Porch Lights (14 page)

“That’s probably it,” she said and smiled at me. “What are you making?”

“I’m making a pimento cheese ball. Remember those? You take grated cheese, mayonnaise, a little garlic powder, cayenne, and onion and then you mush it together with chopped pimentos into a baseball and roll it in pecan pieces? Yummy!”

“Is somebody coming over?”

“Not that I know of, but I was so embarrassed last night when Steve came in and we didn’t even have any kind of cocktail food besides stale peanuts. I just don’t want to get caught empty-handed again.”

“Oh, Lord. Please don’t tell me that he’s going to be coming over here every single night. I mean, I didn’t come the whole way down here to look at his face every five minutes. Not to be rude or anything—”

“I
don’t
expect that he’ll be over here all the time. And these cheese balls can last until Christmas. Which, speaking of Steve, we’d better get Charlie up. It’s dog time.”

Did she really think she was going to dictate who came and went and how often?

I pointed to the kitchen wall clock that, in addition to offering the minute and hour of the day, depicted a scene from Napa Valley that Deb gave me for my birthday a few years ago after, you guessed it, a trip to learn about California wines. Now, that’s someplace I might like to go, I mean a destination over the causeway that’s worth the effort.

“Righto. I’ll be right back.”

She hesitated and then did not pour the milk over her cereal, which I took to mean that she was going to walk Charlie over to Steve’s again. I was right. Before she left the house I called her over to the side to have a private word. “Look to see something for me, will you? I have a bet going with Deb, and you’re the only one who can settle it.”

“Look to see what?”

“Boxers or Superman. Just take a fast look.”

“What? What are you saying? Gross! I can’t do that, Mom! Besides, Charlie is like right there under my feet.”

“Right! Okay. Wait. I knew that. Okay. Check the hamper! Just take a quick peek.”

“You and Deb are terrible. I’ll do no such thing.”

“Yes, you will.”

“How do you know?”

“Because now you want to know too!”

She looked at me with the strangest expression and said, “If you think I care for one split second what kind of underwear another man wears, then you don’t know anything about my marriage to Jimmy.”

I thought, Oh Lord, here we go again. This was my Jackie, who might have slept hard but hadn’t slept well, and it was too early in the morning to canonize anyone.

“Jackie? Sweetheart? You’ve got a little chip on your shoulder. I know you adored Jimmy and that you always will. I loved him too. He was a wonderful husband and father.”

“Sorry, I don’t know what is the matter with me.”

“All right, then. Let’s not worry about this anymore. What’s twenty dollars? I bet on boxers.”

“You bet
twenty dollars
on Steve’s u-trou?”

I nodded. “I know. Pretty silly.”

“I’m not letting you lose twenty dollars. If it’s boxers, I get ten.”

“Done!” I said and we shook on it.

Sometime during the next half hour, they went next door, Jackie clinging to her coffee mug and Charlie rushing ahead. I watched as Charlie bolted from Steve’s house like a shot fired down the beach with Stella and Stanley, the dogs’ tongues flailing in the wake of their own breeze. Yes, I stood on the porch watching him, waiting for Jackie to return, thinking how I loved seeing my grandson running so fast, going where Steve’s beautiful pets would lead him. I wished I could see Charlie like that every day for the rest of my life. Carefree. So young. So beautiful. I wished I could somehow freeze that moment in time and put it in my pocket like a talisman that would always bring me a moment of happiness.

Finally, when Charlie was long out of sight, Jackie climbed our steps and came in.

“You owe me ten bucks,” she said.

“Yay! We’re rich. Hey, I thought of something. How will Deb know we’re not lying?”

“I took a picture with my phone. See?”

She clicked here and there on the keypad of her cell phone, and suddenly there was a picture of men’s boxer shorts. In living Black Watch tartan color. So? He had a thing for Scotland too? Another thing we had in common.

“My. My! You’re a genius, Jackie. Glory! I’ll tell you one thing,” I said, “technology is a marvelous thing.”

“Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. I’ll print it for you.”

I had no idea what she meant by her comment, but I was fast learning that when it came to anything technical beyond my laptop, it was best for me to simply nod my head.

