Shem Creek (12 page)

“SO, this is what two hundred thousand dollars buys today? A gentrified but ramshackle two-bedroom carriage house in the old village?” I said.

“Linda! Look! It’s got a view of the harbor,” Mimi said.

“Yeah, if I hang out the window by my knees, lean to the left and risk my life. . . .”

“And, the kitchen’s bright and sunny!” the broker said.

“If you overlook the flocked metallic neon wallpaper,” I mumbled.

“I’ll repaper the kitchen for you,” Mimi said. “Hey! We can teach the girls to hang wallpaper! These are good things to know.”

I wasn’t even sure if Mimi had heard me. She was lost in dreams of feathering the perfect nest for her sister and her two nieces, one she visualized and decorated, a home whose door held a wreath for every season, accented with beautifully varnished pinecones, satin wired bows stretched like arms to welcome all comers, and lush pots of flowers and ferns on the stoop, clean gutters, swept porches, lavenderscented pillows and linen closets. All I would need to complete her vision was a Labrador—a big black one with a long pink tongue, named Beauregard to honor one of our most auspicious Confederate generals.

I watched her for a few minutes—her laser eye like a measuring tape, already calculating yardage for kitchen curtains. And, would the trim be ball fringe or rickrack? For all her good intentions, I was afraid the answer was no. It would be neither one.

“Mimi?”

“Yeah, baby?”

Her smile was so loving and generous, it would be hard to say that I didn’t adore her, even when it was obvious she meant to position me front and center in her life. I should have been more grateful for the attention, and I
was
grateful. It was just that Mimi had yet to grasp that I wasn’t coming home to retire or that I felt defeated in the least. I was coming here for a fresh start, mainly because I was sick to death of the miserable winters and I wanted Gracie to see the world from another point of view. But her nurturing, while unexpected, was actually, in small doses, rather nice.

“I gotta go to work,” I said again, and smiled at her.

“I’ll follow you out,” she said and turned to the broker. “This is sweet? But, um, I think we probably want at least three bedrooms, you know what I’m talking about?”

“Uh-huh,” said the broker, nodding, “I’ll call y’all if anything new comes on the market.”

“Too small?” Mimi said, after the broker had closed her car door and started her engine.

“Yeah, too small and too
old
. I want squeaky clean and all that new stuff, you know? I am all over
drafty
windows,
uneven
floors,
leaking
gutters,
cracked
asphalt driveways,
unreliable
furnaces . . . I want
central
air,
central
heat, new
windows! I want to flush my toilets with confidence!
I want a dishwasher that lulls me to sleep,
not
one that sounds like a 747! Do you know what
I’m
talking about?”

“Gotcha!” she said, her index finger pointed like the barrel of a revolver.

I opened my car door, threw my purse over to the passenger seat and got in. Mimi leaned in the window. “How’s this Brad person?” she said.

“Brad’s great! The job’s great! But I gotta find a house, you know?”

“I’ll comb the
Moultrie News
!”

“Thanks,” I said and blew her a kiss.

There were so many choices of where to live in Mount Pleasant. And, I suppose like everyone else all up and down the coast, I would have loved to own a home with a view of something besides my neighbors. The harbor, the Cooper River, a creek—any of them would have been fine. But, not knowing how much I could spend put me in a weird position. It meant that I had to look at houses from the point of view of what would be sufficient. In spite of everything, my heart was leaning to living in the old village where I grew up, even though that choice would never deliver a house with
new everything
in my imagined budget range.

Yesterday, I learned Brad lived in Simmons Pointe, right by the Ben Sawyer Bridge. He was lucky enough to run into a furnished, year-round rental. Even though Brad was a partner in the restaurant, he hadn’t been in business long enough to earn enough money to buy anything. He said he felt like he had definitely hit the jackpot with his three-bedroom house on stilts, a new kitchen, two and a half bathrooms, and a marsh and water view for which there was no price tag on the face of this earth.

