Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [29]
Suddenly, I felt awful for the poor jeweler who had to deliver the news. His face was deep red and there were tiny beads of perspiration across his forehead. He had probably seen this kind of thing before. Maybe a lot. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face. Talk about an awkward moment?
“I could give you a few hundred for the mountings,” he said. “I’m terribly sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. Not your fault. Let me think about it. Thank you,” I said, “thanks for your time.”
Patti, my Mortification, and I stepped out into the street. The cracked sidewalks were frozen to a dull gray, bumpy and uneven from the remnants of ice, salt, and sand. The wind whipping down the canyons of Manhattan nipped our cheeks, chapping our lips. I was so upset I could barely make eye contact with my sister.
Patti said, “Maybe we should check with someone else. I mean, he might be wrong. He was pretty nervous.”
“He’s not wrong. I mean, sure let’s check, but he’s not wrong. I just know it.”
“Addison. That son of a bitch,” she said.
“No. Well, yeah, he was a son of a bitch but the poor thing. How low! He must have felt so low when he did this.”
“Humph. That depends on what he needed the money for. I mean, if he was buying cocaine or something, it wouldn’t have bothered him one bit. Or if he was paying that woman’s mortgage . . .”
“Oh, hell. You’re right. Probably safe to say that by the time he pulled this trick his moral compass had dissolved into a puddle of very smelly crap.”
“That’s for sure. Want to go get a cup of coffee? Get out of the cold for a few minutes? Then we can go check with someone else?”
“No. I think I’d just like to go home, or back to your house, eat and drink neurotically and go to bed early. In the fetal position.” I sighed so hard that my frosty breath looked like a mushroom cloud and then I sighed the same way again and again.
Patti looked at me then, worried that I might hyperventilate and aware I was headed to the abyss of despair. She gave me a stern look that said we’ll have none of that and looped her arm inside the crook of my elbow and we leaned into the bitter wind together, pushing against its strength, heading back to the garage where her car waited and then back to New Jersey.
“Here’s the good thing,” I said to her in the car as we reached the other side of the George Washington Bridge.
“Let’s hear,” she said.
“There’s nothing else to take or sell. This is the bottom.”
“Life can be so unfair.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
It took about a week to make all the arrangements but I was finally ready to go. Mark had helped me buy a used Subaru for eight thousand dollars with only fifty thousand miles on it. In his estimation that was practically a new car. It was in good enough shape for a prudent widow or a starving artist, and if I could drive it to South Carolina without wrecking it, it would be all I needed to toot around Folly and Charleston for at least a year or two. I had taken almost all my designer clothes and handbags to a consignment shop called Second Acts, and if they were able to sell some or all of it that would give me another few thousand dollars, I hoped. Besides, what was I going to do with Valentino wool suits and Armani heavy sweaters in the humidity of the Lowcountry? I didn’t need cashmere-lined gloves, cashmere wraps, and lined wool trousers, either. I’d perspire to death. I kept a sensible St. John black dress and jacket in case I had to go to another funeral or in case a prince materialized and invited me to a black-tie dinner. And I packed a few other accoutrements to remind myself I was a dignified woman. It was strange to let so many of my possessions just go in such a short period of time but it was also kind of liberating, like being born again, naked and free.
The morning I was to leave, I was up before the sun. My plan was