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  “For once I agree with her,” Amelia said, and hooked her thumb in Rusty’s direction.

  “Thanks,” Rusty said.

  “Well, I think it’s completely wonderful,” Miss Sweetie said. “Completely wonderful.”

  “I think so, too . . . is that the kitchen doorbell?” I said.

  “I think that door is locked up,” Millie said.

  “Finally!” Trip said. “Probably my dear estranged wife with my daughters . . .”

  I saw Amelia cut her eye at Rusty in disgust as though Rusty were the living embodiment of Hester Primm. I was glad Rusty had missed it because I didn’t want there to be trouble and why insult her? Like most people, bad manners made me uneasy.

  “I’ll see about it,” Mr. Jenkins said, making his way toward the dining room.

  It buzzed and buzzed with such persistence that Millie and I and then Trip followed. What we found was a horror show. There in the doorway was off-the-wagon Frances Mae, gathered upright by the muscular arms of Matthew Strickland, the sheriff of Colleton County. On his other side stood Chloe, crying like a baby. Her forehead was cut and there was blood all over her. She was entirely disheveled, and Frances Mae, for once in her slovenly, drunken, miserable life, appeared to be penitent—that is, if her silence could be translated into regret.

  “Oh Lord!” Millie cried, and hurried to the sink to wet a clean dishcloth.

  “Daddy! Oh, Daddy!” Chloe had begun great gulping sobs. She was traveling toward hysteria and I didn’t blame her. Who wouldn’t be hysterical?

  What had Frances Mae done now?

  Trip swooped up his pudgy seven-year-old Chloe and sat her on the kitchen counter like a rag doll. Millie moved in and gently applied pressure to the wound, handing Trip a second cloth to wipe the rest of the blood away.

  “It’s all right, baby,” she said to Chloe in the sweetest voice she had. “It’s just a little bitty cut. You’re not even gonna need stitches.”

  “Head wounds bleed a lot. Should I bring this one into the kitchen?” Matthew Strickland said, bringing our attention back to my low-life sister-in-law.

  “Good grief!” I said. “Well? Let’s see if you can park old Hollow Leg at the table. I’ll make some coffee.” I reached into the refrigerator for the coffee and into the cabinet for a filter.

  Matthew poured Frances Mae into a chair and she put her head down on her folded arms and appeared to pass out. I began filling the coffeepot with water.

  “It’s all right now, sweetheart,” Trip said to Chloe, and then asked, “So, what happened, Matthew?”

  “I saw her Expedition swerving a little going down Highway 17, so I followed her. I knew it was Frances Mae because of the bumper stickers. So I figured she was liquored up. Then, no surprise, she turned on Parker’s Ferry and I kept on behind her. When she went to turn into Tall Pines, she bounced off the gate and then slid into the ditch. So I picked them both up and brought them to you.”

  “Nice,” I said, and flipped the switch on the coffeemaker. “God in heaven, Matthew, and that’s a prayer of thanksgiving. What in the world would we do without you?”

  “Well, you might be spending some more time in the courthouse. That’s for sure.” Matthew smiled at me and I remembered what it was like to fool around with him not so long ago. God, he was hot. Probably inappropriate for me, but white-hot, honey. By the look in his eyes I could see that he was still interested. I blushed. Okay, I didn’t blush. I twitched in the South.

  “Frances Mae?” Trip shook her shoulder. His voice was filled with disgust. “Frances Mae?” There was no response. The fumes coming from her were powerful enough to cure a string of bass. “She’s as drunk as a goat. Out cold.”

  “Obviously,” I said.

  “The SUV is still in the ditch,” Matthew said. “Fender’s messed up.”

  “I’ll call a tow truck directly,” Mr. Jenkins said, and opened the cabinet where we kept the phone book. “Won’t be the first time. Won’t be the last.”

  “Jenkins?” Millie said. “Don’t you be scratching they mad place!”

  “Humph,” Mr. Jenkins said. “My age? Say what I please.”

  At that precise moment, Eric and Amelia appeared at the kitchen door.

  “Do you want us to light the candles on your cake, Mom?”

  “Yeah, Eric’s eating all the icing around the edges with his finger, Aunt Caroline.”

