Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [41]
When Momma was diagnosed, we began spending more and more time with Aunt Daisy, because Dad had to work.
Our father traveled for a living, so we spent more and more time at Aunt Daisy’s house. He was a pilot for Pan American World Airways and flew all over the world. One night, just two years after we lost our mother, our father died in his sleep of a heart attack. He was in Singapore. I still remember the hullabaloo it was to have his body returned to us and how hysterical Aunt Daisy was with the American embassy and the airlines. They say it took weeks to bring him home. Red tape. So! That’s the short version of what happened to our parents. I still have no memories of either funeral and it’s probably just as well.
I don’t like to think about those days. What’s the point? But Patti and I get mammograms religiously every year and we try to do a lot of cardio and eat heart-healthy meals. Well, most of the time when we’re not eating cake and pecan pie. Or sausage. Or waffles.
Anyway, all that said, from a very early age, we came to the beach to unburden our young souls, to find some kind of comfort in nature and from each other. We were too young to fully comprehend that life goes on and the world doesn’t really care about your personal sorrow. It just kept turning. There was always someone to consider who had less, some poor soul in a worse situation to pray for, and we were constantly told that we should be grateful for what we had. And we were grateful, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a struggle to hold ourselves together, keep our grades up, and lopsided smiles on our faces.
I remembered then how the kids in school pitied us and how I hated their pity because it was false. Children are so cruel and when we were labeled as unfair game for the usual bullying, sarcasm, and backstabbing that went on among girls, they ostracized us as weird. They called us The Bummer Sisters behind our backs but we knew it. Who knows? Maybe they thought our situation was contagious or that we could use our loss to some advantage over them. All their mean-spirited childish quarantine really accomplished was to drive Patti and me closer together. Those were the days that Patti became elevated to the status of the ultimate big sister and that poor Aunt Daisy learned what it was like to raise long-eared mules.
Today it was nearly impossible to remember our parents beyond their faces frozen in time in the scrapbooks Aunt Daisy kept and the few pictures we had. It wasn’t like Aunt Daisy didn’t do everything she could to give us a stable and loving home. And when Ella was there, she was an angel to us, helping with homework, listening to us, or cooking something delicious to eat. But it wasn’t the same thing as having our own two healthy parents in our life and we all knew it.
Funny, I didn’t seem to need to dance like crazy to rid myself of the hangover of Addison’s death. An unconscious sock-slide across the floor had seemed perfectly appropriate. The only thing I felt for Addison was seriously pissed off. Maybe I’d simply had enough of death for one lifetime and by the time he took the leap into the next world, I’d certainly had enough of him. The crazy selfish son of a bitch.
Even though it was just forty degrees, I shivered a few times and moved back from the railing to a chair at the table in the sun. Forty degrees in February in New Jersey would be considered a sign of early spring and here it made me have chills if I was in the shade. I took a few more sips of my coffee and thought about Patti up there in the frozen tundra of Alpine and all the misery that came with winter. Black ice. Furnaces that sputtered and failed. Slippery roads. And being so damn cold your teeth clattered if you had to walk across a parking lot. I should call her, I thought, and let her know I’m thinking about her, tell her I love her and rehash my drive down here once more. I wished then that she was here. Last night we had spoken briefly, briefly because