With Charleston in my past, I would forever consider myself an outsider in any social setting. Unlike my family, scions of the Holy City had lived in the same neighborhoods, sometimes the same houses, for generations. They banded together in loose cartels that dominated the city’s DNA. They argued politics nonstop, like whether to unfurl Confederate flags atop government buildings, and occasionally drank too much at oyster shucks when nightly ocean breezes failed to chase the daily haze. They bucked change and distrusted outsiders. They waged war on progress from their homes south of Broad Street, the posh part of the peninsula, while their brick and stucco
houses waged war against time and the ravages of termites. Their sobriquet, SOBs, was a geographic reference to South of Broad rather than bastard bloodlines, and they decreed that families live in Charleston for one hundred years before achieving the hallowed status of “local.”
That one-hundred-year rule excluded my family. We had emigrated from an Air Force base nestled in America’s heartland of Knob Noster, Missouri. We did not have Southern names like Cooper, Ashley, or Palmer. We had family names, like Grover, that would forever betray our status as foreigners. We did not speak like locals. We spoke like Air Force mutts, our accents amalgamated from my father’s posts as far away as Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines.
I tried to assimilate, at least some in voice. It took months of SOB osmosis, immersion therapy akin to Berlitz, before I lapsed into the soothing rhythm of syllabic expansion and turned one-syllable words into two. Boat became “bow-at,” and with time “eggs” morphed into something that sounded like “a-igs.” I even stopped using the letter
R
, my twenty-five-letter alphabet a harbinger of later years in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When I said the word for “balcony,” it came out “poach.” And I perfected the Southern verb conjugations of syrupy deference, mastering new tenses like “might could.” To my everlasting horror, I once asked a woman during high school “if we might could go to the movies.”
Sam could have dated anyone at Wellesley. She was smart and athletic, her body toned from varsity track. There were hundreds of introductions, hundreds of Harvard guys locked in male perma-heat who came sniffing. She didn’t care. Until Charlie Kelemen waddled into Sam’s life, courting and
Cosmopolitan
made her teeth hurt.
Our dinner hardly qualified as a date. We were two friends. We were meeting to drink wine and compare notes. I owed Sam an update of my progress. Apparently, she had her own agenda.
What’s the big news?
At precisely 6:45 P.M. with shrimp poppers and several glasses of wine under our belts, Chloe and Annie said good-bye. They left me to wait for Sam among the vinyl-covered chairs and Formica tables circa 1950, underneath the ceiling tiles that sagged precariously. A hard sneeze would have
shaken the pressed tin loose. Perhaps the bric-a-brac littering the walls, too. Annie had laughed at the old bait freezer in the back. “Bloodworms” was stenciled on one end, “marriages performed” on the other.
Sam arrived twenty minutes later. For all her many gifts, she had no sense of time. It would have been just like her to burrow into some project and forget about dinner. Evelyn and I once set Sam up on a blind date during college, and she failed to show. Later, mortified, apologetic, she explained, “I fell into one of my art history books and forgot. Sorry.” In some ways Charlie’s absolute control over family finances made complete sense. She never would have paid the bills on time.
The sweet pucker had returned to Sam’s lips since last Friday, the sparkle to her eyes. Her skin glowed, and her black hair glistened. Opting for a plain black top, she had already abandoned Charlie’s penchant for flamboyant attire. Simple fashion suited her.
“How was your day?” she asked.
“Dear,” I said, finishing the sentence.
“Huh?”
“ ‘How was your day, dear?’ That’s the expression.”
“Oh, stop it. I’m curious.”
“I told a reporter to get stuffed, got into a fight with a colleague named Lady Goldfish, and FedExed a rubber chicken to a prospect. All in all, I’d say it was just another day at the office.”
Ask me about the reporter.
“Why the chicken?”
“To snap a guy out of his funk. He wants to be a client, but he’s dragging his feet. Won’t make a decision.”
“And your FedEx sends the right message?” Sam asked, smiling wryly.
