All Summer Long Read online

  It was true that her expenses would be much lower in South Carolina, which would help their financial constraints. But could she generate enough business from there to get her out of debt? Could she generate any business at all? Would she really be as efficient without Roni by her side in flesh and blood? She had asked Roni to consider moving south with them, but Roni could not. The timing was all wrong. Roni was firmly tied to New York. Her eighty-five-year-old mother was in assisted living, dealing with all the horrors of Alzheimer’s. Her two useless siblings and their useless spouses lived in the Midwest in oblivion, pretending no responsibility.

  “I know you’re right. I should go back to yoga,” Olivia said and fished out a large black olive from among the lettuce and tomatoes, popping it into her mouth. “I wish they’d pit these things.”

  “I wish a lot of things,” Roni said.

  “Me too.”

  Chapter 1

  Rats

  Their small commercial plane was about twenty minutes north of Charleston, descending through a thick blanket of cumulus clouds to an altitude of ten thousand feet. Once they cleared the clouds, the landscape of the Lowcountry burst into view. Waves of bright-green spartina covered former rice fields and marshlands, their blades standing in sharp contrast against the sparkling blue majestic waters of the Waccamaw River. Olivia was mesmerized. Nick’s delight at the scene, and most especially at her reaction, was very nearly a tangible thing.

  “Behold paradise!” Nick said dramatically, exhaling a gush of relief. “The sluices of water cutting through the marsh grass in tendrils . . .”

  “Just like the ringlets on the back of Miss Scarlett’s pretty little head,” she said in a terrible southern accent. Then she cut her eye at him and smiled. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be so cynical.”

  “You’re going to love living here. I swear you will,” Nick said, saying a silent prayer that the Lowcountry would work its magic on her. “And your pretty cynicism will roll away on the turn of the next tide.”

  “I’ve always enjoyed the time we’ve spent here,” she said.

  But it was one thing to stay at the gorgeous Charleston Place Hotel and have room service and quite another to live on the tip of an island in a funky old beach house.

  Her eyes were focused on the landscape as it rose to meet them. His eyes were focused on her. (Cue up the theme song from Out of Africa.) Her thick blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail that drifted down her back. She was wearing a straw fedora and all white linen, even though it was before Memorial Day. A bona fide New Yorker, Olivia didn’t give one tiny damn about when she wore white. She had her own rules.

  He loved her in hats. And in white—it reminded him of her tangled in their sheets. Nick was all too aware of her shaky feelings about the move. That’s why he went along with the house she chose. To be honest, he was uncertain about which house she actually did choose! They had looked at so many he couldn’t remember. To be more honest, he didn’t care one whit. He was one step closer to coming home, and that was all that mattered to him.

  He knew the renovation of any of the old houses would be a huge project, and Olivia loved nothing better than a huge project. Nick thought, if he was right, that the house she did choose was hideous, but she said she saw potential everywhere. Where? He thought. He couldn’t see potential in any of them.

  The good news was that all the houses were in such disrepair that his relatives, distant as they were, and old friends wouldn’t be offended by a vulgar display of wealth. At the heart of it all, he was an island boy, a Geechee boy, a Lowcountry boy. Low-key discretion was the name of the game for his tribe.

  Olivia had made at least a half a dozen trips without him back and forth between New York and the island to work on the house, staying in a hotel close by. Surely, just the time spent there on renovations had made her feel some ownership, some affection for the island. Nick felt certain that if he could get her to walk along the ocean with him as the sun was setting, the salt water would exorcise her urban demons, maybe through her feet, pulling them right out to the endless sea like a magnet. Over time her heart would soften. It had to or what?

  “Why can I never remember how beautiful this is?” she asked in a whisper.

  “Because it changes with the seasons and because it’s really just so glorious our brains can’t hold the entire memory.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You know, when I was a boy someone told me a story about how angels have different jobs. Some watch over drunks and babies, but others paint sunsets and color landscapes. That would be a cool job, wouldn’t it?”