He had invited me to come see it, saying there might be another one available, and I had thanked him and had said I would but, in reality, the last thing I wanted was for my boss to have access to my privacy. I mean, what if I decided to let Antonio Banderas sleep over? Did Brad need to see his limo in my driveway? No. And did I want to know who was hanging around him? No thanks. Life was complicated enough as it was.

I pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant and, getting out, the smells of the creek startled me. How powerful! And, how reminiscent of my childhood. I could close my eyes and be seven years old again, my hand in my dad’s, tromping over to Magwood’s to buy five pounds of shrimp, the soles of my sneakers crunching along the broken oyster shells that covered the ground. After a good soaking rain, there were puddles wide enough for zigzag navigation and jumps that resurrected the boy in my father as we leaped over them together, whooping with laughter. Even hours later, long after the mud in the treads of my shoes was dry and fallen away, the smells of salt and sea remained. That same fragrance was linked to good memories like a bookmark. In some remote part of my psyche, I believed that to be surrounded by it again would bring me happiness.

It was in that dreamy state of mind that I began my workday, shuffling through a mountain of bills, organizing them on the computer by category, backing them up on disc. Certain things stood out as too expensive, others as bargains. I would have to think about all of it and apply some kind of analysis to it. One thing was certain—the produce bill was in the stratosphere. Others were unclear. Such as, I couldn’t understand the process for verifying the bills for seafood or why we used rentals for special events. It would all be sorted out in due time. My first order of business was to get everything entered in a bookkeeping software program that would produce checks.

Louise appeared at my door and cleared her throat. She was holding two mugs of steaming coffee and placed one in front of me.

“Some people come say hello in the morning and I reckon some others don’t!”

“Oh! Louise! I’m so sorry!”

“Everybody comes in and says hello to Louise, even Mr. Brad and he owns the place.”

“Other than that, how am I doing?”

“Guess we thought the place would fall apart until you got here this morning, that’s all!” She smiled at me, her dimples showing.

“You are so wicked! Come on, sit down and talk to me. How’s everything in the kitchen? What’s Duane up to?”

“Humph! That man drives me crazy! Now he’s wanting to do all kinds of raw fish—something called
carpaccio
. I can tell you right now that people don’t come to Shem Creek to eat no fool
carpaccio
. They want a clean piece of fish out of the waters of Charleston and they want
you
to tell
them
to eat it
fried
so they don’t have to feel guilty about it. The most exotic thing they order is oysters on the half shell. Isn’t that right?”

“Well, carpaccio
is
Italian and Brad’s got his Italian thing going on everywhere else around here.”

“Humph! So, I’ll let him put it on the menu for now.”

I thought about what she was saying and essentially, she was right. Most of the restaurants along the water served more fried seafood than broiled and I couldn’t remember anyone serving raw seafood, with the exception of oysters.

“There’s a restaurant in New York—Greek or Italian, I can’t remember—but they serve mostly seafood, pretty much like us. But what’s different is that the customer picks out their own fish. They have a huge presentation of iceddown fish in the front and what you do is go with your captain, pick out your fish, and then they only cook it one of two ways. Either they put it on a bed of rock salt and bake it with olive oil and lemon juice or they fillet it and sauté it in butter and olive oil.”

“Fish just sits out there?”

“Yeah.”

“You know what? You might have something there! That might be the scratch for Doo-wayne’s itch! There ain’t nobody over here doing that! That would, you know . . .”

“Make us look like our seafood was fresher? Give us a little style?”

“I gotta go find out how much one of them things to show the fish would cost.” Louise stood up and gave me a little pat on the shoulder. “You know what?”

“What?”

“I like you. You ain’t stupid!”

I hollered after her as she left my office, “Thanks! I think?”

The day was flying by and I didn’t see Brad until well after lunch, when he stopped in.

“Hey! Welcome to your second day in the asylum.”

“Thanks! I am so excited! I have a new job, I have a new life!”

“Um, Linda?”

He was leaning on the frame of the door and if he had not been my employer, I might have been thinking some lascivious thoughts. I didn’t know why but, during the interview, his appeal had gone unnoticed.

“What?” I said, and thought my lascivious thoughts anyway.