“Well,” I said, measuring my words, “a rubber chicken seems more politically correct than hot dogs. I almost sent him a package of weenies.”
“Oh, stop it,” she repeated, laughing now. “It’s a wonder you have any clients.”
“Hey, whatever it takes. In my profession everything works. And nothing works.”
“It’s sweet that Annie arranged for us to meet here,” Sam said, changing the subject. “Did she know the four of us were regulars?”
“Probably not. She said Live Bait is a ‘girl thing.’ ”
“Beats me,” Sam observed on behalf of girl things everywhere.
“Annie said you have news, right?” Without thinking or stopping to listen, I rapid-fired a second question: “Do you want a bottle of wine with dinner?”
“Yes and no.” Sam glowed, and I decided she had never looked more beautiful. Or maybe my drinks were taking their toll. Maybe I needed to slow down on the sauce.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means yes, I have news. And no, I don’t want any wine.”
“Okay?”
I had never seen Sam drink to excess. Or go without. Nobody could teetotal around Charlie. Or could they? I remembered Sam’s birthday party. Surrounded by guests and nose-high with Neylan’s navel, Sam had toasted the belly dancer with a full glass of wine. Sam never drank that night, not even a sip.
Now Sam’s remarkable blue eyes taunted me. She offered no clues. She gave no hints. When it finally hit me, disbelief first, then exuberance, I raced round from my side of the booth and squeezed Sam and cheek-kissed her and announced in a voice raspy from the rounds, “What a gift.”
She pushed me away. “What are you talking about, Grove?”
“You’re not pregnant?” My face turned scarlet, and I felt every bit the jackass.
Sam showed no emotion. Her expression was a mask, stoic and inscrutable. After an eternity plus some, she decided enough was enough. “Gotcha,” she relented, and hugged me back. “About two months.”
Relief coursed through my veins. “Cute,” I replied, savoring her joke.
“Grove,” she countered, at once teasing and coquettish, “you’ve always been so gullible.”
“Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?”
“We haven’t peeked.” Sam quickly corrected herself, “I haven’t peeked.”
With those words, the room’s déjà vu grew dark. No Charlie. No Evelyn. No Finn. One simple substitution, “I” for “we,” had turned our old haunt strangely foreign. Sorrow tunneled through our thoughts like worms in a morgue.
Doesn’t take much
.
Sam’s smile faded, mine too. Neither of us knew what to say. A CD blared
woefully in the background, a woman singing the blues about her rotten life with six no-count husbands.
Bet you’re no picnic, lady.
The singer sounded convincing. Too many cigarettes. Too many tumblers of cheap scotch. Our waitress finally rescued us. Sam ordered catfish. I ordered chicken-fried steak in honor of Charlie.
There was that time when he could not choose between Plantation Gumbo with Andouille Sausage and Robert E. Lee Chicken-Fried Steak. Charlie ordered both and chased the dueling entrées with a side of honey and butter sweet potatoes over marshmallow dirty rice, collard greens with ham hocks, and at least one pitcher of beer. He almost finished with two scoops of chocolate ice cream buried under slices of butter-fried sugar bananas. But later he asked if there were any cookies to accompany his Kahlúa. Evelyn and I had watched the entire gorge-o-rama in disbelief.
I broke the silence first. “You guys had been trying for a while?”
“Not too long,” she replied. “The fertility drugs kicked right in. And wham bam, hello, Sam.” She sounded rueful and happy, both at once.
“Maybe it was all that hard work,” I offered helpfully.
“It’s a tough job,” Sam agreed.
“But somebody has to do it,” I finished on cue.
“Do you miss your girls?” Sam sounded fearful, hesitant to compare her future to my past and present. She was really saying,
What will I do without Charlie?
At least that was my translation.
I measured my response, summoned every ounce of compassion in my psyche, and lied. “Time makes it pass.”
Total bullshit.
“What do you miss?” she persisted.
