Slightly South of Simple Read online

  We didn’t understand yet what had really happened. At least, Sloane, Emmy, and I didn’t. I brushed it off, like Oh, that’s weird. How would a plane hit the World Trade Center? It must have been flying too low. I remember my mom calling the airline and learning that all flights going in and out were canceled. I know now that she had a bad feeling and she wanted to get us all out of the city. But when she found out that she couldn’t, she took my hand and Sloane’s, something she hadn’t done in years. I was still holding Emerson, who was a good fifty-five pounds by then. At my barely 110, I can’t explain how I carried her, with the blush on those tiny cheeks, for the five blocks from school to home.

  I remember the astonishment in her big blue eyes. Even back then, you could tell that she was the most beautiful one. As vain as I was, it didn’t bother me. She was my pet. I was proud that she was beautiful. I felt like somehow, when people stopped on the street to comment about how stunning she was, it was as though I had done something good.

  We didn’t know what was going to happen. In fact, looking back now, I wish we could have stayed on that sidewalk, me holding Emmy, Mom holding our hands, forever. We could have stayed in that moment and never gotten to the next one. Our lives would never be shattered. Our daddy would get to come home. And Emmy, my little Emmy, could stay that sheet- and-tinsel-clad angel for the rest of her life.

  FIVE

  miss fancy pants

  ansley

  Every Wednesday since what must be the beginning of time itself, Peachtreeans have gathered in the parish hall of St. Timothy’s church for the town meeting. But the year when Jackson Thompson was mayor—note how I say year, singular—he decided that a parish hall was too religious a place to hold a town meeting. It conflicted with the idea of separation of church and state.

  The only problem was that Peachtree Bluff was a tiny place. There weren’t many buildings that could hold so many of us. So Jackson decided to start holding the meetings in the park downtown. Everyone would bring his or her own lounge chair and enjoy the beautiful weather. The day of the first meeting, it rained, so everyone had to sit under umbrellas. For the second meeting, there were so many mosquitoes that everyone left looking like he or she had the measles. We all joked that God was mad that we had moved from St. Timothy’s and sent a modern-day swarm of locusts. By the third meeting, it had turned chilly. That was when Jackson Thompson decided that maybe the parish hall wasn’t so bad after all. You see, holding weekly meetings outside with no backup plan for weather or other unforeseen situations is not a good idea.

  It’s also not a good idea to make a giant scene when you are solidly middle-aged if you would rather not obsess about said scene for days. Unable to sleep, I got up at five a.m. It was a chilly morning, so I put on the leggings and long-sleeved tee I paddled in when it was too cold for a swimsuit.

  The quiet, still water eased my mind. This was what I loved most about the winter in Peachtree Bluff. The water was so clear and slick it looked almost like a painting. At night, if you didn’t know it was there, you might walk right into it thinking it was a continuation of the street. Usually, when I wanted to do my morning yoga outdoors I paddled over to Starlite Island, right across from my house. But I needed to go farther this morning, clear my mind, let the tide carry my troubles away, transform my thoughts from a roaring bundle of waves into a slick, crestless calm.

  I looked at my watch. The tide should be low enough now that I would have hours. The tide always lent me serenity. It was constant, changeless. Every day it had its highs and its lows, but, like clockwork, it continued on. That was how I needed to be too. Sometimes low, sometimes high, but always steady. Always there for my children. Always there for my friends. The constant in other people’s lives. That was my role. I knew how to play it well.

  As the sun began to rise I bumped my paddleboard into the sandbar. I knew I could kiss my little board goodbye because as soon as the girls got here . . . Well, no matter. I’d rather have them than the paddleboard—or the defined arms and core it had lent me. It crossed my mind that this sandbar was where I’d first met Jack. But this sandbar held a million good memories, past and present. And it would hold a million more. I convinced myself that it wasn’t Jack that had led me there that morning, that it wasn’t thoughts of how much he loved to fish here at sunrise that had beckoned me.