  “Gross, Eric!”

  “You do it, too, Mom!” he said.

  “Mother would never do something so vile, son,” I said with a wink, and handed him a pack of matches from the drawer.

  “Yeah, right,” he said, and then he added, “Hey! What happened here?”

  “Aunt Frances Mae wasn’t feeling very well and she accidentally ran off the road into a ditch,” I said, without missing a beat. After all, we had become accustomed to spinning this sort of situation into some reasonable explanation over the past few years.

  “Mom!” Amelia called out.

  Frances Mae raised her head and opened her eyes. “Yewr sisters are li’l bitches. Woulna drive Chloe,” she said, and once again, her head went down and her lights went out.

  She referred to her other daughters—my namesake Caroline, known as Linnie, and Isabelle, called Belle, as in southern, and she was anything but.

  “Holy shit!”

  “Eric!”

  “Sorry! But she’s baked!”

  “In the parlance of the young people? Duh,” I said, and gave Chloe a kiss on the hand. Poor thing. “Tell Miss Sweetie and Miss Nancy I’ll be right out. The Wimbleys were never ones to let a situation ruin a party.”

  “A party?” Matthew said.

  “Another birthday,” I said, and put the back of my hand over my forehead, feigning the next step to a swoon.

  “Well, I should be moving on, then,” he said.

  “Heavens no!” I said, and took him by the hand. “Come have a slice of cake!”

  Matthew smiled. “Well, thanks! Don’t mind if I do.”

  His entire six-foot-two frame just radiated testosterone. What was I thinking? Hmm, maybe he’d like to play with the birthday girl later on? I know, shame on me.

  “Tell Rusty I’ve got my hands full here,” Trip said.

  “Oh, now. You go on out and sing for your sister’s cake,” Millie said, attaching a Band-Aid to Chloe’s forehead. “Mr. Jenkins and I have this all under control.”

  “I want cake!” Chloe whimpered. “Can I please?”

  “Of course! Just wash your hands and skedaddle!” Millie smiled and helped Chloe jump to the floor.

  The candles were lit and everyone sang, wishing me a happy birthday. Happy birthday? My pig-farmer boyfriend was in absentia, the county sheriff was the current cause of some very naughty thoughts, my drunk sister-in-law was passed out at my kitchen table, and my dead mother had sent me balloons. What else could a girl want?

  2

  Excess

  DO NOT THINK FOR ONE minute that I was going to let Frances Mae Litchfield’s—okay, Frances Mae Litchfield Wimbley’s—self-indulgent escapade ruin my birthday party. As you might remember, I simply left her in the kitchen with Millie and Mr. Jenkins. But it was a little bit of divine justice for that day to have been the occasion on which Frances Mae would once again show her true colors. I know it doesn’t sound nice for me to take any kind of delight in the weakness of others, but you don’t know what a detestable witch of a sister-in-law she has been to me. So, in the cosmic sense, I had my cake and ate it, too.

  Eventually Frances Mae sobered up, and Amelia, who was beside herself with embarrassment, drove her and Chloe home to Walterboro and then she and Eric continued on back to school. All glibness aside, the whole incident was deeply upsetting because of what happened to Chloe. But instead of raising hell in the moment, I took a cool step back because number one, it was Trip’s place to do the hell-raising. And second, I didn’t want to rile Matthew and have him feel an urgent obligation to arrest Frances Mae. But unfo
rtunately Trip did not step in except to soothe Chloe. Maybe he was so shocked that he didn’t react. Maybe he would react later.

  There would be an aftermath because there was always an aftermath. It began when Mr. Jenkins had Frances Mae’s SUV hauled out of the ditch and sent it off to the body shop. He said it had a dozen empty water bottles, apparently thrown in the back along with assorted fast-food wrappers and old magazines. And in an uncharacteristic piece of criticism, he remarked that the interior of the car had a rank smell. If Mr. Jenkins was reporting this, then her SUV must have been absolutely disgusting. Then he said that Trip, whose veins occasionally pumped the holy blood of saints, had rented a veritable tank for her to drive in the meanwhile.