“Evelyn’s mocha skin.” With that, eighteen months of grief gutted all self-control. “I miss her brown eyes and the way one sat just a little higher than the other. I miss Finn’s bed, how all three of us crowded together and read stories every night. I miss spooning with Evelyn when we retreated to our room afterward. I miss the things that bugged me while Evelyn was alive, her command mode, the way she scheduled every detail of her life. I miss Finn’s colds, the times when she was snotty and utterly miserable and I had to prod her to finish bowls of broth. I miss her peanut butter diapers. I miss Evelyn’s smart-ass mouth. You know what I mean? My little girl was
developing a smart mouth of her own, and I wish Finn had lived to catch up with Evelyn. I would trade everything to get them back. I’d give anything to walk my daughter down the aisle someday, to grow old with my wife and hold her hand again.”
Tears streamed down Sam’s cheeks, making me regret my outburst. “I’m scared,” she confessed, shaking against my chest. We sat for a long time. When our waitress arrived with dinner, Sam avoided eye contact and refused to come up for air. Head down, she planted her nose in the crook of my shoulder.
Our twenty-something waitress, trendy and borderline Gothic, assessed Sam for a moment. Then she scowled at me. When Goth Girl finally turned, a Kilroy tattoo peeked over a black thong that soared high above tight jeans. Shabby chic. She whispered to another waitress just loud enough for me to hear, “The shithead probably dumped her.”
“Men suck,” the second woman agreed. “I usually like redheads, but he’s way too manorexic for my taste.”
Every New Yorker has hair-trigger opinions.
By and by, Sam relaxed her vice grip and blinked away the tears. The scent of Cajun fare wafted up from the plates. The ambrosial aromas filled our nostrils and Sam focused on her catfish.
We made light talk. I told Sam stories about my grandfather, the first Grove, the one who had thrown dice for his cigar store in Chicago. She updated me on the adventures of Sadie, her cousin and the family groupie who had stalked Bob Dylan for years. Charlie, Sam, Evelyn, and I used to laugh our heads off about that one. It took some time, but the gloom faded and our good memories prevailed.
Of course, I couldn’t leave well enough alone. Five or so glasses of wine had turned my right brain into a mosh pit. Booze didn’t justify the next question, though. At times I simply asked the most unfortunate shit. “You know about the
New York Post
, right?”
“They’re running a story,” she confirmed.
“It sucks, if you ask me.”
“You hung up on that reporter, Maris I think?”
“Force of habit,” I replied. “How’d you know?”
“I told her to call you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“So that’s how Maris got my cell number.” I had been curious ever since she interrupted
The Best of Johnny Cash
en route to New Paltz.
“She phoned the day after the funeral,” Sam explained, reaching over and finding my hand. Her depth of emotion, her simple touch, they roused me. “I can’t talk about Charlie yet.”
“Maris called more than once?” I already knew the answer.
“Last Saturday. She said you’re a jerk.”
Are you there?
Anger mushroomed inside me. Not at Mandy Maris; she was doing her job. Not at Sam; she needed help. Mentally, I blasted myself for botching her care package. What had I done?
Hung up on a reporter three times.
“I’m sorry, Sam. I should have handled things differently.”
“Forget it, Grove.” She squeezed my hand more tightly.
“I have this thing about the press,” I added, growing more penitent by the moment.
“It’s under control,” she soothed.
“What do you mean?”
“Alex Romanov deals with reporters all the time. I told Maris to call him.”
“No wonder,” I muttered aloud, remembering her crack about hedge funds.
“No wonder what?”
“Maris mentioned Alex this morning.”
“Really?” This time Sam apologized. “I’m sorry, Grove.”
“What for?”
“I thought she would stop calling.”
“Sam, it’s not important.” Now we were clutching each other’s hands. “There’s only one thing that matters. That’s for me to help sort out your finances. Whatever it takes.”
I paid the bill, tipping Goth Girl too much from force of habit. She glowered anyway, remembering Sam’s tears. Goth Girl’s expression said,
Don’t you dare break up with a girl in my bar again
. If only she knew. Sam and I exited Live Bait, deserting the spicy Cajun smells that had whetted appetites and fed our memories.
