Pawleys Island-lowcountry 5 (16 page)

At almost five o’clock, after finding lamps and bookcases at Morris Sokol and delivering the subpoenas, we drove back to Pawleys. I dropped Rebecca off at her condo and went home to see what havoc Daphne had created. Byron’s car and Huey’s car were in my driveway. Had Huey come to play the conductor in Operation Gentrify?

The first thing I noticed was the smell of paint and the sounds of sixties music from Motown. As soon as I came in the back door I felt the tiniest of all urges to dance. I say tiny because, let’s be honest, it had been a while since anyone would have called me a rocking kind of gal.

All the doors and windows were open and even from the kitchen I could see furniture piled up the whole way to the front porch. They were having a party without me.

“I’m home!” I sang out, hoping for an answer and navigating my way through the maze.

No answer, just two off-key male voices singing “Under the Boardwalk” with great gusto. I peeked in the bedroom, the former shrine to my parents, and burst out laughing from the sight before me. There were Huey and Byron wearing white painter’s jumpsuits and white painter’s caps, their faces splattered all over with drips and dabs of paint. Huey was using a roller to paint the walls and Byron was on a ladder painting the ceiling. Daphne was wearing a large shirt over her clothes and on her hands and knees painting trim. Painter’s tape edged every angle of the room, and the floor was covered in drop cloths.

“Good grief!” I said. “I wish I had a camera!”

“Thank heavens you decided to take this up on a Monday! Great God! I feel like Tom Sawyer!” Huey said and came to kiss my cheek. I backed up, not wanting to get paint in my hair.

“You’re some mess, Huey Valentine. You’ve got cream-colored measles all over you!”

“I do? Heavens! Byron? Give me a little cloth with some turpentine on it, please. By the way, it’s
Rich
Cream, Benjamin Moore.”

“Of course it is,” I said and shook my head.

“Byron?” Huey said.

Byron looked down from his ladder and said, “You want me to come all the way down this ladder to get a wet cloth for you? You must be kidding. I’m a little busy? Hmm?” He went back to his painting, ignoring Huey.

Byron was right, Huey was acting spoiled. I loved it when Byron called Huey on his nonsense.

“I’ll get it, precious,” I said and looked around the room for something to do the job.

“It’s water-based,” Daphne said, getting up to stretch and take a break. “Just wash it off!” she said to Huey and turned to me saying, “So what do you think?”

Huey pursed his lips. “Wash your face! Wash your face! Next you’ll tell me to brush my teeth!”

“Oh, Huey!” I said and wiped his face. Then I looked all around the room, which had taken on a completely new personality. It was reborn and fresh. It was clean as a whistle and optimistic. The walls, ceiling and trim were creamy and warm. Even with the absence of furniture, the room was already very pleasing.

“It’s going to be beautiful!” I said. “How can I thank y’all?”

Their smiles were wide and satisfied.

“You can feed us,” Huey said. “I, for one, am starving!”

I agreed to call Louis’s for takeout and changed my clothes to help them. Everyone wanted to finish that night, and although I couldn’t see how we would, I didn’t argue. By ten o’clock, after a picnic of sorts that included fish and chips, lots of coleslaw and lemon meringue pie, we sat back with steaming mugs of coffee to assess our work.

“Tomorrow we will pull the tape and remove the drop cloths. Then we can touch up after the furniture’s in place,” Huey said, tapping the tip of his finger here and there, testing for dryness. “I haven’t worked this hard in a thousand years.”

“Ever?”
Byron said and opened his eyes wide in a bold glare.

Huey bristled and made guffing sounds.

“Hush up, you!” Daphne said and rolled hers. “Don’t pay him any mind, Mr. V.”

I smiled and Huey sighed.

Later, as I tried to sleep, knowing the mountain of disorder that waited for me on the other side of my bedroom door in the morning, I thought about generosity. The day had been a turning point in a lot of ways. The advent of Daphne had brought change, and while I avoided change whenever possible, her determination to make things right and presentable to the outside world had opened up my mind. Maybe that old bedroom would be a home office for one date with the courts or maybe it would find another purpose. It didn’t matter at that moment. What counted was that it was the generous spirits of Daphne, Byron and Huey, which had tilted the axis of my world ever so slightly, and that slight tilt was enough to change the way I felt about a lot of things.

