. Want a glass of wine?”

I dug through the utensil drawer that always sticks because it’s jammed with stuff from the 1960s and finally found it wedged in the side.

“Sure,” she said. “How cheap is it?”

“Very. It comes with an ice pack for your eyes. Here,” I said and handed her the grater. “There’s too much junk in this drawer. One of these days I’m gonna start pitching stuff.”

I banged it back and forth and finally forced it shut. Then I opened the refrigerator and took out the bottle of white wine with the screw cap and the flip-flops on the label. It stood up very well to ice.

“Thanks. So how was Charleston Grill? I’m starving. What’s
this
? Who puts
avocado
in pasta?”

“I do. Everything is better with avocado. And bacon. My parents are completely crazy. The food, however, was beyond.”

I told her what we all ordered while Mary Beth seasoned and stirred the pasta around in the big ceramic bowl that had been a part of the kitchen all my life. Funny how something that seemed so insignificant, just an old bowl with faded glazed stripes, could trigger so many memories. When I was really young, we used it for cookie dough, cake batters, boiled peanuts, potato salad, and now apparently, not for pasta
primavera,
but for pasta
salad
. But when I was little and my mother pulled out that big bowl, it meant
company
and it meant that for a few hours at least my family would do its best to look and act normal. Ah, the good old days.