Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [56]
“I’m going to give you a key,” she said. “This is ridiculous.”
“Probably not a bad idea anyway,” I said, thinking if they needed me in the middle of the night, it would be good if I could get in. “Do you have any bananas?”
“Of course! I always have bananas. Gotta watch my potassium. Hell at my age I gotta watch everything. I probably need to hire a night watchman just to make sure I’m still breathing.”
I giggled and she smiled at me. She was glad that I took her ongoing harangue about the pitfalls of aging in the right spirit.
“Can I make you a sandwich?” I said.
“Yes! I think a sandwich might be very nice! And there’s some leftover thirteen-bean soup in there, somewhere.”
I dug around in her refrigerator, found the soup and a wedge of cheddar.
“Grilled cheese?”
“Why not?” she said. “It’s the perfect weather for hot soup and a grilled cheese sandwich.”
“What about Ella?”
“She’s gone to the city to see her eye doctor.”
“Oh, I see.” I thought that was marginally hilarious but Aunt Daisy just shook her head. “Get it?”
“Everybody’s a comedian,” she said. “All we do anymore is go to doctors. A big day is a doctor appointment and lunch downtown at Joseph’s or SNOB’s.”
“Where’s the bread?”
“In the breadbox. Where else would it be?”
“Right.” I took out four slices of white bread and dropped a tablespoon of butter into the frying pan. “So, is everything okay? With your health and Ella’s?”
“She’s got cataracts and glaucoma, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. So do I. And we take an aspirin a day so we don’t get a stroke and some other damn fool pill to improve our memory, I forget the name of it.”
I giggled again.
“How’s that one working?” I said. I sliced the cheese and put it on the bread in the pan.
“Not so hot, huh? Wait! It sounds like that Alaskan woman with the whiny voice, the politician . . . Sarah Palin . . . Cerefolin! That’s the one! Whew! I still have it together!”
“Aunt Daisy? You’ve got it together better than I do.”
“Yeah, well, you’ll be all right. Let a little time pass.” She said this and quickly changed the subject. Aunt Daisy’s coddling days were behind her. “Anyway, we’ve got these plastic containers with little pillboxes for each day of the week like I used to have for my old dog, Manny. Remember him?”
Manny was her sweet black lab, who lived for almost eighteen years. And I say who not that because he was like a person in so many ways.
“He was a great dog,” I said.
“He was the love of my life,” she said. “Ah well, we’re getting older, Cate, but the alternative stinks, too.”
“Yes, it does. But you’re not going anywhere for at least another fifty years.” I flipped the sandwiches onto two plates and stirred the soup. I stuck the tip of my finger in the pot. “I think it’s hot enough. You want to check?”
“You can’t tell if the soup is hot enough? Where’s your confidence, girl?” She was a little incredulous. She poured two glasses of tea over ice and put them on the table. It was barely fifty degrees outside and I could hear the fronds of the palmetto trees slapping the sides of the house.
“It left with the repo guys.” I sat down opposite her, opened my paper napkin on my lap, and lifted my glass of iced tea. “Getting windy out there.”
“Humph. It’s the beach.”
“Right. So, Aunt Daisy, let me ask you a question. What do you know about the Charleston Renaissance?”
“The what?”
“The Charleston Renaissance. I don’t know a thing about it. In fact, I’ve never heard about it. I just thought it might be something interesting to learn about. That’s all.”
“Oh, sure. You think I was born yesterday? This is about John Risley isn’t it?”
“I guess so.”
“He’s calling on you and taking you all around the town and you don’t want to look uneducated if he asks this renaissance business? Is that it?”
“I guess so, yeah.”
“Girl! Don’t you play cat-and-mouse with me!”
“Sorry.”
“Humph. Well, I was just a little girl at the time so I didn’t know there was a renaissance going on, either. But! Ever