Isle of Palms: A Low Country Tale (Lowcountry Tales, Band 3) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dorothea Benton Frank was born and raised on Sullivan's Island in South Carolina. She was the New York Times bestselling author of numerous novels, including Sullivan's Island, Plantation, Pawleys Island, Shem Creek, and Isle of Palms.

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Prologue

Okay. I had a dream about my mother last night and I always seem to dream of her when she has had a beyond-the-veil itch to scratch my back. She was waltzing with my father at an enormous celebration of some kind. They were smiling and having a wonderful time. I couldn’t remember ever seeing Doc so happy or Momma so beautiful. She never said a word. She just smiled at me. I had so many questions I wanted to ask her but for some reason, I couldn’t speak.

The next thing I knew, I could sense the light of morning growing all around me. I must have been born with the thinnest eyelids in the world. You know how that is? Well, I realized I was awake. But for a few moments I hung on to the fringes of sleep, trying to retain the details of everything I had seen. I wondered, like I always did, if there was a larger meaning to the dream. Half of my DNA is German, but it was the all-American Lowcountry remainder that wore itself out to a frazzle searching for cosmic explanations.

Maybe something was going to happen. Had we all been at a wedding? The old salts said that when you dreamed about weddings it meant the opposite, that something was coming to an end. More change? No, thanks.

That was when my feet hit the floor. There was no way another blessed change could happen without me pitching a hissy fit. Big time. We’d had enough change around here to choke a goat. We had made it through Thanksgiving and were now trying to focus on Christmas. Thanksgiving had been enough to make anybody’s head burst like an overripe melon. Like Bettina says all the time, it’s enough already. Bettina’s from New York. She’s our manicurist and you’ll love her when you meet her.

There’s so much to tell you about.

Anyway, next I got myself a cup of coffee—ground Colombian beans with a piece of split vanilla bean thrown in the filter—and went outside to get the paper and look at the sky. The first thing I noticed was that my blasted garden still continued to climb all over my trees and my house. Every night it took over a little more. Not that it wasn’t pretty. Hell, no! It was nothing less than a horticultural miracle. Jack’s beanstalk.

The sky looked fine, no storms coming or anything like that. In fact, it was going to be a beautiful day. I stood there watching the sun rise on the Isle of Palms. Right then and there, I decided that my dream had been a message that it was way past time to tell my story. So, here I am.

Now, you don’t know me yet, but by the time I’m all done working my jaw, you’re gonna see that I’m not one to blab. Even though I’ve heard more tales than every bartender

in Ireland, I’ve always tried to keep my distance from trouble. Gossip was trouble and I gave it a wide berth. At least I had tried to. Not that I hadn’t had my share of tight spots. Lord! Jeesch! Man! There were days when I thought the devil himself was out to get me. Maybe he had been, but lately, I had been feeling like he thought he’d given me his pitchfork enough. Not that I’m suspicious, but don’t repeat that, okay? Saying things were going great might get his attention.

Here’s the thing that had landed me in trouble in the first place. Most of my years had been spent careening through life, keeping my plans on a back burner. I kept waiting to live. But wasn’t that what women did? Didn’t we always put duty to others before our own ambitions? Were we not the caretakers, the peacemakers, the homemakers, the ones who told our men and our children that we would always be behind them, no matter what? We told them that everything would be alright and that life was worth living.

Well, most of us tried to do these things. Not all women. Some women were so mean if you looked at them funny your hair could turn into snakes. But all they ever got themselves by being mean was older and more bitter. Ooh! I’d tolerated a few women like that for too long. Somebody better tell them to run and hide because Anna’s talking now. That’s me. Anna Lutz Abbot.

My professional life has earned me nothing but beat-up eardrums and a grossly underexercised tongue, mainly because I own a salon. I’ve been working in the salon world for getting on to twenty years. See, when my clients bared their souls, what I thought and what I said were very often two different things. Who in this world has the privilege to really speak their minds? The lunatics, honey, that’s who. Naked truth from my lips would have put me in the poor-house long ago. Besides, isn’t it better to try to deal with people and all their problems with some little bit of sympathy? Of course it is. But, bottom line? I have heard it ALL!

Have I got a story to tell? Yeah, honey, let’s get you a glass of sweet tea and then plop yourself right down in my chair. I’m gonna tell you a lot of secrets, but if I hear them told, I’ll come after your tongue with my shears. Or worse, my hammer! Yes, I will. This entire tale is true to the very last word and all the names and places are real to expose the guilty.

I was telling Arthur the other day—Arthur is the man who drives me crazy with the shivers—that I had been thinking that maybe it was time to tell some people about how my whole world had changed in just a few months. If it could happen to me it could happen to anybody, right? He laughed so hard I thought he might up and die on me, so I said, Just what the hell is so funny, and he said, Since when don’t you talk? I was not amused. Not at all. No.

Besides my own discoveries, it had occurred to me that it would be très cool if people knew about another side of life in the Lowcountry and baby, there’s plenty to talk about. Every possible thing you needed to know about southern living was discussed under the roof of Anna’s Cabana—and don’t tell me, I know: Anna’s Cabana sounds like the name of a seedy juke joint on the back beaches of the Virgin Islands. It does! But, when you come to understand how it was given that name, you’ll see why I let ithappen.

In any case, my crazy little salon is a gold mine in human behavior studies. When you take one part old salts, mix it up with gentrification and garnish it with tourists, you got yourself one mighty cocktail, ’eah? What happened here a few months ago literally turned the tide. It did. In any case, if I charged the same for listening as I charge forfixing hair, I would own the biggest house on this beach. No joke.

And this whole drama isn’t just about what I hear at work. No, no. There’s a whole universe here on this island. We say we are from Charleston, but we are really from East of the Cooper—Cooper River, that is. Around here you’re either from Charleston, East of the Cooper, West of the Ashley (that’s the other big river), or out by Awendaw. Maybe you lived in one of these weird developments that keep cropping up that look like a movie set of downtown or one of the islands you could only get to by boat. The point is that in this neck of the woods, you can better believe that where you hang your hat makes all the difference in how you tick. I am and have always been an island girl and there was nothing to be done about it.

My family hasn’t been in Charleston for a thousand years. We don’t have some grand family home, plantation or any silver we rescued from the Yankees by hiding it in the bricks of our chimney. In fact, I don’t own a lick of silver and it suits me fine. Polishing silver would not be the best use of my time. But we do love the history of the Lowcountry with a wild passion and we romanticize it all, telling ourselves we are anything except ordinary just because we can call this place home.

My momma and her people were from Beaufort and...