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  The dependable rolling panorama of robust life gave her some relief. For as much as Beth embraced the twenty-first century, like all true Charlestonians, she hated change of almost any kind. Commercial development made her suspicious and she generally ignored its creeping advance, hoping it might go away. If she had lived there full-time she would have fought it with all her might. They could build all the Starbucks and Sonics in the world on Mount Pleasant and the adjoining island of Isle of Palms, but something deep inside of her depended on the peninsula of Charleston and the entire length and breadth of Sullivans Island to remain the same. So far it was reasonably so.

  They turned right on Middle Street, the Champs-Élysée of the island, and began to head toward her house. In the time it might take to swallow a pill, she would be back, perched on the threshold of her childhood. Her stomach began to flutter.

  Memories flooded her mind—all of them together, cousins, aunts, uncles, all of them. She could see herself and the others as children, running around in their pajamas, spinning like helicopters in the silver dusk, fall down dizzy, chasing lightning bugs, scooping them into mayonnaise jars with holes punched in the top. The holes were made by her Uncle Grant’s ice pick, which they were forbidden to touch.

  “Don’t you children even think about laying a hand on that thing,” he would say in a very stern voice to his boys. Then he would turn to Beth with a wink and she knew he wasn’t so very mean as all that.

  Summers! Searching the thicket for wild blackberries in the full sun of the day, filling coffee cans with them, and later, sunburned and freckled, how they feasted on hot sugary blackberry dumplings that her Aunt Maggie whipped up in her copper pots. There were literally hundreds of days when her boys, Mickey and Bucky, and Beth caught crabs down by the rocks with Uncle Grant. They used chicken necks for bait, tied up in knots on weighted ends of cord. They caught blue crabs by the score, shrieking as they moved them ever so carefully from the line to the net to the basket, trying not to get pinched—the Revenge of the Ill-Fated Crab. They shrieked again with excitement when one escaped the basket in the kitchen or on the porch, clicking its claws as it hurried sideways, looking for salvation. There was no salvation for those guys, no ma’am. They wound up steamed and dumped right from the colander on newspapers that were spread over the porch table, cracked apart and dipped in cocktail sauce. It made her laugh to remember. She realized then that she had not been crabbing in years. And she remembered how she had completely embraced her closely knit family when she was young and how important they had been to her.

  “Maybe I should take up crabbing again, Lola. Do you want to come and help?”

  “What’s that?” Mr. Brown said.

  “Nothing. I was just talking to my dog.”

  “No reason why not.”

  They passed the hill fort then and Beth sighed with relief as it had not changed one lick, except for the children’s park built in front of it that had sprung up some years ago. In her mind’s eye, she could see herself, her cousins, and a gang of island kids sliding down it on flattened cardboard boxes and catching the devil from the town fathers for trespassing and sledding on the patchy grass. They had been very young, not quite ten, when Mickey had his first brush with the law.

  “What do you think you’re doing, son?”

  Mickey looked up into the face of the chief of police and everyone thought he was going to wet his pants right there in front of the whole world.

  “Um, nothing?”

  “You children get on out of here now, before I have to lock you all up! You hear me?”

  Beth giggled to remember how they had abandoned their cardboard and run in every direction to escape incarceration.

  She remembered flying kites on the beach in the winter and all those stories they told and retold…you see, as long as things looked about the same and they told and retold the same stories, the past was still alive. They could all stay young and live forever. In that moment, that was what she wanted—for her life to be as it had been before her father died and to live forever in that corner of her childhood world.

  “Turn left here?” Mr. Brown said, snapping her out of her daydream.

  “Yes, left here and then right to that driveway on the left. Yes. Left here.”

  “Welcome home,” Mr. Brown said, and put the car in park, leaving the engine to continue its rumbling. “Always good to be home, ain’t it?”

  She simply said, “Yeah, it is.” What she wanted to say was something else entirely. She wanted to say, You don’t know how complicated this is. I might be swallowed alive in the next year. Get me out of here. But she didn’t.