By ten o’clock Jackie was on her way to Murrells Inlet and the breakfast dishes were humming away in the dishwasher. The dogs were curled up on the front porch, snoring softly, snoozing after their morning run, and Charlie was sitting at the kitchen table playing his electronic game, which had him so hypnotized that it irked me just as it irked Jackie.

“So, old fellow? What shall we do today? Would you like to go on a picnic?”

“A picnic? To where?”

“Well, wherever you’d like to go. I was thinking we might take the ferry out to Bulls Island. Or maybe we’d just have us a walk out to the back beaches and I can show you millions of little fiddler crabs and how they dance. What do you think? Or we could save the picnic for another day and just go to Poe’s Tavern. They make pretty good fish tacos.”

“You mean Poe like that guy you were telling me about?”

“
That
guy
indeed. I can see I’m going to wind up having to buy you the T-shirt.”

“Awesome! Let’s go there.”

“Only if we walk there on the beach?” It was just too hot to walk on the street.

“That’s cool with me.”

“All right, then. Give me about half an hour, and then we’ll meander our way down the island and see what we find.”

I attended to some household business, namely doing a load of laundry, running a dust cloth across the furniture, and wiping down the bathrooms. Then I consolidated all the garbage and had Charlie haul it out to the bins.

“Make sure you always close the tops tight! Raccoons!”

“Got it!” he called back to me.

Then there was the boring business of recycling. I began gathering up all the magazines, and don’t you know that right away I put my hand on the issue of
Southern Living
that ran the profile article on the makeover queen of Charleston? Fate! I immediately sat down and flipped to the page: “Margaret Donaldson Makes Miracles!” The subtitle read “Look Ten Years Younger!” I tore the article out and put it aside. Not that I had an apostle’s faith in that sort of thing, but as soon as I had a private moment, I was going to call Margaret the Miracle Maker and give her the challenge of her career. I wasn’t all
that
possessed by my appearance (okay, maybe I fussed over myself more than the average girl), but I wouldn’t mind if, on occasion and in the right lighting, people took Jackie and me to be sisters. Maybe that was asking too much. Or not. But I definitely needed a haircut. Well, we’d see what she said.

It wasn’t long until Charlie and I were walking the beach. I brought along a plastic bag from the Bi-Lo grocery store in case he found shells or coral or anything else that he wanted to bring home. Now, I worried about my carbon footprint with the best of the tree huggers out there and did not use plastic bags as a general rule, but tossing some salty wet carcass into my canvas tote bag, a premium I received from a donation I’d made to the Spoleto Festival, would have ruined it, as would a package of chicken that dripped water and traces of blood.

When we finally reached Poe’s Tavern, it was bulging with people, locals and tourists. Charlie was as quickly sucked into people watching as I was. Every kind of person in the world was there. Pretty young girls in sweet sundresses had his attention, and so did the teenaged girls who seemed to be showing too much bosom and bottom for my money.

“Your mother never dressed like that,” I said. “I would have killed her.”

Charlie covered up his mouth with his hand and giggled. “I’ll bet!”

After waiting for fifteen minutes or so we got a table, and as soon as he was finished reading the menu, he was ready to talk. I, on the other hand, was feeling indecisive and had already drained my glass of water.

“What should I have, Charlie?”

The waitress, or maybe they call them servers these politically correct nowadays, stepped up to our table, refilled my water, and rattled off some specials. I looked at Charlie, shook my head, and shrugged my shoulders.

“She’s gonna have the Annabel Lee burger, and I’d like to have the Gold-Bug chicken sandwich with a side of fries, Edgar’s Drunken Chili, and extra cheddar cheese. And we’d like some chips and salsa for the table. And extra ketchup? And a Diet Coke. Whatcha drinking, Glam?”

“Why, I think I’d like a Diet Coke too!” I sat back in my chair and looked at my grandson, who had just simply stunned me by the way he’d just taken over. “Heavens!”

“I’ll get that order right in for y’all,” our server said and scurried away.

“Charlie! I have to say you sure handled that one. How did you know I liked the Annabel Lee sandwich?”

“Because it’s a pretty name and you like pretty things. Besides, someone had to be the man, and I was the only man at the table. So tell me some more about Poe.”