  “If you believe in that stuff.”

  “Ah, my lovely, doubting Thomasina!” He took her hand in his and patted the back of it. He meant the gesture to say that here in God’s country she would find faith. “In time you will see wondrous things. My daddy called it reading the signs and wonders.”

  Nick was ready to wax euphoric then. He could have gone on for hours. But the flight attendant picked up the microphone to address the passengers, and although there was an onslaught of static and blank moments of completely missing communication, he knew exactly what she was saying. It was time to close the germ-ridden tray table, press the swarmy, germy button to raise his seat back, and yes, to check the germ-infested-with-something-really-scary buckle on his seat belt to be sure he didn’t go flying when the pilot stomped on the brakes as though he was going to slide into the face of the Rocky Mountains at the Telluride Airport, one of the scariest landings he had ever endured. He worried about plane crashes and sometimes obsessed about germs. Okay, he was a germaphobe. Normally he had a pack of sanitary wipes in his pocket. Somehow he had forgotten to bring them. But other than these two minor but troublesome issues, Nicholas Seymour was not neurotic in the least.

  The plane landed smoothly and stopped at the gate. Nick smiled with relief as though he had dodged a bullet. Okay. He worried about death too. And he hated to fly. But life wouldn’t be so cruel to snuff out the flickering wick of his breath when he was this close to living in the Lowcountry again. Would it? No, he thought, and pushed away a sorrowful and painful mental image of his own wake and funeral. God, how he struggled to disguise his litany of anxieties from Olivia! He knew that she knew all about them, but he pretended she did not. And she did indeed know every single tic of his but overlooked them because she knew that she wasn’t perfect either.

  They gathered up their things, deplaned, and stood beside the jetway with about fifty other people waiting to reclaim their gate-checked bags. After ten minutes or so, their luggage appeared and they began their way through the terminal toward the rental car counter. The airport was going through a massive renovation, but there were so many people milling around that it seemed Charleston’s airport had already seriously outgrown its expansion.

  “I remember the day when this airport had only two gates,” Nick said. “Then it opened a restaurant that merely served fried chicken, deviled crabs, and sweet tea. It was fabulous.”

  “Airport food? Fabulous?”

  “Hard to imagine, but yes.”

  “Wow. And then they invented air conditioning and the whole world went to hell?”

  “Yes, ma’am! The next thing you know we had the pleasure of blue and pink Princess phones and another network on the television.”

  “Yeah, and right after that Ed Sullivan went off the air and Michael Jackson was performing ‘Thriller’ on MTV ten times a day.”

  “You’re right! How could you remember that? You could hardly have been born! I recall watching it with some students and wondering how long it took to put that makeup on.”

  “Yellow eyes. True, I was just a girl of twenty-one, fresh out of school. I always thought he was a fabulous entertainer. Okay, our car rental is at National.”

  Olivia loved being that much younger than Nick. In an odd way it was nice to be thought of as somebody’s pretty young thing. She had been on her own with all the struggles of maintaining her detail-orient
ed business for such a very long time. The only person she had ever had on whom she could depend was Roni, but she didn’t come along until a few years ago.

  It was an incredible luxury to believe there was someone in this cold and lonely world who cherished her. Nick’s love was the greatest gift she’d ever known. She did her best to reciprocate, but sometimes—well okay, often—the stress (and the nut balls who were her clients) of her business got in the way. She could be described as bitchy on occasion. Okay, somewhat often. Actually she was a worrier, and sometimes she may have appeared to be aloof or maybe ill humored when she was just worried. She didn’t mean to seem to be the flavor of cranky that gave certain female New Yorkers their reputation. It was really her obsession with self-preservation that meant she came across as buttoned up or frosty in conversation when you first met her. But when she needed to, she could channel Grace Kelly.