  It was expensive for Trip to have an estranged wife like Frances Mae because you could neither rent her a tuna-can car nor could you rent a car based on some algorithm that determined her worth as a citizen of the world. According to Mr. Jenkins, Trip kept saying that she was still the mother of his children and drove three of their four daughters all over the place and that their safety was paramount to him. I couldn’t have agreed more on that point.

  But any way you shake it up, the fact that Chloe had been hurt while in the car with her mother was a huge warning sign to all of us, gnawing away at my normal reserve and desire to mind my own business. Okay, maybe I didn’t always mind my own business and Chloe’s precarious situation was way over the limit of what I was willing to silently endure as the child’s aunt. Frances Mae was flat-out dangerous.

  On Monday, Millie and I discussed the situation all morning while sitting in the kitchen, going over invoices and considering some new labels for Sweetie’s. Every time I bumped into her during the day, the discussion continued, growing into a simmering stew. Well into the afternoon she brought me a pile of checks to sign that one of Miss Sweetie’s minions had delivered to Rosario, our housekeeper. By then we were in agreement that something had to be done. She stood by the sink, rinsing a glass and talking to me in that tone of voice that all family members knew meant “you had better listen to what I’m saying.”

  “All I did last night was fret over that child, ’eah? I couldn’t sleep for beans! And all day long I can’t even eat. This is a terrible thing going on and it’s gotta be stopped. Frances Mae’s getting drunk up and running the road can’t continue.”

  “Oh, Millie. You’re right. I’m sick with worry, too. But you know, this is Pandora’s box. If we get involved, I can smell huge drama.”

  Millie looked at me with her most serious Mount Rushmore expression.

  “Gone be worse drama iffin we find ourselves standing over that baby’s grave. That chile was all kinda shook up and so was I. So wrong. Jenkins was so mad I thought he was gonna bust. What you gone do?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, ma’am! You! What? You think if Miss Lavinia was alive she wouldn’t do something?”

  “Oh Lord, Millie. I know, but I’m not Trip’s mother.”

  “You the eldest? You need to have a little ‘come-to-Jesus meeting’ with him.”

  “Fine. Oh, fine. You’re right.”

  I called Trip and asked him to stop by for a glass of tea on the way home from his office. It was around six when he came in through the kitchen door looking like utter hell. Signs of stress were digging narrow gullies all around his eyes.

  “Hey there, brother of mine! How was your day?” I stood on my tiptoes and gave the poor rascal a smooch on the cheek.

  “Mondays have a reputation for a reason.”

  “You’re telling me? Good day, huh?

  “Yeah, great. So, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing. I just wanted to talk to you. That’s all.”

  Trip stared at me as he loosened his tie, pulled it off, wound it around his fist, and dropped it into the pocket of his jacket. He knew me so well that sometimes it was frightening. Trip looked really exhausted, something I had not seen on his face in a long time.

  “Want to walk down by the river?” he said, sensing that this conversation could wander into serious territory.

  “Yeah. That sounds good.” I handed him a frosty traveling mug of iced sweet tea and filled one for myself, casually screwing on the tops after I tossed in some sprigs of mint from Millie’s garden.

  “I can’t stay long. Rusty’s cooking fish.”

  “What kind?”

  “Frozen.” He looked at me and smiled. “Some salmon from Nova Scotia I caught a while back.”

  “Sounds too good to miss! So, let’s go.”

  As we had done probably a thousand times in our lives, we ambled across the grass, down the sloping lawn toward the dock. There was a nice breeze, and suddenly, as though we had been folded into some invisible gauze of magic, we were children again, brother and sister surrounded by all the music and smells of the magnificent Edisto River. In the distance, a scattering of great blue herons flew overhead, gliding on the airstreams, resembling creatures from the days of dinosaurs. This place, these acres, were the center of my universe. And Trip’s.

  The river often summoned a part of us that it seemed to own, especially in times of trouble. We approached the water as though drawn by a beckoning finger, stopping to lean against the rails on the platform that led to the floating dock below. It was the same spot where we always stood to adjust our bearings when a shift in our world was happening.