“Well, I have to tell you, Charlie, your momma isn’t so keen on me dwelling on Mr. Poe with you. She thinks he’s too creepy.”

“My mother treats me like a baby,” he said. “If she ever read my comics she’d probably faint. They’re as scary as all you-know-where.”

“I see. And this you-know-where would be someplace that’s even hotter than this island today? Mercy!”

“Exactly! Anyway, she worries way too much about every single little thing.”

“Look, even though your momma is a grown up with a son who’s a big boy, she’s still my baby and I worry about her all the time. It’s the number one specialty of mothers all over the world.”

“Well, tell me about Poe, and I promise to downplay it with Mom. How’s that?”

I narrowed my eyes at him and clenched my jaw. Could he be trusted with the really dark and sinister material? Absolutely not.

“All right,” I said against the advice of that nagging little voice in my head that told me I was heading for trouble. “In 1827, he was stationed here at Fort Moultrie for thirteen months under another name.”

“What name?”

“Edgar Allan Perry.”

“Why did he use a fake name?”

“Well, no one is really sure about that, but usually when somebody uses a fake name, it’s because they want to avoid discovery. And Edgar was extremely poor and in debt, so I imagine he was trying to elude his creditors.”

Over a basket of warmed nacho chips and salsa verde, we discussed Edgar’s brief military history and why he’d grown up with such a thorny personality.

“Apparently it didn’t take too much to get his temper going,” I said.

“Having a bad temper gets you nowhere fast,” Charlie said.

“Yes. You’re right. How do you know these things?”

“They’re what my dad always used to say.”

We ate our lunch and I tried to stick to the topic of Poe, but it was clear that Charlie’s mind was wandering as he ate.

“We could talk about Poe long into the night because there’s so much to know about him and his work. But why don’t we tackle his famous cryptograms?”

“What’s a cryptogram? Do you want a bite of chili?”

“Sure. Thanks!” He pushed the bowl to my side of the table, and I scooped some out and put it on the side of my plate, thinking that chili with jalapeños might come back to haunt me. “It’s like a puzzle you make up to do secret writing in code. For example, if you substituted numbers for the letters of the alphabet, using one for an A and two for a B, you could write a message in code. Like ‘The treasure is buried under the magnolia tree!’ ”

“Wow! That’s more fun than writing computer code, that’s for sure!”

“What do you mean, computer code?”

“You know, Glam, you use it to write a program for your computer.”

“Oh,
that
computer code! Oh yes, of course.” The child appeared to be speaking English, but I had no idea what he was talking about. “Anyway, cryptograms, buried treasure, and the famous Captain Kidd are at the heart of Poe’s well-known story called ‘The Gold-Bug.’ I think you’re mature enough to read it, but the language is very old. It might be fun if we read it together. What do you think?”

“I think definitely! Didn’t you tell me that we have a copy at home?”

“Oh, me! My brains are going to mush! Anyway, cutie, I have his complete works!”

“Sweet!”

“Yes, it’s pretty sweet. Poe was a dark and deeply peculiar little man, and many people thought he was crazy.”

“Maybe he was. This is so good!”

“Good! Well, actually at the end of his life he was completely mad. Most people thought he lost his mind due to excessive alcohol, but just recently they found out he had a brain tumor the size of a lemon.”

“How’d they find that out?”

It was simply impossible to talk about Poe without going to the macabre.

“Well, they exhumed his corpse to give it a more prestigious location in the graveyard—”

“You mean, they dug him up?”

“Uh, yes. Gross, right?”

“Uh, duh!”

“Well, it’s just too bad that he was never recognized as the genius he was during his lifetime.” I was trying to switch the conversation away from death to the achievements of Poe’s life.

“Neither was my dad.”

I heard a crack in his voice and looked down to see his eyes filling up with tears. So I stopped, leaned over, and put my hand on the side of his face. I could feel the heat of his distress.

“Baby, it’s okay to be sad. Tell me how your daddy was a genius.”

“Because he could do anything and anything he did, he did it so great.”

Charlie spoke quietly, so quietly that I could barely hear him. Obviously he didn’t want to make a scene, but he couldn’t hold back his tears either. Bless the little fellow’s heart. Bless his dear sweet heart.