Home Is Where My People Are: The Roads That Lead Us to Where We Belong (10 page)

I’ve never been much for floral design, so I earned my keep by hauling around boxes and props. While Sister and Paige worked their magic, a caterer would make sure there were plenty of hors d’oeuvres and drinks on hand
 
—preferably some combination involving boiled shrimp, fried catfish, and mint juleps. I personally have lived in the South my whole life without ever sampling a mint julep, but visitors seem to feel it’s a rite of passage in these parts. When in Rome, I reckon.

After several weeks, all those smaller parties started to feel pretty routine
 
—almost like a series of dress rehearsals for a big event that was coming up at the end of the summer. A pharmaceutical company was hosting a party for several hundred people at Waverly Hill, a horse farm right outside of town, and it was going to be an all-hands-on-deck event. Sister and Kerri had both worked tirelessly for a couple of months in hopes that everything would go off without a hitch, and Paige and I each had a checklist of what we needed to do before the big night. I may have even kept my checklist in my Day-Timer just so I’d look official and business-y when I picked up chicken biscuits from Mrs. Winner’s in Kerri’s Volvo.

It didn’t matter where I lived, y’all. I was eighteen, and I was forever determined to hunt down the very best fried chicken option and embrace it with my whole heart.

About ten days before the Waverly Hill extravaganza, Kerri had to fly out of town for some meetings. She’d taken the aforementioned Volvo (aka My Baby) to the dealership for service, and she realized about three hours before her flight left that she really needed to take her own car to the
airport. If I could remember the reasons for all this, I would tell you, but all I can recall was that there was a lot of urgency and scrambling and a series of events that resulted in my handing her my keys.

So the plan was that Kerri would drive my Buick Regal to the Volvo dealership, leave my keys under the driver’s seat mat (Dear Atlanta, you were much more trustworthy back in 1988. Love, Me.), pick up her car, and head to the airport. Then, after work, Sister and Paige
 
—who had been running errands all over town for most of the day
 
—would drive me out to the Volvo place, where I would retrieve the Regal and drive it back to Kerri’s house.

Well.

When we got to the dealership, we couldn’t find my car anywhere. Kerri said she’d left it in front of the main office, but there was no maroon Buick with Mississippi plates within our line of sight. We figured Kerri must have forgotten some critical detail since she was in such a rush to get to the airport, so I told Sister and Paige that I’d run inside and ask the man at the front desk if he knew anything about it.

The man at the front desk had no knowledge of my car at all, so he called some people and paged some people and talked to some people, and after about five minutes, he called me up to the desk. He had a huge smile on his face, so I figured the news must be good.

“Well, young lady, we’ve located your car,” he said.

“OH, GOOD!” I replied
 
—no doubt with my best sorority girl enthusiasm. “Where is it?”

“At the impound lot,” he answered.

“At the what?” I asked, incredulous.

“At the impound lot. It was parked in a loading zone, so we had it towed. Sorry ’bout that. But you’ll need to hurry if you want to get it tonight; the lot closes in about twenty minutes, and it’s a good ways up the road.”

At that point in my life I was unfamiliar with the whole concept of an impound lot. Come to think of it, I don’t believe I’ve had any experience with an impound lot since that sweltering summer day in Fulton County, Georgia. But oh, did I ever get an education within the next half hour.
For example, I learned that impound lots don’t care if it’s not your fault that your boss left your car in a loading zone.

I also learned that impound lots don’t accept out-of-state checks from eighteen-year-olds.

Who knows? Maybe the majority of college freshmen enjoy heftier bank accounts than I did back in the day. But it was going to be almost $200 to get my car out of the lot, and at that stage of my life, that was an amount that I liked to refer to as ALL MY MONEY FOR THE MONTH.

Thankfully Sister and Barry covered my expenses at the impound lot, and of course Kerri repaid them. (She was mortified but utterly tickled when I called her later that night and said, “KERRI. THEY TOWED MY CAR” with all the heartfelt angst of Molly Ringwald in the prom scene of a John Hughes movie.) Sister and Paige didn’t stop laughing for about four days.

Once my car was back in my possession, the pre–Waverly Hill preparations should have been easy breezy from that point forward. Paige and I were so confident, in fact, that we decided to pull the phone outside one day and do our work beside Kerri’s pool. Sister was meeting with vendors and Kerri was still out of town, so we had more flexibility than we normally enjoyed during a workday.

Really, it wasn’t that crazy of an idea if you think about it. These days, people work from all sorts of random locations. Cell phones enable folks to conference call or FaceTime from coffee shops, for heaven’s sake. So pulling a two-line business phone to the edge of a patio couldn’t have been a big deal, right?

Honestly, it’s almost like we were ahead of our time.

Kerri’s pool was another project that her late husband never finished. They installed a pool and a beautiful flagstone patio in the back of the house, but some of the trim work and landscaping features were still missing. When Paige and I first arrived in Atlanta, the water was such a distinct shade of green that you couldn’t have paid either of us to stick our toes in the shallow end. You could just barely see the bottom of the pool, and it made me
shudder just to think about what might live in that thar cement pond, as Elly May Clampett might say.

