Bed & Breakfast Page 12

  While Josie had been collecting her party clothes, Lila’d been cornered by that disgusting Mrs. Beasley. Then, on the way back to Hilton Head she’d gotten behind some octogenarian who crawled along at thirty miles an hour, apparently unaware that he was causing traffic to back up for miles, and when she’d said, “People that age should be kept off the road,” Josie had given her that “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” look that made her feel about eight years old.

  They’d stalled again as they’d driven by the new retirement community under construction and when they’d finally arrived at her house she’d found her son Ricky and one of his college buddies wallowing in the debris of his room like pigs in a trough. She’d given Ricky a piece of her mind, slamming the door on his room as she’d heard his friend say, “Hey, your mom’s really wrapped tight.” She’d rounded up her daughter Susan and driven her over to a friend’s for an overnight, then returned to the house just as the caterer was arriving to set up and found the refrigerator’s ice maker was on the fritz. She’d gone to a local liquor store and bought extra bags of ice. As she was getting out of the shower, Evie had shown up, plunked herself down on the toilet seat as though they were still kids sharing the same bathroom, quizzed her about why Josie had called Cam to come home, then talked about her hair, her dress, her life. Then Orrie had come in, not alone as she’d expected, but with his father, Jasper, in tow. She’d decided she didn’t have time to paint her toenails and, still in her terry-cloth robe, she’d settled Jasper into the living room and poured him a weak bourbon. (She knew by the way he’d slammed his glass down on the smoke-mirrored table that he’d already had a few before he’d arrived.) As she was struggling with the zipper on her champagne-colored hostess dress, Josie had come in and asked her to fix the back of her hair, and fussed about Cam’s flight. In desperation, she’d suggested that Josie go to the kitchen and see how the preparations were coming.

  Alone at her dressing table, she’d eyed her reflection sternly, alarmed at the lines that dragged down the edges of her mouth. She’d had a chemical peel only eight months ago, but its smoothing affects were already diminishing. You’re somebody’s daughter, and somebody’s mother, and somebody’s wife, and somebody’s sister—there’s no you here at all, she thought. And then she’d heard the doorbell and got up, shaking herself like a dog coming out of water, and gone to meet her guests.

  “Mama,” she said again now, eyeing the canister of Santa Fe chilies that contained her stash of pills and wondering how she could divert attention long enough to get herself a Valium. “Come on out and circulate. Mrs. Bethune from the Garden Club has been asking where you are. And you’ve hardly even talked to Evie.”

  “Tell Evie to come out here. You know I’d rather keep my hands busy when I’m nervous.”

  “Mama. Please.” Lila inclined her head to the caterer, who was spooning caviar and sour cream into pastry shells she’d just taken out of the oven. “Too many cooks . . .”

  “Oh, I am sorry,” Josie apologized, realizing that she was in the way. “Where did I put my sherry?”

  “Right here.” Cuba, who usually disapproved of liquor, handed the glass to her with a smile. Josie tucked her blouse into the waistband of her velveteen skirt, pulled in her stomach, followed Lila through the dining room where the servers were setting up the buffet, but stalled in the doorway to the living room. “It seems to be going well,” she assured Lila.

  People were laughing, chatting, generally refusing the hors d’oeuvres but lapping up the drinks, moving from the living room to the patio, which was warmed by torches set around the lighted pool. The majority (most of whom Josie knew more by reputation than real acquaintance) were high rollers who’d contributed to Orrie’s campaign, but, as a goodwill gesture, representatives of opposing groups—a couple of embattled Democrats, some women who worked with Planned Parenthood, and a few environmental activists (or “shit-disturbing tree-huggers” as Orrie called them in private) had also been invited. One of the latter stood out: he was the only man wearing jeans (albeit with a Brooks Brothers sports coat), and he lolled against the patio door, talking to no one and viewing the proceedings with lynx-eyed calm. “There’s Bedford Bethune,” Lila said. “Do you remember him, Mama?”

  “I surely do,” Josie answered lightly. How could she forget? He’d been one of Cam’s high-school boyfriends and he’d caused a lot of arguments in her home. Bear hadn’t trusted him because of his politics. She hadn’t trusted him either. She’d thought him too cool, too self-interested. And she’d suspected that he’d been the one who’d claimed Cam’s virginity.

