Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [68]
The front door was locked so I rang the bell and Ella let me in.
“G’mornin’!” she said.
“Hey! How’re you?” I gave her a peck on the cheek.
“Good, honey. Just roasting a pork shoulder and cooking some greens for supper. Your aunt is in the living room with her foot propped up. Finally! I keep telling her she’s got to rest it, but you know her!”
“Yep! I sure do!”
Aunt Daisy was wearing a sweatshirt from the College of Charleston with a Cougars baseball cap, sitting in a big upholstered armchair, working the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink. I loved that she worked the puzzle in ink. She always claimed it was so she could read what she had written but I thought it reflected her decisiveness. Once Daisy McInerny put it in writing, it was so. I mean in all my life I was always reluctant to argue with her. It just didn’t pay.
“Well!” she said and put the newspaper on her hassock. “Look who the cat dragged in! How was your dinner with our Mr. Risley? Did you get the poop on his wacky wife?”
“I’m working on it,” I said. “I just stopped by to see if y’all need anything from downtown.”
“Sit a minute! Where’re you headed with your pants on fire? Ella! Make my niece one of those cappuccinos! She had a hot date last night and I want her to give us all the juicy details! Here, I got you a key.” She pulled a key on a chain from her pocket and tossed it to me.
“Ooh! One cappuccino, coming right up!” Ella called out from the next room.
“Thanks. There’s not too much to tell, really. We went out to the repairman to see how my car’s coming along and some part they need isn’t in yet.”
“That’s fine. The part my foot needs isn’t in yet either.”
“Getting restless, huh?” I said.
“Humph,” Aunt Daisy said. “This gee-dee foot of mine.”
“You have no idea,” Ella said and put some kind of a microwave coffee concoction in front of me. “Driving me crazy,” she whispered behind her hand.
“I heard that! You think just because I’m old and decrepit that I’m deaf, too?”
“Apparently not,” I said and giggled.
Aunt Daisy’s face softened and she smiled then, her shoulders relaxing. All these two old girls needed was an agreeable buffer. And it had to be annoying to be hobbling around in a cast for weeks on end. I would’ve been impossible to live with.
“So where’d you go for dinner? Someplace romantic I hope?”
“Oh please! No, actually, we went over to Mount Pleasant to this very cute place called the Red Drum. It was good. Sort of Tex-Mex meets up with the Lowcountry. I liked it a lot. When y’all feel like a night on the town, I’ll take you over there.” I took a sip of Ella’s version of cappuccino and decided one sip was more than plenty. It was truly wretched.
“I don’t like to drive at night anymore,” Aunt Daisy said.
“Me either,” Ella said. “I see things in the street that aren’t there.”
“Humph! I wouldn’t get in a car with you after dark for all the tea in China,” Aunt Daisy said to Ella.
“And I don’t blame you but who invited you anyway?” Ella said to her and then turned to me. “Is she turning into a mean old biddy or is it my imagination?”
“She might be a mean biddy but she’s not old,” I said.
“Hush your sassy mouth! You’re not too old for me to turn over my knee, you know.”
Aunt Daisy was smiling but you could sense the Grim Reaper blinking and lurking behind every doorway and in each and every shadow in Aunt Daisy’s house, taking away her freedoms one by one. And Ella’s. That’s how old age was, chipping away at you, bit by bit. If you’re lucky. No one in my family had ever liked to talk about it, to admit they saw changes in their abilities to go and do as they pleased. But I guessed Aunt Daisy and Ella were fed up a little.
“Well, the dark doesn’t bother me,” I said, “so I’d be happy to drive.”
“Speaking of night, can we get back to your evening with the professor? Did you have a wonderful time?”
“Yes, I sure did.”
“And are you going to see him again?” Ella asked.
“Yes, I definitely am.”
“Okay, give us the dirt. Did he try to put the moves on you?