The Girls of August Read online

  “Oh, tell!” Curry squealed, throwing her long arms around my neck and pulling me toward her just as the sound of raindrops pinged, fat and cold, against the beautiful prismed panes of our old house on Church Street Charleston.

  “Not on your very young life,” I said around a sudden and surprising lump in my throat. “Even aunts are entitled to a little mystery.”

  I gazed out the rain-splattered window as I rested in Curry’s embrace, and an odd heaviness seized my heart. Yes, a little mystery…

  Chapter

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  1

  The girls of August had decided, given our long hiatus and the introduction of a new person—Baby Gaillard née LucyAnne Gaillard, to be exact—that we had best meet ahead of time at my house to map out our strategy and make sure we all felt OK about Tiger Island. We were to meet the second weekend of June, so we had plenty of time to reconnoiter if need be.

  I stood in my kitchen, barefoot, anxious, muddling the sugar and mint that would spice the pitcher of mojitos I intended to ply the girls with. They would be arriving momentarily, thus my nerves. Had we changed too much? Had three years been kind or cruel? What if one of us had gotten wildly fat or depressed or mean-spirited? Why, on earth, was I fretting so?

  “Calm down,” I whispered.

  I began juicing the limes. The aroma of citrus and sugar curled through the air, and as I breathed in the tart sweet, I considered our different fates.

  Me? I had married a man who would become—in terms of the medical establishment—the least of them: a family practitioner. But in terms of the heart, he towered over Oliver and Hugh and Teddy. Which isn’t to say I didn’t love and admire the other guys. But I got lucky with Mac. He was, as Curry was so fond of saying, a keeper. I tore off another handful of mint leaves, added them to my stone mortar, and thought how ironic it was that a man who had dedicated his life to healthy families had no children of his own.

  As for me, after I quit teaching, I did nothing to serve that relentless baby need—no charity work with homeless or orphaned children, no more volunteer work at the hospital. The lack of kids in my life had made it too painful to be around other people’s kids. Maybe that was selfish. But we all have coping mechanisms, and avoiding the sweet voices of the young was my way. So I stayed busy with my catering business and was, in fact, something of a celebrity in old Charleston. And no one suspected that the yearly anonymous donation that kept the School for Children afloat came from Mac and me.

  Then there was Rachel’s husband, Oliver, who was one of Atlanta’s most esteemed oncologists. The money had changed Oliver, if you ask me. It had made him antiseptic, a wee bit arrogant, a tad remote, but done nothing to diminish his million-dollar smile and his doting affection for the Italian greyhounds they bred and showed. Or maybe it wasn’t the money. Maybe dealing with so many profoundly sick and dying people had caused Oliver to lose some of that boyish charm and retreat into a safer space, a space where he didn’t feel the world’s sadness quite so acutely. That was something I could understand.

  Rachel, however, didn’t let anything change her. She was a tough Jewish gal from Hoboken, New Jersey, who had, quite simply, a heart of gold. She was sassy and sarcastic, and suffered no fools. She and Oliver had met while he was just beginning his medical residency and she was finishing up her final semester in nursing school. A pediatric nurse with five children, she seemed to have chosen a profession that would serve her offspring, if not herself.

  And then there was sweet Barbara, who’d married Hugh, the heart surgeon in our group. With a booming Birmingham practice (Cornelia Colleton’s father was among the patients who called him Doc) and an aptness for society and its galas, he had—five years into his practice—demanded that Barbara quit teaching school in order to raise their three children with the help of an imported English nanny.

  “Over my dead body, Dr. Fowler,” Barbara had told him. “You might love affectation and fine china, but don’t ever forget that we’re two poor crackers from Marianna, Florida, who happened to get lucky. I will raise my children myself, thank you very much. And I will live out my days as a working woman.”

  I poured the cold rum into the Waterford pitcher (yes, I liked nice things too) and Barbara bloomed in my mind’s eye—her cola-brown eyes flashing with righteousness as she gave Hugh what for—and my anxieties over their visit began to ease. In fact, as I threw back a wee shot of rum, imagining our laughter and conspiratorial whispers, I decided Rachel and Barbara couldn’t arrive soon enough.