  As though he’d heard them talking about him, Bedford Bethune looked in their direction. Lila said, “He looks lonely. I’d better go over and say hello to him.”

  Josie said, “Yes, do,” but as Lila walked away she thought, “He isn’t lonely. He’s just chosen to isolate himself so he can be the center of attention.” Bedford had been one of the first boys in the county to wear his hair long. (It was hard to believe the furor young men’s hairstyles had caused back then.) He still wore it long, though now it was salt-and-pepper and pulled back into a ponytail. Bear had called him “a little hippie prick” and refused to let him come to the house, and when Bedford had gone off to Yale or Harvard or one of those Eastern schools the local gentry sent their sons to before the Southern colleges had started to gain prestige, Cam had moped for weeks. Word had it that Bedford had moved to Canada to avoid the draft, lived there for some fifteen years, returned to the States, and made a killing on Wall Street, then had given up the fast track to return home.

  He’d reappeared on the local scene just a few years ago, writing and editing a newsletter called The Swamp Fox, championing the rights of migrant farm workers, trying to get the bomb plant on the Savannah River cleaned up, and generally making himself troublesome to the powers that be. He’d even turned up at one of his mother’s garden club meetings to enlist the members’ support. Fundamentally, Josie agreed with his politics (as she had, secretly, way back when), but there was something about him.... She watched his expression as Lila talked to him. He was a shade too seductive, a tad too condescending, and certainly self-satisfied enough to be called, well, what Bear had called him.

  Josie turned her eyes to the bar, where Orrie, his father, Jasper, and Evie were standing. Except for some thinning of his hair, Orrie’s appearance had barely changed since Lila had brought him home in her junior year of high school, when he’d been all Adam’s apple and hangdog lust. Bear had always said Orrie lacked the manly virtues. Orrie had professed to be patriotic but he’d avoided (Bear’d said dodged) military service—though Josie could hardly blame him for that. She knew Orrie’s idea of courage went no further than a fullback going through the line at a football game and that if it hadn’t been for Jasper’s money and influence, Orrie might have been a gas-station attendant, but the qualities a woman looked for in a son-in-law weren’t necessarily the qualities she respected in men generally. She’d known from the beginning that Lila would be safe with Orrie, and Orrie hadn’t disappointed her. He was patient, indulgent, and affectionate toward Lila, and though Lila rarely showed outright meanness or bad temper, she was not—no one knew better than Josie—the easiest person to get along with.

  Orrie had gone from college jock to businessman to politician. As far as Josie knew he’d never played around. Jasper had set him up in business, he’d always been a good provider, and now he was something of a celebrity. He was no leader of men and wasn’t particularly ambitious, but Jasper was. He, many of Orrie’s backers, and even Lila seemed to think that Orrie’d just put his foot on the lower rung of the political ladder and had a high climb ahead. He was a good ol’ boy like his father, but with all the edges knocked off.

  Jasper, in contrast, was the genuine article. He had a broad back and a big, hard belly. His head was the shape of a root vegetable and his cheeks were a patchwork of bourbon blossoms. He laughed too loud, whacked men’s
backs too vigorously, still genuinely grieved for his sweet, dead wife but never greeted any woman under seventy without commenting on her sex appeal. He had a reputation for ruthlessness in business deals—as Cuba had once said, “He’d take a worm off a sick hen”—but, Josie had to admit, he had a certain rough vitality that Orrie lacked. His personality, like his red sports blazer, was in primary colors. Just now he was slipping his arm around Evie’s waist and Evie was bobbing her head and laughing in a way that made Josie’s heart sink.

  At a distance Evie looked at least ten years younger. She still wore her hair long and fluffy, and tonight she had little red satin bows that matched her dress tying it back. Her mouth was a glossy pout and her false eyelashes were so artfully applied that if Josie hadn’t watched her making little shushing sounds punctuated by curses as she’d glued them on in one of Lila’s guest bathrooms, she wouldn’t have known she was wearing them. In a photograph Evie would have been, hands down, the most beautiful woman in the room, but there was something about her actual physical presence—the slightly pigeon-toed stance and strained cheeriness of her laugh—that condemned her to being “First Runner-Up, and Winner of Miss Congeniality” just as she’d been in the Miss South Carolina contest over twenty years ago.

