Return to Sullivans Island (32 page)

“Does my baby want some water? Come on, miss, your momma’s gonna take care of that right now.”

Just as she changed the water in Lola’s bowl and placed it on the floor, the phone rang. It was her mother.

“Okay, I’ve thought about it and here’s what I think.”

She had not opened with a blast of
No way, forget it, you’re too young to do this, you’re an idiot…
so Beth held her breath and waited for her to continue.

“I tried to think of what I would do in your situation if it was me making the investment, and I just think that one hundred thousand dollars is an insane amount of money to risk. To be honest, it makes me feel a little bit sick to my stomach. So, I’m thinking put in ten thousand and see if he lives up to his promises, and then invest in another deal with him for more money if it turns out that he’s a straight-shooter. How does that sound?”

Beth’s head was spinning with panic and her heart began to race. Ten thousand? That’s all? She had already told Max she was going to give him ten times more than that! She would look like a fool! A complete and total fool! He would never believe a word that came out of her mouth again for the rest of her life! She might as well give him nothing if all she had to offer was this humiliating pittance! He would never see her as a full partner! Much less a wife! She was going to lose Max! Lose him! Forever!

She was just about to start screaming but something told her to calm down and just say, Okay, that sounds good, and thank you and you’re probably right, which she managed to do. Just barely.

“Look, Beth, you said this guy is developing beach properties all up and down the coast, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.” Beth was so upset she could hardly stay focused on the conversation.

“So, if this one works out, you might want to do another. I think it’s always a good rule of thumb to start slow and build, don’t you? I mean, that’s what Henry would say. I’m pretty sure about that.”

“You’re probably right. But it’s not what I had hoped for.”

“Well, life is like that, isn’t it? I mean, Beth, ten thousand dollars is an enormous amount of money! Think about it! It’s more than some people ever have to invest in anything besides their home, and for a girl of your age to have it to invest is a very incredible thing!”

“I guess.”

“So, Doodle, you send me the paperwork and I’ll sign whatever I have to sign and that’s it! And, hey! Congratulations! This is your first independent investment! Woo hoo!”

“Thanks!” Beth tried to sound enthusiastic but her disappointment had shaken her so badly it was as though her life were over. In that moment she wanted to die.

“Well, honey, I just wanted to let you know that I think you’re brilliant and I trust you and your judgment. And I love you. Here’s the fax number.”

Beth wrote it down and said goodbye to her mother, trying to sound upbeat. How was she going to tell Max? She would drop this bomb, he was going to walk away from her, and she would never see him again. Wait! she thought. Is Max only in this for the money? She had thought that before, but more and more she had become convinced that Max really cared about her for her and not just for her wallet. This was the obvious pitfall of mixing business and pleasure. She had to ignore her insecurity and proceed with confidence! She would just tell Max and he would understand. Wouldn’t he? She would say, Max? Remember that one hundred thousand? Well, now it’s ten. Yeah, right, that would impress him. Yeah, sure, that’ll work with him. And that other ninety thousand would just have to come from someone else, like that wrinkly old woman she saw him with at Atlanticville. Holy shit! she thought. I can’t let that happen. I just can’t. He needs the money. I know he does!

He had never come right out and said he was desperate in so many words but she knew it, and if she was desperate, she told herself, it was only because she wanted to be the one who made life so easy for him. She wanted to clear his path, pave his way, pre-solve any and all problems he might ever have. He would want her with him for the rest of his life. She would be his lucky charm, his guardian angel, his savior. Now, that dream along with her heart and soul were blown into little bits of laughing dust, floating through all the rooms of the Island Gamble, mocking her, whispering terrible things about her.
She had to be a big shot, didn’t she? Now what! Look at her! She’s ridiculous! Everyone knows it!

