Slightly South of Simple Read online

  He kissed me on the cheek. Gross. I wanted to wipe it off, but that seemed immature. Today he was wearing jeans and a blue-and-white-striped Johnnie-O shirt that he called his “surfer look.” There were no two ways about it. I might hate him, but the man was a hot surfer.

  “You look great this morning, Caroline.”

  Liar.

  “Are you feeling any better today?”

  I pinned on my fakest smile. “Oh, right as rain, sugar.”

  “I have soup and grilled cheese for you, Viv,” Mom said. “I am going to go find my other grandchildren, and then I believe I’ll take a nap.”

  “Solid plan, Mom,” I said. “I think I will, too.”

  James took my hand and helped me out of the chair. Then he put my arm around his waist and half carried me up the stairs, which was quite nice, actually.

  “Thank you for letting me see him today,” he said.

  I nodded. “He’s so perfect. He really is.”

  James helped me into bed. As I closed my eyes, I heard Preston crying.

  “It’s OK,” James whispered. “I’ll get him.”

  He hurried back, handing me the baby, and lay down on the other side of the bed to watch me feed him. I couldn’t help but think that what he had done in bed with Edie Fitzgerald was quite different from this. Oh, that hurt.

  I wanted to protest his being there, but I was too tired. So I said, “If I fall asleep, please take him back to Hummus. I don’t want him to get used to sleeping in bed with me.”

  “Oh, yeah.” James laughed. “That’s a slippery slope.”

  Vivi had slept between us for years.

  My eyelids got heavy, and between the exhaustion and the sweet smell of baby, it was impossible not to drift off. I couldn’t move on from the past, and I wasn’t ready to let go of the pain that James had caused me. But I couldn’t help but think, with him on the other side of the bed and Preston between us, that this was the way my life was supposed to turn out.

  TWENTY-ONE

  nest egg

  ansley

  New Year’s Eve, like every other important or unimportant holiday, is a huge deal in Peachtree. The town hosts an event called Marshmallows and Goals. There are fire pits all over town, actual bonfires on the island, and firefighters absolutely everywhere. I have this notion that there are so many flames you can see Peachtree from space.

  Kids and grown-ups alike spend hours roasting marshmallows and talking about what they are going to do differently on their next turn around the sun. Not me, though. I have lots of goals, but I’ve never said them out loud to anyone. I like to play it closer to the vest than that.

  Which is why I always used to tell Carter not to say anything to the girls about the money. Because you never knew what was going to happen. But he was adamant that they know they would always have a fallback plan. He was wonderful and caring and kind. But when he was adamant, there was really no arguing.

  The year after Emerson was born, Carter had finally started to get those big breaks he’d always believed in. He had always done well. We were all taken care of, and that was all that mattered to me. But he was suddenly starting to pick stocks with amazing accuracy, something that can be as much about luck as it is about skill. Carter was a realist, though, and decided to diversify instead of keeping all of the money in the market.

  He invested in a large whole life insurance policy with a company that was getting incredible returns. It was a huge security for me, no doubt.

  Around 2000, I had noticed some strange patterns in Carter’s behavior. He was keeping odd hours, which, according to him, was because he was investing in overseas markets. It made sense, but something still felt off to me.

  I wouldn’t find out until after his death that Carter’s job had turned into almost an addiction for him. The stock market is, after all, gambling by any other name. Looking back over our books, I saw that he had won big, then lost big, then won big, then lost big. I had no doubt in my mind that he would have won big again. But he died. So he never had the chance. And he never told me that he had taken out a mortgage on what I believed to be our paid-off apartment.

  The one worry I knew I wouldn’t face when Carter died was money. The life insurance policy was there. We would be fine, despite the fact that the rest of our assets were minimal at that moment.

  Brad, our insurance agent, had been a good friend for a long time. When he rang the doorbell on September 21, I was unfathomably relieved. The insurance companies were having a tricky time, because who knew who was really dead? But they had determined after ten days that Carter was gone. I was living my second-worst nightmare on a scale that was indescribable. Terrorized didn’t begin to cover how I felt.

  Brad came in and looked around. The girls were at school. I had finally made them go back to take their minds off their father. What I was going to do to take my mind off him I wasn’t sure. Brad had sat me down and handed me an envelope. I assumed his grave expression was for his friend who had died in such a gruesome way.

  “Ansley,” he said. “I have some bad news.”

  I laughed ironically. “Brad,” I said, “it can’t get any worse.”

  Only it did. The economy had been wonderful for years, and the policy had accrued a massive amount of cash value—which Carter had been slowly either taking out or “borrowing” from the policy. As he took the cash out, the face value of the policy diminished, and the money he had borrowed from the policy was also subtracted from the total amount I would receive. Long story short, my millions had dwindled to barely enough to pay the three girls’ college tuitions.

  My first reaction was to panic, obviously. Not only did I have a giant mortgage that I hadn’t known existed, but I had no way whatsoever to support our massive living expenses. And I hadn’t worked since Caroline was born. I was a nobody interior designer who hadn’t so much as picked up a shelter magazine in ten years. Who on earth would hire me over the big names in the city?

