Slightly South of Simple Read online

  We sat on the back of the boat in plastic chairs, our feet up on the stern, the teak worn and very, very vintage, and watched the most beautiful sunset in the world. It was pink and orange and so very vibrant, like someone had painted it by hand, mixing the colors just so, streaking the sky into a masterpiece. My husband, Carter, had been a wonderful artist, and when we first moved to Peachtree after he died, I would pretend that he was painting the sunset for me, sending it down from heaven to make me feel like all was not lost.

  “So get me up to speed,” I said. “What have I missed over the past, um, thirty-five years or so.”

  We both laughed. The wine was making my face warm already. On the bright side, I was decidedly less awkward. That was a plus.

  “Well,” he said. “Let’s see. I retired last year.”

  “Retired?” I said, shocked. “How did you pull that off?”

  He laughed. “I figured out something very useful early on in my career.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  “Well, remember how I started a restaurant in Atlanta and it wasn’t doing so hot?”

  I nodded, not wanting to remember, not wanting to be back in that moment where Jack had told me that, wanting to keep myself in the present and out of the past. “Yeah.”

  “I opened one in Athens, and it did great. So then I opened one in Chapel Hill. It did even better. And one in Columbia. It was the best of all.”

  “Ah,” I said, getting the drift. “So what worked in one college town worked in all the others?”

  He nodded, holding a sip of wine in his mouth. “Not all of them, but for the most part. So that one little hot dog joint turned into one hundred and eighty-five hot dog joints.” He shrugged. “And then I sold out.”

  “Now that’s the American Dream,” I said. “Starting with something small, working your way up.”

  He smiled. “Yeah.” I could tell that he was starting to feel more comfortable with me as well. “Just think. A few hot dogs led to all of this.” He swept his arm majestically around the dilapidated boat, and we both laughed so hard I thought wine would come out of my nose.

  This was nice, actually, reconnecting with an old friend. It wasn’t so scary after all. It would be fun to work with him for a few weeks.

  “I was really sorry to hear about Carter,” Jack said.

  “Thanks.” I took a sip of wine.

  “I wanted to reach out but . . .”

  He trailed off, and I picked up. “No. That’s all right. I understand. I understood then, too.”

  “So work is good with you?”

  I looked out over the water, the sun now a bright, fiery red before its final descent. “It really is. I was scared, you know? I hadn’t worked in all those years. But I had nowhere to turn. And I made it.”

  Jack smirked, but he didn’t say anything. And he didn’t have to open his mouth for me to know that he was rolling the phrase “nowhere to turn” around in his brain.

  “You?” I said. “Wife? Kids?”

  “Ex-wife,” he said, turning toward me. By the look in his eyes I could tell that he wasn’t drunk, but he was almost to that point where the wine was going to make those lips a little too loose. I almost said I needed to go. But, really, I had to hear about the ex-wife.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Yeah. She left me when she saw the boat.”

  We both laughed and Jack looked me in the eye for the first time that night. “Your laugh is exactly the same.”

  I looked down into my wineglass, and he asked, with something like sadness in his voice, “Do you remember the night we met?”

  And, there we were. The loose lips. That was my cue to go. I started to stand, but I made the mistake of looking at him again, of remembering the Jack and Ansley we used to be.

  He wasn’t handsome then. Not like he is now. He was a scrawny sixteen-year-old kid, a line of sweat around his buzz cut. Nope. Not a thing handsome about that kid. But he had something. Swagger. That’s what they would call it now. Back then, we would have said confidence. But either way, I couldn’t possibly forget. He still had it. It was a quality you could see clearly, as though you could reach out and touch it. It was a quality you couldn’t help but be drawn to.

  “Of course,” I said softly.

  I didn’t want to remember. But I was a tad tipsy, and it felt so good. I knew already, even then, that it couldn’t keep feeling this good. It wasn’t possible. But for the moment, I was riding the wave. After all of the pain of the past decade and a half or so, losing Carter, my daughters hating me, hiding Carter’s secrets, hiding my own . . . It felt good to drink wine and smile and remember.