  * * *

  “I’m not spending a week on an island with anybody named Baby,” Rachel said grumpily, looking at the photograph of the house. “I don’t care if it’s the most perfect beach house on earth.”

  I watched Rachel from my spot on the sofa and decided these past three years had been good to her. Her chestnut hair still gleamed and her blue eyes shone with that endless curiosity I so loved about her. And, after five kids and twenty-some years, she’d kept her figure. Tall and buxom, she was what you called a handsome woman.

  “Just look. The house is to die for. Puts the Colleton house to shame. But really! Baby?” She shoved the photo at Barbara, who had just arrived from Birmingham and had barely had time to put her luggage down before I stuck a mojito in her hand.

  “It just about is. Perfect, I mean,” Barbara said, her long, beautiful fingers cupping the photo. “Look at that beach. Look at those roses. Actually, Rachel, it looks like the Colleton house, only…I dunno…more lived in, a place you could really get used to.” She sighed, as if even the mention of the Colleton house filled her with memories too sweet to bear, and then tossed the photo on the coffee table. “Better Baby than Cornelia Colleton, if you ask me,” she said, her eyes widening at the mention of Teddy’s ex.

  “She has another name,” I said. “It’s LucyAnne. Two words, but all together. Teddy told me.”

  “Oh, Teddy.” Rachel waved her drink dismissively through the air. “Anybody who’d marry a Baby…,” Rachel said, and then looked over at me. “Sorry, Maddy.”

  Before I had dated and married Mac, I had been with Teddy Patterson for almost a year. It was my first year out of Vanderbilt and his first in his residency at the teaching hospital there. I was a brand-new Pink Lady in the evenings, dispensing everything from chewing gum to cigarettes (those were the old days) to hugs, hoping I was providing some measure of comfort to the sick and grieving after my teaching stint at Harrowbrook Elementary was done for the day. Teddy was just starting his long climb toward becoming a pediatric surgeon. We were totally and groggily in love…I more than he, as it turned out.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said to Rachel. “It was doomed from the start. Baby pointed that out to me not a week ago.”

  She and Teddy had spent a few days on Tiger Island at the house in the photo, which was Baby’s family’s summer home, dating back to the early nineteen hundreds. He’d brought her over for supper so she could meet Mac and me before they headed back to Lexington the following day. They actively engaged in a hard sell. Indeed, both Baby and Teddy seemed desperate for us to use the house for our August outing. I suspected Teddy wanted us to accept Baby into our circle because if we did, he would think we’d forgiven him for the accident.

  Rachel delicately picked a strand of rum-scented mint from between her teeth. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I was in the kitchen, putting the final touches on my shrimp and grits, and she followed me in there like the proverbial puppy dog, wearing nothing but a dress so short you could see her coochie if you were willing to look. She helped herself to a shrimp right out of the pot, licked her fingers, wiped them on her thigh, and, laughing merrily, said, ‘Well, of course you couldn’t have married Teddy. You’d have been Madison Patterson. Can you imagine?’”

  “Little bitch,” Rachel snapped.

  “What did you say?” asked Barbara, who, I had noticed, seemed to be settling into a middle-aged spread, something I was fighting with every ounce of my b
eing.

  “Nothing. As I’ve gotten older, I’m not so good with the comebacks.” I grabbed a couch pillow and drew it to me, cradling it as if it were a fat baby.

  We were silent for a moment. I suppose, each in our own way, we were taking stock of not being twenty-three any longer.

  Barbara tossed back the sandy-blonde hair that she’d grown out to past her shoulders and, breaking the silence, said in her lovely north Florida drawl, “So, besides being a little bitch, what’s she like?”

  I gazed down at my drink and thought a moment. I wanted to be fair. And honest. And true to Melinda. Doing all three was going to be impossible. “Well, let’s see. She is very, very, very young.”

  “How young?” Rachel said, slitting her eyes.

  I looked first to Rachel and then to Barbara. “Hang on to your panties, girls.”