  “So what now?” I asked Brad.

  He looked at me hesitantly. “I don’t know, Ansley. I really don’t.”

  I handed Brad the check.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Invest it,” I said. “I have to have that for the girls’ college, and if there’s a little interest every year, it will help us get by.”

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  I shook my head and looked down at my feet. “I’m going to do the only thing I can do.” I sighed. “I’m moving to Peachtree Bluff.”

  Brad was a true Manhattanite, a real New Yorker, one of the ones John Updike wrote about, who believed that people living anywhere else must be kidding. If you were going to go to Brooklyn, you might as well jump off the bridge on your way. “Ansley,” he said, “get serious. Your life is here.”

  In that moment, so full of pain and dread and confusion, I looked him squarely in the face. “Brad,” I said, “my life is over.”

  At that time, I truly believed it was. Yes, of course, I had my girls to carry on for. But Carter was the love of my life. Without him, nothing made sense.

  I tossed and turned over the decision. I could sell our brownstone, but with the size of the mortgage and the instability of the Manhattan housing market at that moment, I would end up owing a ton of money even to get out of it. And what bank in their right mind would have given me a loan? I would need a job for that, and all I was qualified to do was pick sofa fabric. Even at a big design firm, it would take years to build up a clientele to support us. I felt pure, hot panic. I was on my own. With nothing. Which was when I called my mother and told her we needed to come live with them in Florida for a little bit.

  “Mom,” I explained, “Carter left me with nothing.” Actually, he had left me with far less than nothing. Not only would I owe the bank substantially on the brownstone when we sold it, but the debts that Carter owed kept rolling in. And I had no idea how I would pay them.

  “Darling,” she said, “you don’t have nothing. You’re
beautiful and talented, and you have three amazing girls. In some ways, you are very rich indeed.”

  I remember the way my breath caught in my throat, the way I nearly choked when I realized that she wasn’t going to let me come home. “None of those things is going to feed my children right now, Mom. I am seriously panicking here. If we can come to Florida with you and Dad, just for a couple of months, I can figure out how to get our life set up at Grandmother’s house in Peachtree Bluff.”

  I was lucky. Even then, I knew that. How many people would have had a house that their dead grandmother had left them just sitting there waiting for them to move right into? Not many. But I was mourning, exhausted, overwhelmed, and terrified. I had never, ever felt so alone.

  Fortunately, what felt like a lifetime but was probably more like a couple of days later, help arrived in the form of the Victim Compensation Fund. It wasn’t as much as I would have thought, because Carter hadn’t made as much as I thought over the last few years. I had to pay back what my husband owed to creditors all over the place, which took a huge chunk, but the money gave me hope. We could afford to stay in our house, while it was on the market, until Christmas, when I would move with the girls to Peachtree Bluff. I would sell the house and pay back the bank what we still owed on the brownstone. We would probably even have a tiny bit left to live on while I got back on my feet. We would make it. We would survive.

  No thanks to my mother.

  Now, needless to say, when Caroline asked me for her money, I felt a little trapped. It was like when Carter and I were trying to have her: there were no great options. I could tell her the money was gone, which would imply that I had either spent it or lost it, neither of which bathed me in a particularly favorable light.

  Or I could tell her that her father, whom she loved dearly and thought was completely without reproach, had essentially legally gambled away everything we had spent twenty-one years together building. I couldn’t bear to ruin that image of her father for her. My girls had been through enough. They deserved to have their memories.

  On the bright side, I had been, slowly but surely, putting whatever I could away every month for the girls for emergencies. I never wanted them to be in the position that I was in, all alone with no one to help them. But I had hoped that it would be something for them after I was gone. It wouldn’t be quite as much as their father was going to leave for them but when you combined what I had saved with my life insurance, it would be enough to give them a safety net. They were bright, talented, hardworking girls. All they really needed was enough to see them through a rough patch.

  “Earth to Ansley,” Jack said.

  We were sitting on the floor in my store, each on a colorful striped cotton Dash & Albert rug that would later go in a cabin on Jack’s boat, surrounded by pictures of nautical-looking light fixtures. For a home, I would have immediately declared any of these choices entirely too kitschy. For a boat, they were exactly right. These were the moments I liked. I wished we could have a life like this. I could have my girls and their families in one sphere of my life and Jack in another, and the two would never have to overlap. That would be better. That I could handle. If only it were reality.

  I held up a photo of a sconce that looked like it belonged in a submarine. “I like this for the head,” I said.

  He fixed his gaze on my face. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  I looked at the photo. “Sure, yeah. We can talk about it. What do you think?”

  He laughed. “I meant do you want to talk about what’s on your mind? I don’t care about the sconce. Like I said, pick whatever you want. The only reason I’m here at all is to spend time with you.”

  I smiled, feeling that warmth wash over me. “For one, my mother broke her ankle last week.”