  That night I met Jack had been the first sandbar party of the year. In between Peachtree Bluff and Pecan Beach, which was right across the bridge and was where my girls built many a sand castle, lies the sandbar, the one where Jack and I had run into each other a few days earlier. If you don’t know the area, it’s treacherous, because your boat is sure to get stuck there, as it’s completely hidden during high tide. But when the tide is low, the sandbar makes its appearance, barely popping up out of the water. It’s as long as a football field and about half as wide. Only the most seasoned boaters know how to weave among the marsh grass without getting stuck. To the right, the coastline was dotted with what we called the mermansions, huge cedar-shake houses with boat docks and breathtaking views. To the left were smaller, simpler houses with views made even lovelier by the fact that the mermansions were in their line of sight. Every summer, at least three or four times, we would all anchor our boats around that little patch of sand.

  This first party began as a family picnic. Everyone pitched in, setting up tables and portable grills on the sand, and then we all stood around with plates of cold fried chicken and barbecue or hot dogs and hamburgers, sipping sweet tea and beer, the kids sneaking another one of Mrs. Bennett’s famous brownies. It was almost Memorial Day and just cool enough. The entire summer lay ahead, ripe with promise, teeming with possibility, a flower right on the verge of blooming. You could taste the energy of that night as clearly as the potato salad, as if everyone was leaving behind the stress of the year, sending it out to sea, letting it go to fully enjoy this, one of the most special places on the planet.

  It was there, on that sandbar, over a plate of Mrs. Bennett’s brownies, that Jack’s hand brushed mine for the first time as we both reached for the biggest one on the top.

  “I remember, too,” Jack said now, interrupting my thoughts. “Those cutoff jean shorts. That yellow-and-white-striped bikini top. Those big hoop earrings. The way you tasted like bubble gum when I kissed you.”

  I was close enough that I could swat his leg with my hand. He grabbed it. “Do you still taste like bubble gum?”

  “Stop it,” I said. “Stop it now, or I’m going home.” I pulled my hand away and sat up straighter.

  Truth be told, I hadn’t been alone with a man since Carter died. Plenty had asked. Occasionally, I had been tempted. I was only forty-two when he died, after all. But I couldn’t imagine trying to start over with anyone else. No one else could possibly understand the life we had lived.

  “So tell me about this wife of yours,” I said.

  “Ah, yes,” Jack said. “The wife.” He paused. “She was entirely too young for me. Thirty-five.”

  I laughed. “Thirty-five. For heaven’s sake, Jack. That’s practically Caroline’s age.”

  He looked at me, and I looked back. It wasn’t fair not to face him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for, Ans. It is as we always said it would be.”

  “Well, I’m sorry your marriage didn’t work out.” I was. Kind of. But really, Jack was mine. He had always been mine. He would always be mine. And that was how I had seen it from that very first night on that sandbar. Not that I was interested in him in that way now. But still. It was the principle.

  As the tide began to rise, the parents had fled, leaving just
the teenagers splashing around. That was when the sandbar was the most magical, if you asked me. You couldn’t see the ground we were standing on, and all around us was deep, dark water. I imagined from the mermansions it must have looked as though we could walk on it. It made me feel timeless, weightless, fearless. The lukewarm beer we sipped out of Solo cups didn’t hurt, either. I remember the way Jack flirted with me that night, the way I knew already that he wasn’t scared of anything, not like I was. But it was more than that. The molecules in the air rearranged themselves when Jack and I were together. Anyone around us could feel it, knew from that first night that no matter what the future held, in some small way, the stars aligned for us, the moon rose for us, pulling the tide higher and higher until we were forced back onto our boats. Jack kissed me that night, standing in his fifteen-foot Boston Whaler, our hearts thumping in time, the mosquitoes circling around our bug-bitten ankles under the sweet, sweet full moon of summer.