  She only said, “Yeah, it is.”

  Beth leaned forward in her seat to size up the Island Gamble. She thought she had known exactly what to expect. The house would loom large, spooky, and scare the daylights out of her with its enormity. But it didn’t. She was ship-shape. Her shutters were straight, her white clapboards glistened from a recent paint job, and her silver tin roof mirrored the enormous clouds overhead like the compact mirror of a dowager. The Island Gamble seemed sweet, grandmotherly, and nostalgic, as safe a haven as one could ever want. At the sight of it she became emotional and suddenly she wanted to cry. There was her mother’s old Volvo wagon and her Aunt Maggie’s car too. They were there, waiting for her.

  She got out and liberated Lola from her crate, hooking her leash to her collar. She paid Mr. Brown and he deposited her luggage at the foot of the steps, meaning she would have the pleasure of hauling it all up the steps and into the house and then up another two flights to the second floor.

  “Thanks,” she said, and gave him five dollars instead of the ten she would have given him if he had taken her bags inside.

  Mr. Brown shrugged his shoulders, got back into his van, put it in reverse, and backed out of her life.

  Lola was nosing around, sniffing the lantana and the pittosporum, when a screen door slammed against its frame. Thwack! Beth looked up to see her mother and Aunt Maggie hurrying down the steps to greet her.

  “He-ey!” Aunt Maggie called out in a singsong. “Come on and give your auntie a kiss, you bad girl!”

  “I’m not bad,” she said, and smiled.

  “Yes she is!” Mom said. “Come here, Lola baby!”

  “What about kissing your daughter?” she said.

  “After I scratch my granddog,” she said, gave Beth a slap on her bottom, and scooped up Lola from the grass. “Look at my precious widdle baby!” Lola proceeded to wash Susan’s face, one slurp at a time. “Come see, Maggie! Our Lola’s got your nose and my chin!”

  “Well, look at that! Would y’all look at this little bit of a fur ball? Hey, darlin’.” Aunt Maggie allowed Lola to lick her hand, much like you might kiss the pope’s ring, and then she turned her attention to Beth, narrowing her famous blue eyes. “All right now, missy. Want to tell your aunt what in the world you did to your hair?”

  “I merely enhanced the red.”

  “I’ll say! Whew! Well, hon, it’s just hair, isn’t it?” She sighed so large Beth caught the fragrance of her toothpaste.

  Aunt Maggie, the self-proclaimed matriarch of the family, did not like Beth’s hair. Apparently. Beth did not give a rip what she thought. She was there to do them a favor, not to get a makeover. She was immediately annoyed but hiding it pretty well. She deemed it unwise to arrive and start bickering right away.

  “Don’t you pick on my child,” her mom said to Maggie, and gave Beth a dramatic hug, fingering her ringlets. “I happen to love red hair!”

  Beth took Lola back from her. As usual, her mother had read her mind.

  “Let me help you with the bags, kiddo,” Aunt Maggie said, groaning under the weight of her duffel bag. “Lawsamercy, chile! What you got in here? Bricks?”

  “Books,” she said, “and more books. Sorry. This one’s worse.”

  Everyone took a bag and they grumbled their way up the stairs, across the small back porch, and into the kitchen.

&
nbsp; “Where do y’all want me to sleep?”

  “Take your old room for now, but when we leave you can rotate bedrooms if you want,” Aunt Maggie said. “You must be starving. I made lunch, so why don’t you go wash airplane and dog off your hands and we can eat?”

  Airplane and dog? She was almost twenty-three years old. Did she really need someone to tell her to wash her hands?

  “Sure,” she said, kicked off her flip-flops, and took two of her bags up the steps to her old room that had never really been hers.