D
APHNE
had my credit card and was gone to shopping for curtains. She said, and she was right as usual, that the room looked too institutional.

“Let me just get something light to hang up there until you decide what you really want.”

“Fine,” I said. Like I had a choice in the matter?

I was home alone realizing how much happier it made me to be organized. In a mere two days, Daphne had lightened the entire complexion of Miss Salt Air by two shades.

I was in excellent spirits for other reasons as well. There were few things more gratifying to a matrimonial attorney that had a client in the right and a defendant who was as dumb as a post. Nat Simms was as dumb as a post.

My nationwide search for bank accounts in Charlene’s name or in Nat’s name had turned up just what I thought. Or hoped. Turned out that our Bonnie and Clyde had an account in Beaufort, South Carolina. That account sent its statements to a mailbox in Charlene’s name in Charleston
and
that sweet little account had seen deposits and withdrawals in excess of two hundred thousand dollars over the last year. Well, what do y’all know? Imagine my surprise.

All these thoughts were swimming around and all this damning evidence was laid out before me in my beautiful, okay, lovely new office, organized that very morning. I had purchased a most useful oversized month-at-a-glance calendar from Staples and notated every phone call, hotel visit, motel visit, vacation, deposit, withdrawal and expenditure Nat had made for as long as the records showed. It was highlighted in other colors to show Rebecca’s birthday, Mother’s Day, their anniversary, class plays, parent teacher conferences and so on. Without fail Nat had an afternoon of sweaty ooh la la with Charlene and a blizzard of phone calls on all dates corresponding to anything of remote importance to Rebecca.

Just to demonstrate the real depth of the callous depravity of Nat and Charlene, on Rebecca’s wedding anniversary Nat had Charlene tucked away in the Ritz-Carlton in Jacksonville, Florida, in the honeymoon suite no less, while she recovered from a trip to Dr. Nip O’Tuck. She had ordered lobster and champagne that night from room service. Rebecca and Nat dined at an Outback Steakhouse, where Nat was interrupted on three occasions by cell phone calls from Charlene. Nice. Very nice going, Nat.

As the information flooded in, I could’ve told you almost anything you wanted to know about Nat, Charlene and all their personal habits. No wonder Rebecca had been so fooled by Nat. There were so many transgressions of his marriage vows that I’d been forced to lay it out on a calendar grid like a scorecard just to see who was where when.

But the details were well worth the gathering. Just like a good general knows the time to strike the enemy is when victory is a foregone conclusion, I looked at my telephone and imagined the invisible line between it and Harry Albright’s office as a lit fuse that would dissolve its way to Nat and Harry, leaving nothing but ashes in its trail. I was almost giddy as I dialed Albright’s number and thoroughly deflated when I learned he was out of the office for the remainder of the day. I left a message with his cantankerous mother that I was waiting for the overdue interrogatory from Nat, and hanging up, I decided to make some phone calls. First I called the family court in Charleston to see if we had been assigned a judge.

A gal named Anice Geddis answered the telephone.

“Ms. Geddis, this is Abigail Thurmond calling, and I am wondering if you can help me with a piece of information.”

“I can try,” she said.

“I represent Rebecca Simms in the case for divorce against her husband, Nathaniel Simms.” I gave her the case number and the date and hour of our hearing.

“Can you hold for just a moment? Good gracious, the phones are ringing off the hook today!”

She put me on hold; I waited for a while, and finally she came back.

“Judge Prescott has that one.”

“Julian Prescott?”

“Yep. We only have one.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Oh, swell. This presented a huge ethical problem. I knew I had to ask for another judge and decided to call Julian and see what he wanted to do. Sure enough, his office number was listed with information, and after a short wait, he picked up the line.

“Julian? Hey, it’s Abigail.”

“I knew that! How are you?”

“Practicing law again. Um, listen, we have a small issue here.”

“I heard that about you resuming your practice. Hey, are you irked with me because I didn’t go with you to get a cup of coffee that day?”