  “Want to tell me why your marriage didn’t work?” I asked him.

  He gestured around with his beer bottle. “I told you already. The boat.”

  I rolled my eyes. “It was not the boat.”

  He nodded. “Before we got married, she didn’t want children. After we got married, she decided she did.”

  “And you didn’t?” I said. But I already knew the answer. Jack had never wanted children. And it had broken my heart. Because as much as I had loved him, I knew I was meant to be a mother.

  “It seemed . . .” He trailed off, fiddling with his beer bottle. “Complicated.”

  I swallowed a lump in my throat. “Yeah.” I paused. My phone beeped. Caroline. I held it up. “Kids complicate things. That’s for sure.”

  “Actually, by then, I realized that I would kind of like to have kids.” He cleared his throat and looked out over the water. “And I loved her and she made me happy in a lot of ways. But I also knew that she wasn’t who I wanted to have children with.” He smiled, but I could see the sadness behind his eyes. That’s how it is with people you’ve known since you were teenagers at the sandbar party. “I’ve never admitted that before, not even to myself.”

  He finally looked at me again, and I looked back. I didn’t say anything, but he could read my face.

  “It’s not your fault, Ans.” He said it, but as the words tumbled out, there was an edge to his tone. One that made me uneasy. One that made me know that despite how cool he seemed, despite how nonchalant he was trying to be, he thought a lot of things were my fault.

  I looked down into my wine. He couldn’t have blamed me for his unhappiness any more than I blamed myself. I always felt that if I had compromised, if we had been together, his life would have been better. But mine, I knew, would have been unspeakably incomplete.

  He reached over and lifted my chin toward him, softening. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really mean that. It’s not your fault.”

  I could feel the tears in my eyes. I was suddenly aware that I’d had too much wine and too much heat for one day. I wiped my cheeks quickly. “I need to go home,” I said.

  “Want some company?” he asked. And he was back to normal, back to the easy Jack I knew.

  Everything inside me wanted to say yes. Everything inside me wanted not to be alone. I wanted to pretend that we were teenagers again. That the world was fresh and new. That we were standing on the edge of everything, that life was out there waiting for us to grab it. But we weren’t. And it wasn’t.

  And he knew it, too. That’s how he knew I meant it when I said, “No.”

  TEN

  fairy stones

  caroline

  Everyone used to call Sloane and me either two peas in a pod or trouble. Both were equally accurate. When we were younger, Sloane was fearless. As free-spirited and wide open as she was, her big sister was the complete opposite. I’ve always been by-the-book, structured, regimented. I knew from the time I was small that I wanted to grow up and marry New York City royalty, have his babies, raise them, volunteer, and maybe get invited to the Met Ball one day. That was really it. I mean, yeah, I went to college because that’s what you did. But I was there to meet a man, plain and simple. If that didn’t work out, I’d have some cool job in the meantime.

  The weird thing was that when our dad died, Sloane and I sort of flipped. Where I had been so uptight, I suddenly realized that today was all we had and that I had to take every chance while the chances were around for the taking. She, on the other hand, became more fearful. It evened the score for us a bit, his death.

  I begged Sloane to come to NYU. But she said she didn’t think she’d ever be able to go back to Manhattan. True to her word, she hadn’t. Since she’d set foot on Georgia soil, the only relocating she’d done was to North Carolina, where Adam was stationed. And let’s face it, it’s the same place.

  It made me sort of sad that our lives had diverged on such different paths. We weren’t as close as we once were. I mean, we were still sisters, sure. But in a lot of ways, we simply could not relate to each other.

  Like when she pulled into the back driveway in her—wait for it—minivan. I about fell over. Because, you see, although I concede that they are quite convenient, I would never be caught dead in a minivan. But Sloane doesn’t think like that. She thinks about what is economical and what is practical. And yeah, sometimes I envy her that.

  When she pulled into her spot beside Mom’s car in the driveway, we all made a mad dash for the van. The doors automatically opened to reveal my two nephews in their car seats, Goldfish crumbs everywhere, TVs in the headrests playing PAW Patrol. The interior smelled vaguely of sour milk.