  “Oh, gawd! Please tell me she’s not jailbait,” Barbara said, her plump face revealing hope and shock.

  I took a sip and my time. I admit, I relished the suspense. “Well, almost. I’m not sure exactly. But if I had to guess, I think she’s legal in most states but probably won’t see her third decade for a good long while.”

  Rachel harrumphed. “No wonder Teddy didn’t invite anyone to the wedding. He’s ashamed.”

  Reaching for a sesame cheese straw, Barbara said, “Now give us the really bad news. How beautiful is she?”

  “She’s pretty, real pretty. And she’s got a great body. Even Mac said so and he hardly ever comments on other women. To me, anyway.”

  “Brunette?” Rachel cocked her head at me.

  “Nope. Long blonde hair, deep-green eyes, pert little nose, great boobs. If she were taller, she’d be a model.” I wiped the condensation off my glass with my thumb. “She’s a traffic-stopper, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “Teddy!” Barbara spit his name the way she’d spit his first wife’s name moments before. “He can be such a jerk.”

  “And a fiend for pretty blondes.”

  “If it’s any consolation,” I said, topping off our drinks, “God gave her all body and no brains.”

  “He went from beautiful, brilliant, grown-up Melinda to a child with no brains?” Rachel looked indignant, and I thought it was a good thing Teddy was in Lexington and not in this room because Rachel might have given him a finger-wagging what for. “What is he thinking!”

  “He’s not,” Barbara said.

  “I don’t know. He might be,” I said, “but it’s not with what’s up here.” I tapped my skull.

  “Yeah…he always did think with his pecker,” Rachel said, her slight acquired Atlanta lilt sloshing into her New Jersey tough-girl accent.

  “And there’s another catch,” I said.

  “Oh-oh. What’s that?” Rachel was just about to wiggle out of this deal. I could see it in her face, which was beginning to harden against the whole idea of Tiger Island.

  “It’s not a week.”

  “What! But it’s always a week. It has to be that way,” Barbara said, setting down her drink.

  “Something about the guy they hire to ferry them to and fro. He’s not going to be available on the seventh day out.”

  “Why not? Then let’s just hire somebody else.” Rachel’s practical streak was admirable.

  “They say there is nobody else. We’re going to be out there for fourteen days.”

  “A two-week vacation!” By the tenor in Barbara’s voice, you would have thought she’d never heard of such a thing.

  “It’s not what we do,” Rachel said.

  “I agree. It seems unthinkable. But those are the cards they’re dealing.”

  “Two weeks,” Rachel said, tilting her head in that wistful manner that dispelled her toughness.

  “Yep,” I said, warming to the idea even though a part of me feared the whole universe-tilting-on-its-axis threat. “Just the beach and the sun and”—I held up my mojito—“good drink and food.”

  “Oh well,” Barbara said, picking up the photo and studying it. “What are we complaining about? A longer vacation for free? And it’s a great house. I vote we live dangerously and take it.”

  Then she looked at us, levelly, and I thought I caught a glimpse of Barbara the seventh-grade French teacher. “Besides,” she said, with not a hint of a grin, “we can always drown Baby.”

  * * *

  And that was that. We were going to Tiger Island, or so I thought until Mac and I got into bed that evening. I snuggled under the sheet and rested my head on his bare shoulder. He smelled slightly of shrimp and vodka and I was caught off guard, as I often was, by how thoroughly I loved this big-hearted, Scots-Irish, six-foot-three, rumple-haired, lanky man.

  “It’s funny,” I said.

  “What’s that?” he asked, gently gathering my hair into a single swath that cascaded over my breast.

  “It’s as if no time has passed. I mean, Rachel, Barbara, and I just took up where we left off before Melinda died. Or, actually, before we even met Melinda. Three against one…first Cornelia and now poor little pitiful Baby.”

  Mac traced my collarbone with his index finger. “Poor little pitiful Baby has enough money to buy Cornelia and then some. Teddy…I tell you what, that man can smell money.”

  “Yes, and in his case money smells just like trouble.”