  The bedroom where Beth had spent many nights housed her parents’ four-poster bed, which had come into their hands when her grandparents went to their great reward. When her mother and stepfather sold the house on Queen Street and moved in with her Aunt Maggie and Uncle Grant just as they were moving to California, her mother had sold most of their belongings in an undistinguished yard sale and brought only the most important pieces of furniture and some other things with her. Those things that mattered to her and those she thought mattered to Beth, and yes, that was another issue Beth had with her. How could someone else decide what was important to you?

  The big mirror was the first artifact to arrive, followed by an old grandfather clock that chimed when it was in the mood. But the mirror was the thing. The Mirror, the curious and well-used doorway for those no longer of the flesh, was firmly installed in her Aunt Maggie’s living room the week before her mother married Simon Rifkin. So her mother’s exodus back to the island had actually begun before Beth realized what was going on. Maggie had always wanted the mirror back, saying it was original to the house. She had whined about that thing like it was made out of the skin of her children. But that’s how Beth’s Aunt Maggie was—acquisitive to the tenth power. Her mom didn’t mind returning it, saying she didn’t need the deceased walking around her house at all hours anyway. This made her mom happy and Aunt Maggie happy and Beth, well, not so much if she had recognized its departure as a sign of the times.

  So, in addition to house arrest, Beth would have the company of every dead person the family had ever known, if you believed in that stuff, which she did, because she knew it to be so from firsthand experience.

  This was the moment of Beth’s return, and moving into the house required considerable energy. After twisting her spine in every conceivable direction, Beth finally managed to get her luggage upstairs and opened her bags. She took Lola’s dishes and a Ziploc bag of her food downstairs—after she washed her hands—and placed it on the kitchen floor in a spot that was out of the way. Lola began to drink, lapping the water in such an anxious way that everyone remarked she was just adorable.

  Maggie had produced a spread of tuna salad sandwiches with no crusts, pickles, celery, and olives, iced tea, and sliced watermelon. This was the hallmark hot-weather lunch of their childhood.

  “This looks great,” Beth said, determined to be pleasant.

  “Good, honey, why don’t we say grace?” Maggie said, and sat in her usual spot at the head of the table. She snapped her linen napkin in the air and pulled it across her lap, bowing her head, mumbling some words in a voice she never used except for serious prayer and holiday toasts.

  “Amen,” they all said.

  “My sister can make tuna salad like nobody’s business,” Susan said, taking three sandwich wedges, a load of pickles, celery, and olives. She passed the platter to Beth. “Saltshaker?”

  “Hungry?” Maggie said, pushing the salt toward Susan, and winked at Beth.

  Beth took three wedges and more pickles, celery, and olives to support her mother’s healthy appetite and passed the platter to her aunt.

  “Don’t we have any potato chips?” Beth said. She couldn’t stop her inner devil from having a word.

  It was well known within the family that Maggie thought everyone should act like an anorexic at meals. In her mind, it was unladylike to fill your plate, even if you had been stranded out in the ocean for ten days, eating nothing but raw seagull, and just came home from the hospital blistered and starving, barely recovered from life-threatening dehydration.

  “No, darlin’. Sorry. I don’t keep that kind of thing in this house.”

  Maggie scanned everyone’s plates, corrected her posture, and gingerly took two wedges for herself, two slices of Mrs. Fanning’s Bread ’n Butter pickles, and one small stick of celery. Then she smiled her smug little smile of superiority, the one that had irked Beth all her life.

  It was sweltering. Beth was wearing a long, lightweight, pink scarf made of cotton gauze, twisted and double-looped around her neck, but now the room seemed warmer and even more humid, despite the ocean breeze and the ceiling fan, but mostly because of her Aunt Maggie’s opinions. So she unwound it, pulled it off, and horrified them with her cleavage.

  Maggie inhaled with a great gasp. Maggie and Susan were markedly less endowed.

  Her mother giggled and said, “She got those from Tom’s side of the family, I guess.”

  “Gee-za-ree, honey! What’s happened to you?” Beth thought her aunt’s eyes were going to burst forth and join the olives. “You know, this is Sullivans Island and you just can’t go around like that!”

  “Like what?” Susan said.