  The nature of their professional lives was polar opposites, his being far more predictable than hers. He had known different kinds of stresses in academia, to be sure—publishing and all that—but he had been a tenured professor for ages. And as everyone knows, there was no tenure in the world of interior design, no safety net. But on the positive side, as different as their careers were, they still found time for their first passion—travel. They would drive up to Millbrook to shoot birds at Mashomack in the fall. Or hop on the Jitney to visit friends in the Hamptons in the summer. The more spontaneous the decision was, the more they relished it.

  “No self-respecting New Yorker spends weekends in the city anyway,” she would say.

  Nick strongly disagreed but went along with her when she announced upcoming plans. He would’ve been just as happy to stay at home and read. He hated to admit it, but he especially loved it when her billionaire clients invited them on their drop-dead-gorgeous three-hundred-foot yacht for a sail around some heralded playground of the rich and famous, which happened a couple of times each year. Olivia adored the spectacular thrill of the yacht and all that came with it too. The outrageous behaviors of the yacht’s owners and other guests left Nick completely agog and spouting his favorite line: “I should’ve been a shrink.” He would say this and Olivia would respond, “Come on, Nicky. They’re my best clients.” She always hoped those trips would evolve into more business.

  Actually, at the present time the yachtsman and his wife were her only active clients, but the project was winding down soon and there was nothing on the horizon. Obviously, not every getaway was on a private jet or a yacht. So, even though it was on a much less dramatic scale, they were really looking forward to their weekend escape to Charleston. Nick was excited to see the progress on the house and Olivia felt there was finally enough progress to show him.

  Nick brought out the best in her, just as a truly great teacher should. She was her most gracious when she was with him. In return, she had introduced him to other worlds that were completely unattainable on a professor’s salary. But perhaps most important, she made him feel young again. There was no price tag for rediscovered youth.

  They stepped up to the car rental counter and a very cordial man named Ed greeted them. They signed the waiting paperwork, took the keys, and left.

  “Boy, that was easy,” Olivia said.

  “Everything should be so easy,” he said.

  It was after one o’clock. Outside, the sun was so intense that they stopped midstride on the sidewalk to fish out their sunglasses and quickly put them on. Their sunglasses were in roundish tortoiseshell frames, another preference they shared. Hers were oversize, like Jackie O or Iris Apfel might have worn. His were strictly Ben Silver Charleston gentlemanly style, owlish and the kind a professor would choose. Often, in matters of their own personal taste, they lived up to their stereotypes. One would never mistake her for an academic or him for a designer.

  “I’ll drive,” he said.

  “Great! Then I can do my email.”

  The air was warm. There was a nice breeze and just enough humidity to throw her off balance. Olivia hated humidity. It did grotesque things to her hair and made her perspire in places that should not be discussed in polite company. How she would survive in this climate without a shower four times a day, she didn’t know. Nick seemed impervious to sticky jungle weather. In fact, his linen shirt and trousers were barely wrinkled even though he’d been squished into a tiny seat for two hours like a human sardine. She marveled at that because her linen looked like she’d slept in it for a week. At least she thought so.

  They found their sporty red SUV, lifted their luggage into the hatchback, cranked up the engine, and backed out of the space.

  “You hungry?” Nick said.

  “Not especially. Are you?”

  “No, but I know from experience that I will be eventually.”

  Olivia giggled, and she was not a woman given to easy or frequent giggling before she met Nick.

  “Well, listen,” she said after deleting thirty-something pieces of junk mail and dropping her phone back into her bag, “I’m just a little anxious to see our house. So if your tummy can hang on a little while, let’s drop off our stuff and then we can go grab a bite.”

  “All I want is a plate of fried shrimp at the Long Island Café,” Nick said, adding, “But I can wait a bit.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “And a chilly glass of a crisp sauvignon blanc.”

  “Mmm. That sounds delicious.”

  “They stop serving lunch at two-thirty.”

  She looked at her watch. It was already one-forty. She knew he was smiling without even looking at him.