  “Oh, no!” Jack said, looking concerned. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I shrugged. “I think I’m blocking it out. She got into a wreck—her fault.” I sighed. “Scott thinks there’s something off with her, so I’ll be glad to get her here for a little bit.” This was the tricky part about being a child. Scott and I thought Mom needed to be somewhere that she had a little bit of care—or at least with one of us. I knew my mother wasn’t going to want to leave Florida. I knew she wasn’t going to want to live in a nursing home or move out of her house or lose her independence. But she is the mother and we are the children. Our lives had been about her telling us what to do. When was the right time for those roles to reverse?

  “Is your brother John involved?” Jack asked.

  I laughed so hard I nearly fell over. “Oh, yeah, right. I don’t think he and Mom have even talked in like five years.” Come to think of it, I didn’t know when I had last talked to John. Sometime last year, I decided to see what would happen if I never called him, if he would ever attempt to contact me if I didn’t initiate it. I got my answer. I felt a sadness creeping in. The three of us had been best friends when we were growing up. And, yes, I wished Scott and I had more time for each other. But, whenever we were back together, it was like nothing had changed. With John, things were so damaged that I felt like they’d never be right again.

  “Oh,” Jack said. “That’s not good.” He paused. “Anything else weighing on that pretty mind?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t want to stick you with a big secret.”

  He laughed heartily. “My darling,” he said, “a good bit of my life has been centered around keeping your secrets.”

  I smiled. There was no argument about that. The man hadn’t let me down yet. I sighed and told him about Caroline and the money and what had happened to it. “I just don’t want her image of her father to be ruined,” I said. “That’s all.”

  “You have to tell her the truth,” he said. “Maybe not the whole truth. Maybe a watered-down version, like the market took a downturn after nine-eleven, which is true, and it affected all the values, and you didn’t get what you thought you would.”

  I nodded. “So you don’t think I should take the blame? I mean, I’m still here to defend myself.”

  He shook his head. “No, of course not. With all due respect, he’s gone, and you’re still here. It’s not your fault.”

  “Yeah, that’s true technically. But I should have been more involved. I always let him handle everything, and I shouldn’t have.”

  “Well, marriage is complicated.”

  “It is, isn’t it?”

  “I wasn’t very good at it.” Jack smiled. He looked into my eyes. “My heart wasn’t in it.”

  I could feel those nervous butterflies building. “Jack, I—”

  “No.” He cut me off. “I understand your reservations. Truly, I do. But I don’t see how my being in your life changes anything. I’m still the same guy I always was. It’s not like if this whole thing doesn’t work out, I’m going to do anything to hurt you. I would never.”

  I knew that was true.

  “We aren’t getting younger, Ans. Let’s give this thing a shot.”

  I nodded.

  “Wait. Is that a yes?” He looked genuinely stunned.

  I grinned at him. “I don’t really have anything to say yes to, now, do I?”

  “Will you please have dinner with me?”

  “How about next week when I’ve recovered from the complete and total lack of sleep that comes along with grandmotherhood?”

  He squeezed my hand. “Next week can’t come soon enough.”

  I hated to ruin the happy moment, but I held my hand out to stop his joy all the same. “This is not a green light for you to be a part of my family. This is maybe we’ll have dinner and take things really slowly and see how they go. OK?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Read you loud and clear.”

  I held up two photos. “Plain or fancy?”

  Jack, completely ignoring me, stood up and wiped his hands on his khaki shorts. “You decide,” he said. “I have a dinner to plan.”

  I clasped my hands together in front of my chest, closed my eyes, took a deep breath, ro
cked from side to side a little, and raised myself to standing from crossed legs—no hands. I smiled triumphantly.

  “What in God’s holy name are you doing?” he asked.

  “Oh,” I said, suddenly realizing that was, perhaps, a little odd. “It’s very important to be able to stand from a cross-legged seated position with no hands. It says a lot about your long-term strength.” At least, that was what the article Caroline had sent me said.

  He squinted at me. “You’re serious?”

  I crossed my arms. “You try it, smarty pants. It’s not as easy as it looks.”

  Jack laughed. “Next time.”

  It wasn’t until the door had fully closed that I realized I was a little nervous. I hadn’t been on a date in more than thirty-seven years.

  TWENTY-TWO

  the suit

  caroline

  “Do you remember the day we lost our fairy stones?” I asked Sloane, as she was lying beside me in my disheveled bed in the guesthouse. She was sipping coffee, I was sipping tea, and for the moment, the world was still. And mercifully quiet.

  She just nodded. “Of course I do. It was like losing a part of who we were.”

  It really had been, though I couldn’t explain why. It made me feel better to know that even after all these years, Sloane still felt that way, too. Of course, things gain their meaning when we ascribe meaning to them. But I swear it was more than that. Even now, twenty-five years after I had weighed one of those dense, heavy stones in my palm, its mineral flecks sparkling in the daylight, I could still feel the magic coming from it, the power it had. Grandpop told us those stones would keep us safe. And losing them had meant losing a part of our childish invincibility.

  “Do you remember the little bag I made to carry them in?” Sloane asked, looking over at me.

  “Of course.”

  Grammy had taught us to sew that summer—or at least attempted to. Sloane had made a little bag, misshapen and uneven, with a pink satin ribbon threaded through the top. Grammy had embroidered all three of our initials onto that bag in a matching pink, and inside we had placed our fairy stones for safekeeping.