  Now there was the addition of Eric’s boat in the landscape, hanging above the water in dry dock. It was a blue-and-white Sea-Pro with a seventy-five-horsepower engine. Trip chose it for him as a graduation gift from all of us last summer, a little runabout that didn’t give me a nervous breakdown when Eric took it out alone. Eric had become quite the accomplished river rat, thanks to the patience and gracious attentions of my brother. Once again I was reminded of the many loving ways that Trip had filled in for Richard.

  We never said this out loud but it was obvious to everyone that Trip couldn’t handle his daughters and had all but thrown them into Frances Mae’s lap. He was naturally drawn to Eric because Trip was a man who should’ve had sons.

  Richard, on the other hand, couldn’t have put a boat in the water if his life depended on it, even to escape a global nuclear attack from the Klingons. And yes, mentally castrating Richard was one of the ways I released the contempt I felt as the years went by and he continued to treat Eric so poorly. Richard’s day of reckoning would come and there would be a hefty price to pay. I believed in karmic justice.

  But for today, I was down by the river with my brother trying to tactfully broach the subject of his daughters’ safety.

  “I didn’t sleep all night,” he said.

  “That explains why you look like you been rode so hard. And FYI, who slept?”

  “Truly.”

  “So, did you talk to Frances Mae today?” I said.

  “No. Hell no!” Trip cut his eyes at me and then took a long drink of tea. “Why would she call me?”

  “Well, I was thinking she might call to say thanks for the rental car. Or maybe to apologize? And say that what happened yesterday would never happen again or something to that effect. Although we all know it could happen again this afternoon.”

  “You think she’s gonna drive drunk again? After what happened yesterday? Is she that stupid?”

  “Well, let’s see. She’s drunk all the time, so if she wants to go somewhere, and she’s gonna drive there, chances are about one hundred percent that she’s gonna be driving drunk, right?”

  “Her butt is gonna wind up in jail. I mean, she can’t expect the police to overlook her problems forever.”

  “Yeah. It’s true. Matthew’s a great friend, but the law’s the law. And yesterday he rescued Chloe while she was bleeding from the head.”

  “It was just a little scrape,” Trip said.

  I squinted my eyes and tightened my jaw. “A little scrape. Trip? Are you serious? You’ve got a big problem here, bubba.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “The kids sh
ouldn’t be in the car with Frances Mae. Period! And let’s face it. Belle can’t be expected to run car pool for Linnie and Chloe, and Amelia’s off at college.”

  “So? That’s Frances Mae’s inconvenience, not mine.”

  Sometimes Trip could be exasperating.

  “Actually, you are technically correct. But if something happens to your girls at the hands of Frances Mae, when you know she’s perfectly fine with getting behind the wheel of a car drunk as a dog, you’ll never forgive yourself. And that’s where she’s headed. She’s the proverbial disaster waiting to happen.”

  “Shit. Great. Fine!” Trip looked at the floorboards of the deck and then out across the water. “So what are you suggesting I do?”

  “Somehow you’ve got to get the girls out of harm’s way. You have to!”

  “Aw, God! Come on, Caroline! What are you trying to say?”

  “I’m saying that as long as those girls remain with Frances Mae? They’re in danger, Trip. You know it and I know it.”

  Trip turned his attention back to the breadth and length of the river, watching for the nearly imperceptible movements of the placid water. Even the tiniest bug gliding over its surface caused ripples, seismic echoes that extended out a thousandfold from the epicenter, a Lowcountry reminder that one decision could have a disastrous impact that lasted forever.

  My brother was not a stupid man. Even though Rusty managed the most minute details of his daily life, from what he would enjoy most for entertainment to which necktie would intimidate the defendant’s attorney in the courtroom, Trip would acknowledge that he had and would always have a tremendous obligation to his daughters. But, like people say, talk was cheap.

  So, as Millie and I had planned, I planted the seed and watered it. I hoped I wouldn’t have to wait long to hear him say that he understood and agreed. I didn’t know how much time was on the side of the girls’ safety, but I knew the odds did not weigh in their favor.

  “Well,” Trip said, with a loud sigh, “there’s rehab. But we’ve already tried that four times.”

  “Alcoholism is a fiendish disease, an absolute monster.”