“No, Julian,” I lied. “I couldn’t care less about that. The problem is that you’re the judge on a case I’m handling.”

“Oh. But that, I mean, we, um, that was years ago! Do you
really
think anyone would care?”

Well, he certainly got over
me,
didn’t he? I could feel myself turning every primary and secondary color associated with the swelling soufflé of rage and humiliation.

“It doesn’t matter, Julian. You know that.” My stupid heart was pounding.

“No problem. Give me the details and I’ll recuse myself.”

“Thanks. I can email it over if it’s easier.”

“You have email? You?”

“Yeah. So. That would be great. Thanks.”

“Okay…my email is [email protected].”

I wrote it down and mumbled, “Okay.”

There was an uncomfortable pause and then he said, “Okay, then. You doing all right?”

“Yeah, I’m great. You?”

“Oh, everything’s fine. Staying busy, you know…”

Somebody had to put a stop to the drivel, so I stepped up. “Okay. Well, you take care, Julian.” I pressed the off button of my phone.

I stood there trying to recount the conversation word for word. All I could take away from it was that there was absolutely no desire on his part to engage me in anything more than polite informalities. I felt like I’d been slapped. Worse, I could feel tears burning the sides of my eyes. Surely he realized the price of my relationship with him had cost me more than anyone should have to pay for one mistake. One mistake.

But had it been a mistake to sleep with Julian when I was married to John? Of course it was morally wrong. But the affection and desire I felt for Julian was not a black-and-white situation. It had
nothing whatsoever
to do with John. When I fell in love with Julian, it was as though I had no control over it. It was a riptide, and it never occurred to me that I could resist the undertow. It just happened.

I smelled him before I saw his face in the crowd around the bar. He didn’t smell like the men’s fragrance counter at Dillard’s, okay? He just smelled clean and manly. We were at the old Hyatt in Chicago, and there were twenty or so of us there having drinks at the end of a long day of lectures. I was seated on a bar stool talking to a gal from Minneapolis, and he leaned in behind me trying to attract the bartender. He ordered a glass of Merlot and I remember thinking,
Gosh, red wine sounds good all of a sudden
. So I said, I’ll have one too. He said, put it on my tab. I objected and he said something like,
Why can’t I buy someone a drink,
and proceeded to buy a drink for a total stranger standing next to him on the other side, a squirrely-looking male, I might add, to prove his point. He said he was feeling generous, that he loved Chicago and who was I?

We began to talk, and for the first time in years, I felt alive. He treated me like I was interesting and smart and he looked at me in a way that no man had ever looked at me before, as though he knew my every thought. He made me feel young and beautiful and, God help me, sexy. Maybe the most important part of my first encounter with him was that he really listened to me. And we laughed, really laughed. That was the beginning of the affair right there over a glass of wine. It didn’t matter one whit that we were fully dressed and in the company of many people. He hung on my every word and I hung on his. The air between us sizzled and we never discussed whether or not we would wind up in bed and was it right or wrong. It was like this—if we didn’t sleep together, we were going to die. We had a one-way ticket on a freight train to hell.

Yes, he was right to say it had all happened so long ago that no one would probably have cared, but for me, seeing him and hearing his voice made it seem like it was beginning all over again. What a fool I was!

Look, if he had ever made me feel dirty or used, I would have hated him, but for a different set of reasons. But at that moment, I thought it was worse to feel insignificant or ridiculous, and he had just made me feel both in the course of a two-minute conversation. To pile on the misery, I realized that some part of me, some very weak and pathetic part of me, still cared deeply for him.

“Oh! Get out the violins!” I said to the thin air and decided to go for a short walk on the beach.

I kicked off my shoes and walked along the water’s edge, letting the cool surf wash over my feet. It didn’t take long until I had my emotions under control again. All I had to do was tell myself
get over it
about a billion times. I decided I had too much to do to waste my time fretting over Julian Prescott. Intellectually, I knew it was absurd. Absurd. Yep. That’s what it was. Get over it. Get over it. What if I went to my grave as an old lady and I still wasn’t over it? That was one of my little issues. I never got over
anything
. I hung on to bones like a mad dog.