  Saluting the sun as the sun rose was perhaps the most cleansed a human could get. Inhale, rise up, exhale, swan dive forward, inhale, plank, exhale, chaturanga, inhale, up dog, exhale, down dog. And so on and so forth, as if I was the one helping the sun to chart its course into the sky. I have always been able to lose myself in that combination of body and breath. And I have always been able to find myself once again along a stretch of sand surrounded by water.

  The puttering of a small engine didn’t cause my thoughts to wander. I simply incorporated it into my motion and my mantra. It was as natural a sound as the birds calling or the waves crashing, as much a part of life on the water as any other.

  I looked up to see a small craft coming toward my sandbar that was quite unlike any I had ever seen before. It was the size and shape of a paddleboard, but with shallow sides, a tiny engine, a Carolina blue Yeti cooler for a seat, a lovely teak steering wheel and rod holders behind the cooler. It was small and functional, but even I knew it was very, very expensive.

  As the boat came closer, I started to wonder . . . It couldn’t be. Certainly not.

  Only, it was. Jack didn’t notice me. I considered slipping away unseen, paddling silently home. I was mortified over how I had acted when I had seen him last. But I found myself watching as he opened his cooler, removed a fish, baited his hook, and cast. It was a gentle motion, a smooth one, a rhythmic one, with as much finesse as my own yoga flow. I remembered the days that I spent baiting hooks with Jack, offshore or in. I never cared much for fishing. But I did care for Jack. And there was a time when I would have done most anything to be close to him.

  As I remembered, he turned and, finally, saw me. He laughed. What else could you do, really? But he stopped before the sound fully escaped, reeling it back into his mouth. He didn’t say anything and neither did I. We both just looked. It should have felt incredibly odd, standing there in the silence. But there was something about the stillness of that morning that you couldn’t bear to interrupt, something that felt natural about our quiet.

  “I swear I won’t try to talk to you,” he said finally. “You can go. I’ll pretend like I didn’t even see you.”

  I looked for the sarcasm, but found none. That wasn’t Jack. Not now. Not ever. There had been times I wanted him to be angry with me, times he certainly should have been. But, mostly, to a fault, he was kind. My face flushed with the memory of my running away. Coming face to face with the man that featured so prominently in the highlight reel of my past had caught me so off guard, so unprepared. I had imagined seeing him again for years, what that moment would be like. I never would have anticipated acting that way. I noticed that my heart was beating only a little wildly now, which was growth. Yoga must have calmed me.

  “I’m sorry I acted like that,” I said. “It was awful of me. I was just so surprised.”

  He ventured a small smile. “You and me both.”

  “Yeah?”

  He nodded. “Truth be told, I was glad you ran away. I felt like I couldn’t breathe when I saw you.”

  I could feel my heartbeat relaxing back to normal. “Me, too.”

  I took a few steps until I was close enough to see his face. It still had that childish roundness to it, and his eyes were still measured, steady, black as ink stains.

  Jack grinned at me. That same old grin like we were teenagers sneaking out to smooch on the dock. But we weren’t. We were all grown up now. I wasn’t sure why, but it pained me to remember that.

  “How are you?” I asked, cheering in my mind that I had said something, anything normal.

  He nodded. “Fine. You?”

  I shrugged. “The girls are
coming home.”

  He smiled. “How wonderful.” He looked out at his line. “Ansley, listen. We have each lived a lifetime since we last saw one another. There’s nothing that hasn’t changed.” He paused. “Well, I mean, I still have great hair, but otherwise . . .” We both laughed, and I could have hugged him for lightening the moment. “Sheldon is redoing my boat. I’d love it if you’d decorate it while I’m here. It would make my life so much easier.”

  My face moved in a way that made us both know that I was about to say “no.”

  “You don’t even have to see me,” he said. “You can do whatever you want.”

  I didn’t say anything, and he added, “Sheldon says you’re the best yacht designer this side of the Mason-Dixon.”

  I put my hands on my hips. “You mean he thinks there are better ones on the other side of the Mason-Dixon?”