Over the course of the summer, though, Kerri had hired a pool service. There was a gorgeous view of the pool area from every room on the back of the house, and it seemed like a good idea to let someone get the pool situation under control before major repairs were required. After three or four visits, the pool service had the pool in tip-top shape, and the day Paige and I planned to work outside was going to be our inaugural dip in those waters, so to speak.

Somehow Paige and I had both managed to make a temporary move to Atlanta without packing swimsuits, and as you might imagine, this wardrobe deficiency presented a challenge for two girls who planned to work by the pool for most of the day. Eventually we decided there was nothing scandalous about sitting poolside in our underwear (keep in mind that this was during a decade when people still loved them some cotton, and a thong was nothing more than a type of sandal people liked to wear in the summertime). So Paige and I and our modest underpinnings took the work party outside, where we prayed to the good Lord that there wasn’t a single neighbor with a view of Kerri’s backyard.

(Of course we didn’t have any sunscreen because we were college students and historically inconsistent with life’s daily responsibilities like, for example, SKIN CANCER PREVENTION.)

(Clearly the Bora-Bora lesson had not stuck.)

Nonetheless, the first part of the morning ambled along quite pleasantly. We very deliberately didn’t do any splashing when the phone rang (we might have been missing the sunblock, but at least we had the good sense to know that nothing ruins a business call faster than someone screaming “CANNONBALL!”), and even though the pool had been decidedly
ick
just weeks before, its makeover had elevated it to “tranquil oasis” status. Paige and I were just as thrilled as we could be.

A couple of hours into our poolside diversion, I was floating on my back in the center of the pool (to my credit, I was listening for the phone and writing some letters IN MY HEAD) when Paige’s voice broke the silence.

“Peach?”

The fact that she invoked my family nickname got my attention.

“PEACH?”

I sat up.

“Don’t panic, but, um . . .”

“WHAT IS IT?”

“Well, it’s just that you shouldn’t get any water in your mouth and you surely don’t need to breathe underwater because there’s, um, well
 
—there’s a dead squirrel floating at the other end of the pool.”

“THERE’S A DEAD WHAT FLOATING WHERE?”

Let me tell you that Paige was not kidding.

And listen. I am not by nature what anyone would call a fast-moving individual, but I would venture a guess that my cotton undergarments and I made it out of that pool in four seconds flat. GIDDY ON UP.

We’re still not sure where the squirrel came from, by the way. Maybe he’d been lodged in a drain. Maybe he fell from a tree. Maybe it was so hot that he drowned himself when we weren’t looking. But since SWIMMING WITH RODENTS was nowhere on my bucket list, it seemed safe to make the call that pool time was over. Granted, working inside at a desk wasn’t quite as refreshing, but at least we wouldn’t run the risk of contracting some sort of squirrel-transmitted plague.

And to add insult to injury? I got me a mighty fine sunburn that day. It was mainly my chest and shoulders since my legs were in the water most of the time, but it would be several more days before I could convince myself to wear a bra. Plus, since I had been wearing a bra in the pool, my sunburn was particularly noticeable in the places where there had been a lace overlay. I’ll leave that to your imagination, but suffice it to say there was a certain Vanity Fair design that I could not ever bring myself to wear again, what with that time I inadvertently let the sun tattoo it to my chest area and all.

I was still pretty tender skinned when the Friday of the big Waverly Hill party rolled around. Unfortunately, no one had a spare second to care. Sister and Kerri, who obviously was back in town by then, were in charge of details on top of details on top of details, and despite the fact that
my personality prefers to get a glimpse of a big picture and then KEEP MOVIN’, EVERYBODY, I knew that Paige and I were going to have to hunker down and get after it before the party started at six. We had a U-Haul full of stuff that needed to be unloaded
 
—table linens, gift bags, kids’ favors, bottled waters, votive candles, citronella torches, and no small quantity of tree lights
 
—and it took the four of us, Barry, a few of Kerri’s friends, and an array of vendors the better part of the day to get everything unpacked and set up.

Guests started to arrive around five thirty, and despite the fact that Paige, Sister, and I looked like Melanie Griffith in
Working Girl
when the steam from the dim sum cart has made her face shiny and her hair frizzy, the setting was magical. Kids jumped in bouncy castles, grown-ups sipped drinks under the oak trees, and the sun was just starting to set on the far side of the property. There was no escaping the scent of citronella, but it only served to make the night seem even more Southern. Considering how our week had started, it was hard to believe that everything had come together
 
—but it did.

The fact that my frizzy hair and sweat-soaked shirt didn’t scare any small children when Paige and I were manning the face-painting booth was just an extra measure of blessing. My hunch was that they were at least a little distracted by the man who was making balloon animals. God love him, he was sweating to the point that he had to have been dealing with some dehydration issues. Paige and I looked like Scarlett O’Hara in the shade by comparison.

I’m not trying to be petty about it. But we’d been outside on a July day in Georgia for the better part of sixteen hours. Sometimes you have to find a little comfort where you can.