  “Well then, sir, we’d better hurry up and get there!”

  You see? She wasn’t always inflexible.

  Soon Nick was opening the restaurant’s front door for Olivia and then holding her seat for her at the table. In a matter of minutes, after he inspected and wiped the silverware with his napkin out of habit, they were eating the most perfectly fried shrimp in the entire South and the first tomatoes of the season. The tomatoes were reasonably good even though they were from Florida. An unspoken battle exists among the southern states about who produced the best tomatoes. If you are from Charleston, the richest tomatoes blossomed in the enchanted dirt of Johns Island just like Jack’s beanstalk. There was a strong argument to be made for the tomatoes from Estill or Florence, but all these harvests wouldn’t come in until the middle of June. This was late April. So until June, the nit-picking South Carolinian tomato aficionado had to step back and make himself happy with the fruits of Florida.

  “Just think,” Nick said. “Down here we can thrive on the Mediterranean diet and get really healthy. No more soufflés at Le Bernardin or cholesterol killer gargantuan steaks at Del Frisco’s! None of those decadent cheese and charcuterie boards at Gramercy Tavern or chocolate death warrants from Daniel! No more, I say! We’ll live to be one hundred and one!”

  “I’ll sort of miss the soufflés,” Olivia said in a quiet voice. “And the chocolate.”

  Nick’s enthusiasm evaporated as he realized yet again that Olivia wasn’t one hundred percent bought into his monastic vision of their future. He really believed that refined sugar was a killer, but she’d never been particularly grateful for his lectures on topics that were not within the realm of his professional expertise. She should’ve been, he thought, but she just wasn’t.

  “Well, we’ll just have to scour the town to find the perfect delectables for you! Surely someone in this town can make a soufflé?”

  She smiled at him in a weak attempt to restore his mood. “I’m sure there is,” she said. “Aren’t there, like, three James Beard chefs here?”

  “I think you’re right!” Nick said, perking up again. “Maybe more. I think I read that somewhere. Don’t worry, sweetheart. We’ll find the devils and coax all manner of gourmet temptations out of them. I’ll make it my personal mission.”

  “It’s not the end of the world,” she said.

  “Well, if they can’t be found, I’ll lea
rn to make a soufflé myself!”

  “This I have to see,” Olivia said and had a quiet chuckle over the mental image of Nick in a toque and a long apron to the floor, whipping egg whites in a copper bowl large enough to double as a baptismal font in a kitchen that looked like a bomb had exploded in it. She dipped the corner of her napkin in her water glass and wiped some tartar sauce away from the front of his shirt. He smiled at her. She smiled back.

  “Can I get y’all anything else?” the waiter said, presenting the check. “Dessert? Coffee?”

  Nick knew that if they wanted a piece of key lime pie or the bourbon chocolate pecan pie, the waiter would not have denied it to him in a million years, but it was getting on to three o’clock and he knew they had overstayed their welcome. The busy restaurant was empty of patrons except for them. And he was pretty sure the down-home desserts at that restaurant, wonderful as they were, couldn’t compete with Daniel Boulud’s or Thomas Keller’s sublime confections. It was an apples-to-oranges situation and unfair to compare.

  “No, thank you,” Nick said, handing him back the bill with his credit card. “But this was delicious. I dream about your shrimp.”

  “They truly are incredible,” Olivia said, smiling honestly.

  “Well, thanks! I’ll tell the chef and I’ll be right back with your receipt.”

  Nick leaned back in his chair and looked intently into Olivia’s brown eyes. While their new locale might have lacked culinary arts to dazzle her Big Apple palate, his Lowcountry offered other, more deeply meaningful experiences. He was holding fast to his conviction that over time she’d understand the wisdom of his decision. And he would investigate the culinary scene. He remembered reading something in The New York Times about it not that long ago.

  “I’m so crazy about you I don’t know what to do with myself,” he said.