  I think that’s when we both knew I was going to say yes. I sighed. “I’ll come look at it later in the week.” I added under my breath, “I’ll show Sheldon which side of the Mason-Dixon is better.”

  Jack laughed. We both saw the tug on his line. The way he moved when reeling it in was so familiar that, for an instant, it was as if we had rewound the clock forty years.

  “I hope you caught a good one,” I said.

  He reeled it in, glanced at it, and then held his gaze on me a little too long as he said, “Oh, I did.”

  My mind was miraculously still as I paddled home. Once inside, I didn’t have long to consider the ramifications of Jack being in Peachtree before my phone beeped. From beneath the glass screen cover that my store manager, Leah, had given me to keep my fingers from looking as though I had taken them to a mandolin until I could get to the phone store, I saw: Caroline: Plane leaving in 5. Flight 791. Will grab an Uber when we get there.

  I laughed. Grab an Uber. Oh, that child. Did she honestly think we had Uber here? I checked her flight status and saw that she and Vivi would be arriving in an hour and a half.

  I texted Leah: Any chance you could open today? My daughter is arriving at 10:30 . . .

  She pinged back immediately: Sure. Be there at quarter to 10.

  The good thing about a town this small was that you couldn’t live more than a ten-minute walk from anywhere. So when you needed someone, it didn’t take long to track her down.

  I turned the shower on, stepping onto the mosaic marble tile, the steam fogging the solid glass door. I didn’t think of it often, but this morning I remembered the putrid harvest-gold color this entire bathroom had been. After Carter’s death, when we moved here, I didn’t have the money to change it. I think Sloane started to realize then that something was up. But not Caroline. She was so wrapped up in being mad at me—to deflect the pain and anguish of her father dying in such a sudden and gruesome way, I think—that she hadn’t realized my spending habits had drastically changed.

  At least her bathroom tile was white. I would have heard about that, too.

  I felt that familiar pain around my heart even thinking about that time in my life, that pulsating feeling like it was literally breaking in two. It was a feeling I had never known until Carter died, one I had believed to be something that sounded romantic, a figment of some gifted writer’s imagination. But once you’ve felt it, once you know what it’s like for your emotional pain to be so deep that it becomes physical, you never forget it. Nearly every day for sixteen years, I had felt that pain. Not all day every day, like I once did. But every day, in some small way, that pain was there.

  I tied my hair up on top of my head to avoid getting it wet while I washed my body. There was no time for drying and styling. The airport was thirty minutes away, and more than anything, I needed coffee. And maybe a little bit of Kyle. But definitely coffee.

  I stepped out of the shower and stood in front of my mirror, examining the lines around my eyes and mouth, pulling and poking at them a bit, wondering if I should try some of those fillers my best friends Sandra and Emily were always raving about, immediately deciding I couldn’t possibly watch a needle coming at my face. I took longer than usual with my makeup, knowing that it would be heavily criticized by Caroline no matter how good I thought it looked. I believed in my heart that she was trying to help. But our lives didn’t remotely resemble each other. She was a New York City socialite. I designed beach houses in flip-flops. We were apples and oranges.

  While I was getting ready, I instructed Siri, “Call Mom.”

  Much to my surprise, Siri did call Mom, as opposed to getting directions to the mall or searching the Web for pillows.

  “Hello-o,” Mom sang.

  “Hi, Mom.” I loved it when she was chipper like this. “How’s Florida?”

  “Darling, Florida is as fabulous as ever. It’s warm, it’s sunny, the eligible men keep coming.”

  I laughed. That was the difference between my mom and me. After my dad died, she was sad, of course. She did her year as the dutiful mourning widow, and then she got back in the saddle. I, on the other hand, had spent sixteen years too paralyzed to move forward.

  “Well, you won’t believe this,” I said.

  “Try me.”

  I swiped blush on my cheeks, thinking that my mom and my daughter would both be happy about that. “All three of the girls are coming home.”

  She laughed. “You’re kidding me. Are you happy? Terrified?”

  I paused. “Yes.”

  We both laughed.

  “I heard James was going to be a television star,” Mom said.