  “Like, like…you know! With your tatas almost showing!”

  “My what? Did you say my tatas?” Beth started to laugh but stopped when she saw how serious her aunt was. “Um, Aunt Maggie, this is how everyone dresses these days. Little tanks layered up, long scarves, tight jeans…it’s how we dress. It’s okay. Really. I can show you on Facebook.”

  Beth looked around. Her mother’s face was confused. She had always trusted Beth’s sense of propriety in matters of clothes and so forth. It wasn’t as though she had come home tattooed all up and down her arms. Or with twenty little rings pierced through her lips and nose. But Beth decided her mother had bowed to Aunt Maggie’s judgment too. They should see what goes on in the world, Beth thought. And even though Beth thought Maggie could be an old-fashioned, out-of-touch, world-class prude, her face and neck got hot. She was pretty sure her skin matched her hair.

  “I’m sure you’re right, Beth honey,” Maggie said. “I just don’t want people to get the wrong impression of you, that’s all.”

  “What? Did Sullivans Island suddenly become some kind of Islamic fundamentalist country or something?”

  “No, sweetheart,” Maggie said, and Beth loathed Maggie calling her sweetheart like you cannot imagine. “But you know, ahem”—Maggie cleared her throat, and Susan and Beth hated that gesture of hers because it was always the precursor to her reminding you that you were a big stupid idiot—“your Uncle Grant always says that the bait you use determines the kind of fish you catch, right? That’s all.”

  Now Beth’s anger was on the rise.

  “Well, I didn’t come here to fish. I put my life on hold and came here to watch this house so you two can go do your thing. How about instead of insulting me someone says thank you, Beth, for giving up a year of your life?”

  There was complete silence at the table then. The only sound was the clicking of the ceiling fan, which seemed to grow louder by the second. Beth had been rude and knew she had better quickly make amends.

  “Look, Aunt Maggie, I’m sorry, but here’s how it is. My hair is a little crazy, I know it, but it’s only color, for Pete’s sake. And humidity doesn’t help. And my top? I dress like everyone else my age. Believe me! You all are like a lot older than me, and maybe, just maybe, a little conservative? No one in Boston ever looked at me funny. Well, not anyone I knew anyway. I swear. Anyway, thanks for lunch. I’m gonna go unpack now and walk Lola on the beach.”

  She left the table and put her plate in the dishwasher. Silence.

  “Awesome tuna salad, Aunt Maggie. I’ll see y’all in about half an hour?”

  “Just a minute, miss,” Mom said. “Sit down.”

  Whenever Susan said Just a minute, miss, Beth knew the ice on which she was skating had grown thin. So she sat and Lola settled back down at her fe
et.

  “Your Aunt Maggie and I thought long and hard about who to ask to watch the house, and you were the only candidate who made sense to us. Above all your cousins and everyone we could think of, you are the most responsible and you have good common sense.”

  “Your momma is right,” Maggie said.

  “And, we are a family, which means we come to each other in our hour of need. I won’t have you coming in here with a chip on your shoulder like you are so put upon to do this for me and for your aunt. It isn’t nice. So let’s drop the martyr attitude right now. I mean, I have done everything for you I ever possibly could, so let’s be fair. It’s one year, not the rest of your life.”

  “Fine. Look, I know all this and I appreciate how you feel, but I don’t feel like getting pecked to death the minute I get here either. I mean, I’m almost twenty-three, right? Can I please have some respect as an adult?”

  “If you want us to treat you like an adult, then perhaps—”

  “Hold on, Maggie,” Susan said, and it was a good thing she did or Beth might have grabbed a sharp object and done her worst. “Beth’s right, you know. She is. Maybe we were a little harsh?”

  Maggie sighed as only their mother, according to legend, had ever been able to do, and looked from her sister’s face to Beth’s.

  “I’m sorry, Beth. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I am so glad you’re here. I am. And I know everything’s going to be fine. You go on and unpack and walk that precious dog of yours. She is housebroken, isn’t she?”