“Are you always this upbeat?”

“No.” That was the truth. But since returning to the land of my people, I had become undeniably optimistic. In fact, I had stopped taking my happy pills and didn’t miss them at all.

“And, so what’s happening with your domestic arrangements?”

“Oh, that! Well, I, that is, we are still hanging in my sister’s crib.”

“Ah,” he said, taking a moment to digest the meaning. “Well, this may or may not be of interest to you, but Robert has a client who owns a property in the old village that used to be a farm. One outbuilding—a boathouse—still exists and he wants to rent it. I know the guy—very nice guy—nice wife, all that. I think he would even consider selling it if he could get the variance and found the right person, but you might like to have a look.”

“How many bedrooms?”

“I don’t know. I’ll call him if you want.”

“Sure. Why not?”

Brad whipped out his cell phone, one that sent and received pictures, and called Robert for the number and then got his friend on the line. “Lowell? You still interested in renting that little cottage?” Pause. “Uh-huh, uh-huh. No, she works for me.” Pause. “Two teenagers, one going to college this fall. Yeah. NYU. Yeah, no kidding. Okay, sure.” Pause. “How much? What? Hey, didn’t I tell you she worked for
me?
She ain’t related to Donald Trump, okay?” Brad covered the mouthpiece and said to me, “Don’t worry.” Pause. “Okay. Five o’clock. Sure. I’ll bring her around. Yes, I’ll bring some wine!”

Brad turned to me.

“Okay. Here’s the vital stats. It’s on the bank of the harbor and used to be a caretaker’s cottage slash boathouse. It’s been renovated, has three bedrooms, a sort of living room, dining room, kitchen, two-bathroom combination but it’s got light and a fireplace and enough storage—so he says. We can see it at five. Want to do it?”

It had been a very long time since a desirable man had thrown out the phrase
Want to do it?
I took a deep breath, steadied myself and said, “Sure, why not?”

Who was I kidding? He was not interested in me in the least and I would be well advised to get over myself. I immediately switched gears to Little Miss Pragmatic, and began making a list of the features of living so close to work.

The biggest advantage of living in the old village was that driving to work would take less than five minutes, even if I caught every single red light. That was certainly a plus. But the truth was that as long as I stayed east of the Cooper River, the most time it would
ever
take was fifteen minutes, even from the islands.

I continued to dig through the pile of papers on my desk, deciding to withhold judgment until I actually saw the place. The afternoon glow began to cover the dining room in deep shades of pink and I looked at my watch. It was four-thirty.

I thought Brad was probably in the kitchen and went to look for him.

“Seen Brad?” I asked anyone in earshot.

“He’s up on the sunset deck,” one of the guys said.

I said something like
Okay, thanks
and climbed the outside stairs to find him with a hose, spraying the deck with a vengeance.

“What in the world are you doing?”

“Well, it’s a thousand degrees up here, right?”

“Whew! No kidding!”

“And, we get about a hundred to two hundred people up here every night for happy hour, right?”

“Yeah, so . . .”

“Well, hosing down the floor, or the roof, depending on your point of view, cools it down about ten degrees.” He continued to spray for a minute and then realized I was standing there for a reason. He turned off the nozzle and looked up to me. “Um, want to take my car?”

“Sure.”

He grabbed a bottle of white wine and we were off. Without a lot of conversation beyond the usual niceties, we drove from the parking lot to the house of his choosing, which worried me. After all, what if I didn’t like the house he thought I should like? But when we pulled into the yard of the big house and drove down the live-oak-columned gravel drive to the back, every hair on my body stood on end. This was it. I knew it, even before I saw the inside. This was my new home. This might be my home forever. How could he have known?

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Love the location.”

“Me too.”

We climbed the steps together. As though I owned the place, my hand reached out to the flower boxes overflowing with the palest lavender petunias and fragrant blooms of yet another something I didn’t recognize. The owner, Lowell Epstein, was waiting inside for us. He had turned on the lights and Rod Stewart’s new CD of ballads filled the air. And, there was a smell of something familiar but then I knew that every house had its own perfume.