  I cleared my throat. “Um. Yeah. You could say that.”

  “Oh, darling,” she said. “This, too, shall pass. I’ll come down to visit while all my girls are there.”

  I heard a muffled sound in the background, followed by “Oh, goodness. I’m almost late for bridge. Love you!”

  “Love you, too,” I said. But she was already gone.

  I wondered how she did it. I worried about my children and my life and what was going to happen every minute. She had never seemed terribly concerned about any of it. I had definitely gotten the worrying from my dad. And then, with no warning, in the midst of my smile, there it was again, that tinge of resentment, that tiny stab that made me realize I still wasn’t over it. I still hadn’t fully forgiven my mother.

  As I stepped out the back door, shutting it behind me and not bothering with the key—no one in Peachtree locked their doors, as there was no reason to—I stopped dead in my tracks. Standing at the door to the screened porch was Mr. Solomon, aka the neighbor from hell. He had on khakis and a short-sleeved, button-down, lime-green shirt. I could see a sleeveless undershirt beneath it. He had his pants pulled up high enough that his stomach protruded from between his belt and his pant legs like a basketball half stuck in the sand. He was nearly bald and had these wet, beady eyes that always reminded me of a lizard. I couldn’t stand the man. Truly.

  I consider myself to be a nice person. But even I have my limits. And Mr. Solomon was my limit. “I don’t have time today for whatever sort of ambush this is, Mr. Solomon. I have to pick up my daughter at the airport.” I smiled wickedly at him. “In fact, all three of my daughters and my three, soon to be four, grandchildren will be here for months and months. Doesn’t that sound great to you? The sounds of children’s laughter in the yard again?” So no, I wasn’t sure I was 100 percent enthused about the idea of having them all under one roof. But making Frank Solomon mad had to be a silver lining.

  I swear he snarled. “Ansley, you keep your sprinkler water out of my yard.”

  This might have been the stupidest complaint yet. “Oh, you mean the dirt lot behind your house where nothing can live? Sure. I’ll make sure nothing touches that. We wouldn’t want to go crazy and let a blade of grass grow or anything.”

  He cut his eyes at me. “I mean it. I will call Bob.”

  Bob had been mayor for forty-seven years, except for that one lost year where we’d taken a chance on Jackson the meeting mover. And Bob had had the hots for my mom for all of those y
ears, thank goodness. So he always took my side in these squabbles with Mr. Solomon.

  I crossed my arms. “That’s good news for me, Frank, because you know he always agrees with me.”

  “Not when I have the law on my side, Miss Fancy Pants.”

  I laughed. “Yeah. Because there is a law saying my sprinkler water can’t hit your lawn. Don’t worry. I’ll keep the water on my side of the fence.” Peachtree had so many inane rules there probably was a law saying that.

  His beady eyes got beadier. He turned around and walked the two dozen steps between his house and mine.

  One of the things I loved most about Peachtree was how close together the houses were. It was a historic town, and the homes were built side by side for protection and safety back in the pirate days. Each home had a picket fence around its front yard. To increase the privacy and create defined parking, I had also added a picket fence around the back.

  Mr. Solomon and I had never been friendly, exactly. He would gripe about our construction noise keeping him up, bemoan that a painter left a cigarette butt in his yard. But we weren’t sworn enemies or anything—until the fence.

  He claimed that the fence was five inches over his property line. I said my survey said it was inside mine. Which it was, by the way. Most people would have let it go. What’s five inches, for heaven’s sake? But not Mr. Solomon.

  He served me with a certified letter from his attorney. I served him with one right back from my attorney, saying that if he wanted to pay for a new survey, I would consider moving my fence.

  He wouldn’t pay. I wouldn’t move. And we’d been fighting about it ever since. That was fourteen years ago. No amount of yoga or meditation could make it so that my insides didn’t seethe every time he shuffled out his back door. I wished I could handle it more like Hal handled Mrs. McClasky and those bikes. But I just couldn’t. The man drove me up the wall. It was so stupid to the outside world. I realized that. But it felt very personal and extremely irritating to me.