  Mac’s laughter sounded more rueful than joyful. He kissed my cheek and remained so close I felt his breath against my skin with each word uttered. “Listen to me, Maddy. Why don’t you girls just stay in Charleston? Have a good time here, getting reacquainted. Hell, I’ll steer clear.”

  “Honey, that’s not how it works.”

  “In the first place, I think Baby is a nut case,” he said. “I don’t see how you could spend an hour with her, much less two weeks. And I don’t like the idea of Tiger Island. It’s just too wild. The weather is crazy. The animals…I don’t even have a good idea of what’s out there anymore. Rabid coons, for all we know. Besides, it’s too hard to get to from Charleston. What if something happens?”

  “Sweetheart”—I cupped his face in my hand—“nothing is going to happen. It never does. And believe me, we can handle Baby.” As I spoke, an image of Melinda loomed—insouciant and smart and smacking down that young newcomer with one pointed glance of those startling eyes. “And we like the idea of Tiger Island because there isn’t anybody on it, nothing, really, except the house. What could bother us there?”

  “Well, number one, it’s not empty. There’s a small Gullah settlement on the western side.”

  “Oh, well, Gullahs…”

  “Most Gullahs I know are far more substantial than a lot of the people we call friends,” Mac snapped.

  “I didn’t mean they weren’t. I just meant they’re not likely to want to mingle with three middle-aged white ladies and a baby girl, are they? And by the way, do you know any of Baby’s people? Seems you would, given that both your families have houses out there.”

  “Had houses. Ours is long gone. You know that. And, yeah, I probably met them, but…” He trailed off, lost in thought, and I wished I could crawl into his brain and find out what was going on up there.

  I was just about to say, “Earth to Mac,” when he leaned up on his elbow and stared down at me, his eyes more serious than I thought they needed to be. “Did I ever tell you about all that time I spent on Tiger when I was a boy? We swam and built bonfires and told lies, and I don’t know what all. The Gullahs treated us like we were their own kids. We literally grew up together, some of us.”

  I touched his lips. “So maybe you still have friends out there.”

  Mac fell back into his pillow. “Nah. Time changes things, Maddy. I doubt a single soul would remember me.”

  “But you must know Baby’s people.”

  “Not really. Our house was on the northern tip and theirs is closer to the southern end. I still don’t know how their house survived Hugo and ours didn’t.”

  “Why didn’t y’all rebuild?”

  “Too hard. Too
much hassle. Too much money. And besides, if memory serves me, I was a handsome resident chasing after a beautiful young Pink Lady right about then.”

  I lifted his hand to my lips and kissed his fingers. “You know,” I said, “you might be surprised. I mean about anybody out there remembering you.”

  “I don’t think so, Maddy. That was another time. People change, move on. But back to my original point.” He pulled me close. “Won’t you girls at least consider staying in Charleston?”

  “Why on earth, honey, do you mind us going to Tiger Island so much?”

  “Maybe, just maybe,” he said, cupping my face in his giant hands, “it’s because I love my wife. And I don’t want to be away from her for two whole weeks. Maybe I’ve gotten spoiled these years, having you all to myself.”

  I traced his lips with my finger and whispered, “Just think how you’ll feel after all those days spent away from each other.”

  We kissed and one thing led to another as such things are wont to do. When all was said and done, I drifted to sleep, dreaming in fits and starts of a baby, and even as I dreamed, even as I saw her crawling across my kitchen floor, I knew it would never come true.

  * * *

  Two months later, the three girls of August and Baby Gaillard loaded up the SUV and Mac drove us out of Charleston. Our destination? A rickety dock on a nearly deserted stretch of coast located just past the southernmost point of Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge. Baby texted and prattled all the while. No one, not even Rachel, could have accused her of being unable to talk and use her thumbs at the same time.

  “Y’all are all Teddy talks about,” she said, tapping her smartphone’s keyboard with one hand and pulling her blonde curls over one shoulder with the other. “He says he wants me to be one of the girls of August when I grow up. Ha!” Judging by the whoosh sound, she’d evidently just sent a text into the ether. “That Teddy, he sure is a funny guy.”