Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [28]
A pecan pie was the cure for anything. For some families it was chicken soup but for mine it was a gooey rich filling of Karo syrup, butter, sugar, and pecans all nestled into a gel against a crust made with lard. If I was really on a bummer I could eat a whole one. Okay, not in one sitting but a homemade pecan pie would see me through just about any seventy-two-hour dilemma.
Sara thought it was a great idea for me to retreat to Folly Beach, too.
“Mom, seriously. You need to get the heck out of New Jersey. Your whole entire world besides me, Russ, Aunt Patti, and Uncle Mark just Apocalypsed! Take a break! You know? Maybe I can find some cheap tickets and come down for a few days. I’ll make you one of my special cocktails and we can stay up all night . . .”
“Yeah, great! So how’s that bartending thing working out?”
“Mom! I’m a mixologist!”
“Right, right. Sorry.”
“I’m making some serious dough.”
“Well, praise the Lord for that.”
And I spoke to Russ, who was perfectly sanguine as most men are about a parent coming to town. In fact, he could see no reason why a basket of fried seafood wasn’t the perfect solution to anything that ailed me.
“We’ll go to Bowens Island! It’ll be like old times.”
Wasn’t that the typical male response? The stomach speaks. I had to smile at my boy.
“Absolutely,” I said and sure enough my traitorous mouth began to salivate.
Bowen’s Island was the most diminutive of all the islands in the land, so small that in the old days the island itself was said to practically disappear when the tide came in. There, in a tiny, very undistinguished house passing for a restaurant, one that had escaped the attention of the health department for decades and any touches of gentrification from a decorator since its very inception, you could eat your fill of delicious shrimp so fresh, fish so exquisitely moist, and hush puppies as big as your fist, for a pittance. I mean, a plate of fabulous fish and grits for ten dollars? Even in my newly impoverished state, I could pick up that check.
So, with those conversations, observations, and conclusions, my immediate future had been more or less decided but the deal was clinched when I took an unfortunate but necessary short ride to Forty-seventh Street, the diamond district in New York City. Any woman would hate to part with her diamonds and my heart was heavy, but it was abundantly clear to me that I had to sell my ring and studs. After all, they were just things that could be replaced if my financial situation changed.
There in the kiosk of a well-respected diamond dealer, I. Friedman, leaning against a glass showcase crammed with estate pieces from another era, standing there with my sister Patti by my side, I learned from Corey Friedman that my diamonds were fake. Yes. Fake.
At first, I was stunned. Patti gasped and, to give you some idea of the gravity of the moment, she did not say one word. A terrible silence filled the air. There we were, two well-dressed middle-aged women, and I was obviously the victim of some kind of disgusting, horrible scam. I could feel my blood pounding in my ears. Here it was again. More treachery. More deception. One more betrayal from Addison, The F-ing Scoundrel, formerly known as The Deceased.
Then I remembered the night I gave them back to him. It was like watching the rerun of a movie in my head. Over dinner not too many years ago, he took my original diamond engagement ring and my smallish diamond studs into his hands and stood. With a glass of an ’83 Haut Brion in one hand and my treasures in the other, he delivered an announcement that to honor our twentieth anniversary he wanted me to have something spectacular. Absolutely spectacular, he said, worthy of a queen, something worthy of The Queen of HIS World. This was done with so much theatrical flourish that you could almost hear the New York Philharmonic playing in the background. I had believed him and I even wept, hoping against the odds that this was my old Addison, trying to make amends for all the many other outrages with a grand gesture meant for me.
FAKE!
Unbelievable.