  Bear had always been against Evie showing herself off in beauty contests—anything that called undue attention was a mistake in a military family, and beauty contests, Bear insisted, were something only “chippies” did. Josie hadn’t much liked the idea herself, but she’d argued that Evie had a right to shine in any way she could, because she’d known from the time Evie’d been a little girl that looks were the only thing about her that ever would shine. She’d never believed that Evie was actually unintelligent, but somehow Evie’d made a habit of seeming so and didn’t know how to break it.

  By the time Evie had been conceived—an accident after the annual Marine Corps Birthday Ball when Josie’d neglected to put in her diaphragm—Josie had been less into “the miracle of birth” than a hardheaded calculation of what it would be like to raise another child virtually on her own. It had been a difficult pregnancy and Bear had even tried to get his orders changed so that he could be with her, but—not for the first or last time—he’d had a poor relationship with his commanding officer and he’d been overseas for most of her pregnancy.

  After the birth, when he’d finally come home, he’d joked that she must’ve found Evie under a rosebush. If Evie had been the son he’d wanted, both she and Evie might have redeemed themselves, but though Bear had never shown any outright disappointment, she’d known that he held a deep superstition that there was something wrong with a couple that couldn’t produce a son on the third try. She didn’t like to reduce things to the pop psychology that had made Evie’s columns popular, but Evie had always suffered from Bear’s—and perhaps even her own—neglect. Evie was the “accident” child who didn’t get the attention given to the firstborn, or the discipline imposed on the second.

  But there was something beyond that, some flaw Josie had noticed from the very beginning. Evie was—what better words could she find, even though she’d never say them aloud?—a born sucker. At two she’d handed over her toys and backed off at the first sign of bullying. At four, when most children insisted on the fairness of taking turns, she’d step aside and let the kid behind her go on the slide. By first grade she’d give up her cookies for tuna sandwiches and, even though Josie’d explained the difference in the value of coins, she’d still trade a quarter for a nickel because, “Kids like me better when I trade the way they want.”

  In high school Cam had blazed a trail of flash and sass and Lila’s light had shone, less brightly but more consistently, in honor societies and student government, but Evie couldn’t compete as either star or solid citizen. She’d become cheerleader, “Sweetheart” of boys’ clubs, homecoming queen, but surprisingly, perhaps because boys assumed she already had lots of suitors, she’d had fewer dates than either Cam or Lila. Her best friend, and sometime escort, was Lance, the team mascot, a frail, bright boy-man cursed with a terrible case of acne and a mordant wit. Josie hadn’t given much conscious thought to Lance’s sexual proclivities. She’d only known that she had no objection to Lance and Evie being alone in Evie’s room.

  In her first year of college Evie had been pursued by a couple of overly confident “big man on campus” types, but they hadn’t stayed around for long. And who could blame them? Despite Josie’s warnings that she should go slow and use her head instead of her heart, Evie would start planning the color of her bridesmaids’ dresses after the second date.

  In her sophomore year, after being dumped by a boy to whom she’d been unofficially engaged, Evie’d run off to the West Coast with Lance. By then, Bear had lost interest in everything but his memories and his bottle, and hadn’t seemed particularly concerned when Evie’d written to say that she and Lance had been married in Las Vegas. They’d gone on to live in San Francisco where Lance found work in a florist shop and Evie went back to school, their meager income supplemented by whatever Josie could scrounge out of her housekeeping money. After a couple of years, Evie’d announced that she was coming back home. She wouldn’t discuss either her marriage or her divorce with Josie, but her relationship with Lance remained surprisingly amicable. So much so that when, to everyone’s surprise, Lance went into the mail-order business selling artificial centerpieces and made a small fortune, he’d continued to support her, both financially and emotionally, through her two subsequent marriages and divorces.

  During the last few years Evie had seemed to develop a hard shell. The popularity of her newspaper column was due, at least in part, to her complaints about male behavior, but when, as now, she was in the company of the opposite sex, she reverted to cute mannerisms and showed such naked vulnerability that Josie sometimes wanted to rush over and throw a blanket over her. And though Josie had no evidence to support it, she suspected that Evie was involved in another hopeless affair.