  That was the moment it really sank in. These vermin were going to have their mitts all over my fresh, pure, un-germed baby. My throat constricted.

  But then Adam said, “Carowine,” with those sticky hands reached out to me, and he couldn’t help but melt your heart. He had Sloane’s big brown eyes, but everything else was Adam’s. It made complete sense for him to be Adam’s namesake, because he could have spit him out.

  I reached in and pulled him out of the car seat, resting him above my protruding belly.

  Sloane got out and said, “Caroline! He’s too big for you to hold now!”

  I tried not to let my disapproval of her outfit choice show on my face. She had on these dumpy, flare-legged, faded black yoga crops that no one should ever wear and a too-tight T-shirt that made it very evident she hadn’t lost the last ten pounds of baby weight.

  “Sorry for the outfit,” she said, as if she knew what I was thinking. “Taylor peed on me at about mile three-fifty.”

  Gross. I had forgotten about all of that. Maybe this baby wouldn’t do that.

  Mom was bouncing Taylor on her hip, and he was cooing delightedly.

  Emerson hugged Sloane, and Vivi held her arms out to Adam, which was comical, because he was probably half her size. But he went to her.

  “Wow,” I said, hugging Sloane. “These are some amazingly well-adjusted kids. Vivi never would have done that.”

  Vivi shot me a look. “Thanks, Mom.”

  I laughed. “It wasn’t a bad thing. Just a difference in personality.”

  “So what have I missed?” Sloane asked. “You know how much I hate it when y’all are here together without me.”

  I cringed. They had her now. It was official. Once you go “y’all,” you never go back.

  I winked at Emerson, whose hair was piled up on her head, making her cheekbones even more severe. I put my arm around Sloane and led her to the back door. “How about I fill you in on everything while Emerson whips you up some . . .”

  I looked toward Emerson, who looked down at her watch. “Celery juice!” she exclaimed. “Sixteen whole ounces if you want.”

  Sloane looked disgusted, her nostrils flaring. “I think Taylor peeing on me might end up being one of the more pleasurable parts of the day.”

  “What if I get these guys into the bath?” Mom asked.

  “I’ll help!” Vivi called be
hind her, struggling to carry Adam up the steps.

  And then there were three. Three sisters, standing around the kitchen island, Emerson pulling two bunches of celery out of the refrigerator while I removed the juicer from the cabinet under the microwave drawer. It wasn’t that I was naturally helpful or caring. It was simply that she was so thin I wasn’t sure she would be able to handle the weight of the machine.

  I pulled one of the stalks off of Emerson’s cutting board and crunched. “So,” I said, “the rumor around town is that Emerson has already slept with a guy named Kyle.”

  Sloane’s eyes got wide. “Wait. You mean Coffee Kyle?”

  “The very one,” I said, chewing.

  Emerson laughed. “It’s not true, of course.”

  “If there’s going to be a rumor, which, duh, there is, at least it was someone hot,” Sloane said.

  This was the good stuff right here, three sisters sitting around talking and laughing like old times. I missed these girls so much. Being home for a while might not be that bad after all.

  Emerson handed us each a wineglass full of green, pulpy stuff. Sloane and I looked at each other skeptically.

  “You’re going to drink it, and you’re going to like it,” Emerson said sternly.

  She walked out of the kitchen, and we followed her through the dining room and the family room out onto the wide front porch.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket, and my stomach clenched. Before I even saw it, I knew it was James. Could I please talk to Vivi? I want to explain before tonight happens. Please don’t keep me away from her.

  I laughed.

  “What?” Sloane asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” I said, continuing to walk toward my seat. I read in an article that more injuries occurred while texting and walking than while texting and driving, so I stopped. For the baby’s sake.

  I am not keeping Vivi away from you. I can’t MAKE her talk to you. We are going to Peachtree. Need to get her out of the city.