She sat down, elbows on the kitchen table, her head resting on the heels of her hands, and began to cry. Oh God! Why couldn’t she ever have anything for herself? Why couldn’t she make one decision on her own and have everyone else think that if
Beth said so
it must be all right? But nooooo! Not in this lifetime, she thought. Beth was so angry with her mother she didn’t know what to do with herself. If she had been Henry at her age, fresh out of business school, they would’ve all jumped up and said, Oh, Henry’s always been so smart and everything he touches turns to gold! He’s Uncle Freaking Midas Touch! And her twin aunts? Well, there were two of them, a team, and who could argue that they understood what the whole world of fitness was about? All you had to do was look at them! But for Beth? Never. It had never been easy for her and it never would be.

At last, Beth began to pull herself together and she typed up the paper for her mother to sign.

It read,
I give my daughter, Elizabeth Hayes, permission to borrow against her trust account with Hamilton Investments, 2020 Peachtree Road, Atlanta, Georgia, up to ten thousand dollars.
There was a line drawn for her mother’s signature under which it read
Susan Hamilton Hayes Rifkin
, and of course, it was dated for that day.

Beth printed the document and stared at the paper. Her mother had tried to understand the depth of Beth’s plight, but plain and simple, she did not. But she had tried. Beth had to give her that much credit. And her mother also thought she had come up with a perfectly acceptable compromise. If this had been only a business deal it might have been reasonable. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Beth’s judgment, it was the amount of the investment that made Susan so nervous. But she did trust her judgment. She had said so in those exact words, had she not?

Big deal, Beth thought, convinced that no one in the world really understood her. Ten thousand.

Suddenly an idea was born in Beth’s mind. She rewrote and reprinted the same document, only the second time she drew a line where the dollar amount was to go and printed it. Then, carefully, she wrote in the numerals of the dollar amount so that it read
10000
. It was a small space with no room to write out the amount as you would on an ordinary check.

She faxed it to her mother right away and thought out loud, “We’ll just leave this one to fate.”

Feeling less like a congenial hostess than she ever had, she managed to get to Atlanticville in a timely fashion. Work was a misery. It was hot, the restaurant was crowded, and she wound up clearing tables because two people called in sick. When one table complained that they had been waiting for their food for almost an hour, she was about a splinter away from telling them to go to hell and see how they liked the service there.

She hated her life more than ever and at least three times she fought back tears of anger and thought about just running away and chucking it all—the family, graduate school, and everything.

Alan and Robert pulled her aside twice to see if something was wrong.

“You sure you’re okay?” they said.

“Yeah, just pissed about something unrelated to this place. I’m okay.”

“We can take you out tonight and get you drunk. How’s that sound?” Robert said.

“I’m in,” Alan said. “Come out with us! We’re excellent company.”

“We’ll see. Y’all are the sweetest.”

“
We’ll see
sounds like a no, bubba,” Alan said to Robert.

“Yeah, darn. Looks like it’s just us again, trolling the bars all alone…It’s very sad, Beth, very sad. Pitiful, really. Right, Alan?”

“Pitiful,” Alan said, looking somber.

They were so adorable. Beth brightened a little and told herself she needed to do a better job of concealing her feelings. It wasn’t professional to consider telling patrons where to get off or to mope around in a cloud of gloom.

By the time she returned from work, her mother’s return fax was there. Beth examined it and went over her plan again. She simply added a zero and faxed it off to Woody at his home with a cover sheet that just said
Got it!
fully expecting him to call her right away. If her scheme worked, fine. If it didn’t, well, then she would plead insanity and let the firing squad commence. If Beth could not spend the rest of her life in the arms of Max Mitchell, she had all but decided with certainty that life wasn’t worth living.

And speaking of Max, he had not called her all day. Weren’t they supposed to have dinner that night? Yes, they were. Beth looked at her watch. It was already five o’clock. Where was he? She checked the message machine. Nothing. She checked her cell phone, and sure enough, she had missed his call. She dialed him back.

“Hey!” she said. “How’s the greatest guy in the world?”

“Well, you’re not going to like this.”

“What?”