Thoroughly annoyed with myself, I walked back to my house, kicking through the white sand and cut my big toe on a broken shell. I sat on the bottom step of the walkover that bridged my yard with the beach and watched the trickle of blood. Great. I was bleeding. It would probably get infected, I would have to have my toe amputated and never be able to wear thongs again—and, believe me, a thong sandal was the only kind of thong I had in my wardrobe. Julian would never fall in love with me again if I lost a toe. And, and, and…it was time for Little Miss Sunshine to buck the hell up! Or at least to get a Band-Aid.

I hobbled back inside, washed my toe and gave it first aid. All I kept thinking was how long it had been since I’d had any kind of minor accident that caused me to bleed, and I realized it had been a very long time. But I could bleed like anyone else, and then a whole new thought popped into my head about, you got it, Julian. Maybe it wasn’t that he didn’t care about me. Maybe he had just sworn off relationships. Wasn’t that what men did? Crawled in a cave to heal wounds? I mean, sure I won the prize for lousy personal life, but maybe he was first runner-up? Who knew?

I was considering it (engraved trophies perhaps?) when my cell phone rang. It was Rebecca.

“Hey! It’s me. What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow? Well, other than making the world a better place by changing one life at a time through our legal system, nothing.”

“Want to drive with me to the Charleston airport to pick up Claudia? I’m taking the day off.”

“Sure. Why not? What time do you want to leave?”

“Early. Around eight? I can’t wait to see her and I can’t wait for you to meet her. She’s really and truly a wonderful woman, and God knows she’s been a great friend to me.”

“Can we stop by Saks? I bought some clothes last week, and if they haven’t shipped them yet, I could just pick them up myself.”

“Let me guess—something black?”

“Pretty grim, right?”

“Yeah.”

After a little giggle, a
thanks a lot
and a
see you in the morning,
we hung up.

I went back into my new office, which I could already see was going to draw me in much in the same way you lift pot lids on someone’s stove to see what’s cooking. My message light was blinking and, lo and behold! there was a message from Harry Albright. I couldn’t dial the slime’s number fast enough.

“I’ll put you through,” Broom Hilda said.

“Ms. Thurmond! I have your interrogatory. Would you like me to FedEx it or do you want to have it picked up?”

“I’ll pick it up myself. I actually have to be in Charleston tomorrow, so I can just swing by. Oh, and Mr. Albright, I think we should discuss my client’s right to be in contact with the children’s camp and her prerogative to speak to them during scheduled calling hours.” At least I had the presence of mind to do then what I should have done earlier.

Dead silence from the cockroach, and then, “What seems to be the problem?”

“Under the law, you and Mr. Simms cannot interfere or stop her from speaking to her children. You know that.”

“Ms. Thurmond, the judge granted sole custody to Mr. Simms because your client is an unfit…”

“Hold it right there, Mr. Albright. She’s been convicted of no crime. These children were coerced and I think we both know it. And my client looks like a Mother Superior next to yours and we both know that too.”

“You’re referring to that alleged unfortunate incident at Louis’s Fish…”

“
Alleged,
my big, fat foot. There were a hundred witnesses. Look, Harry, and yes, I’m calling you Harry and you can call me Abigail if you’d like, if there’s one thing you and I have both seen enough of, it’s kids getting used as tools in divorce, so let’s back off, okay?”

“We use what we have, Ms. Thurmond. But I will call the children’s camp today.”

Fine, don’t call me Abigail! “Thank you very much.” I hung up the phone and said, “Asshole!” The nomenclature was tailor made.

We drove to Charleston the next day, going over and over what I was uncovering in discovery, and with each revelation Rebecca became more and more annoyed.

“You can call your children anytime,” I said.

“Great. Now let’s see if they want to talk to me.”

By the time we got to the airport she was coming to the same conclusions I had known for years—divorce is a battlefield. The only thing that made going through it tolerable was the knowledge that a solid game plan and intense preparation could—not definitely
would
—but
could
bring some justice and a sense of closure.

We were sitting outside of the baggage claim in my car, waiting for Claudia to appear, when Rebecca said the words I longed to hear. “What in the world would I do without you, Abigail? Thank you for this, for everything.”