  Feeling hopeless herself, she stepped back into the dining room and went to the table, moving a fork into alignment so that it formed a semicircle with the other forks. Was it her fault that Evie was unhappy? It seemed unfair that you were expected to assume responsibility for everything you’d done—or hadn’t done—as a parent. Sometimes when she woke up in the middle of the night she thought about the inscription on a gravestone she’d seen on St. Simons Island. The marker said, “She did the best she could.” At first she’d laughed at it because it seemed such an acknowledgment of defeat, but when she’d mentioned it to Dozier, he’d had a different take. He said it was a sign of wisdom to accept that you’d done the best you could. “We’ve only got so many years left ourselves, Josie. If we’ve really done the best we could, we’d better just give it a cosmic shrug.” She’d loved the cosmic shrug part. Went to show that Dozier was still reading philosophy, or at least sci-fi. She wished Dozier was here with her. Not with her—clearly he couldn’t be with her—but just in the same room, standing across from her and giving her that special look of understanding. And who was she to chastise Evie for weaknesses about men when she, at her age, was longing for the presence of her own brother-in-law?

  “Look at these benne straws,” Cuba, who had come up beside her, whispered. “Caterer says they homemade but I know they store-bought. And see that?” Cuba inclined her head to a large platter of rare roast beef. “That’s just for show, ’cause how peoples gonna eat it without cuttin’ it and how’s they gonna cut it when there’s no sharp knives an’no bread or biscuits to stick it in?”

  Josie agreed, “You have a point, but the table does look beautiful.”

  “Know anybody who eats with their eyes?”

  “Why, yes, people do eat with their eyes.”

  Cuba shut hers. “Wonder what’s the bill, that’s what I wonder.”

  “Well, we can always eat up the leftovers.”

  “Miz Tatternall, what we want with leftovers before Christmas?” Cuba sighed. “Seem like
these days you can’t teach young people the value of money. Like my grandchildrens carrying on ’bout a special brand of sneakershoes ...”

  “Yes. Well.” Josie glanced into the living room. Lila, still talking to Bedford, slid her eyes over to them with a look that made Josie feel uncomfortable. When she and Cuba were alone in her home, they had the ease of old friends, but she didn’t know how to balance their relationship when they were on Lila’s turf. “Maybe we ought to go back into the kitchen and see what we can do to help.”

  “Oh, it’s all ready to go. Caterer ’bout to tell Miz Lila to call everyone in to supper. Soon’s she do, I’ll go to the living room and start picking up glasses.”

  The caterer, edging her way through the crowd, reached Lila, who nodded, signaled Orrie, disengaged herself from Bedford with a smile, announced that the buffet was being served, and started toward the dining room. As guests began to follow her, the sound of chimes was heard over the din of voices and Orrie made his way to the front door, admitting some latecomers. As though the crowd had been restlessly waiting for a parade and someone had spotted the first float, the collective attention shifted to the front door. “I guess it’s them,” Josie said, craning her neck, her heart thrumping.

  “I specifically asked Aunt Edna to bring her in the back way, but she would make her entrance just I’m getting ready to serve,” Lila muttered as she swept past Josie into the kitchen and reached to take ajar of chilies from the spice rack.

  Seven

  “HEY, SIS, long time no see!” Orrie gave Cam what she called an A-frame embrace; his lips touching her cheek but his body held away stiffly at an angle. Evie came toward her, arms outstretched, looking like an advertisement for a collector’s doll in a regional Sunday supplement. “Oh, sis. My oldest sister, Camilla!” she said in a little-girl voice, kissing Cam on both cheeks, stepping back to shake her head and catch a tear on the tip of a fuchsia fingernail. The toss of her head looked studied and the touch of finger to eye seemed more like checking mascara than controlling emotion, but there was an echo in the childish pronunciation of “Oh, sis” that reminded Cam of the times Evie had begged her to come into her bed or play with her, and she found herself smiling. “Oh, Cam, it’s been too long! How long has it been?” Cam started to speak but was tackled from the side. This was no A-frame embrace. The man was pressing her to him from neck to knee, asking, “Don’t you remember me? I’m Orrie’s daddy, Jasper.”