“I’m still in Wilmington. We break ground here in two weeks and the contractor doesn’t have all the permits and it’s just a big mess. But I should be back tomorrow night. I’m sorry.”

She thought he was going to Wrightsville Beach, but she supposed she had heard him wrong.

“Oh, it’s okay. I’m sort of tired and I have to work on this article for the paper.”

“Which reminds me, whatever happened to the other one?”

“Oh, it comes out tomorrow.”

“Cool. Well, that will be fun to see. And Woody went back to Atlanta, I assume?”

“Yeah, he left this morning.”

“He’s a great guy.”

“Yeah. Smart like anything.”

They talked for a few more minutes and finally said goodbye.

She called Woody and got his voice mail. She called Cecily and got her voice mail too.

“So, what am I supposed to do all night? Sit around and stew?” She was talking to herself, but this was not so unusual, especially given the tensions of the day. “Oh, shoot, I may as well work on my piece for the paper.”

She went upstairs, got out a legal pad to take notes, and started rereading the letters to the editor in the
Moultrie News
and some other articles from the
Post and Courier
that she had been saving. Noise was the new cause du jour on Sullivans Island. It had long been a problem downtown in the French Quarter, on the Isle of Palms beachfront, and, of course, on Folly Beach since the days of their amusement park and the pier. But Sullivans Island was a family-oriented island, and different in that it had never really curried the favor of pub crawlers.

Beth was unsure of her political stance on the topic. In some ways, she liked the liveliness of Dunleavy’s Pub, Off the Hook, and Poe’s Tavern. It made the island seem like a happening place and she didn’t feel so isolated from the modern world. But through reading the stack of letters and articles and by talking to the guys at Atlanticville she was beginning to understand the problem. And, most especially, now that she was going to be an investor in the health of the area, it was even more important for her to fully grasp the issues.

A few residents who had purchased homes near the bars in the business district were complaining bitterly about the late-night noise. How stupid! she thought. If you wanted to live in a quiet spot, why on earth would you buy a house near a beach bar? Let’s look at it another way, she thought. Should the complaints of a few dictate the rights of the many? Yes, in this case, because wasn’t every resident entitled to peace?

The noise went farther than the backyards of the neighbors of the bar scene. There were some residents who had owned houses on the island for over fifty years and the voices from the partyers and their loud music carried over as far as Atlantic Avenue and as far back as Raven Drive.

When Beth was a little girl, Sullivans Island was a sleepy beach community. The wildest thing that happened at night might have been a stranded tourist with a flat tire. In recent years the popularity of the island’s business district had grown dramatically. Now there were easily a thousand people who came and went from all the bars and restaurants on Friday and Saturday nights to meet friends and listen to music until two in the morning. And all that noise traveled across the island like pollen, hence the complaints. Happy voices calling out to one another sounded like a good thing unless you were trying to keep your children asleep in their beds. Shouldn’t tax-paying residents have the pleasure of sleeping with their windows open, waiting to be lulled off to dreamland on the sounds of an incoming tide?

But here was the problem no one seemed overly concerned about. Yet. If someone was on the porch of a bar or in the parking lot of a restaurant in the wee hours of the morning, carrying on at the top of their lungs like a maniac, shouldn’t the authorities call their sobriety into question? Locking up rowdy drunks was surely safer than letting them drive home and killing themselves or, worse, some innocent people in another car. But the island had no holding cell, did it? If the island turned their heads while people, as drunk as forty goats, got behind the wheel of their cars resulting in tragedies, one after another, wouldn’t that be a liability for the island at some point? Certainly it would be for the bars that had overserved them. Beth had lots of questions that needed answers and she imagined she would have to go over to the police station on Monday and also place a call to the island attorney. But where was common sense in all of this? Once people were made aware that the island residents did not want to live like that, wouldn’t visitors come to their senses and have a little regard for others? As of yet, no.

Beth was not the only one stewing in her juices waiting for a phone call. What if Woody looked hard at her fax and realized she had added that zero? It took all of her willpower to put it out of her mind.