Isle of Palms Read Online Free PDF

Angel gone give y’all fresh lemonade she make this morning. Just this morning I say, Angel?—gone be hot like de Debbil’s breath today! Better have something fuh dem bad chillrun when they come ’round, and come ’round y’all surely did. Drink up and gwine leave me be!”
    Homemade lemonade! Wonderful! She thrilled us all the time.
    Miss Mavis was the exact opposite of Miss Angel. Momma said she was always putting on airs, whatever that meant. Miss Mavis had a daughter who was away at college and a son who was married, living way off in California trying to be a movie star. She would show me his publicity pictures and tell me that he was up for a commercial or a part in a movie. Daddy always said her son was a damn fool because he had changed his name from Thurmond to Fritz. I didn’t know which name was more stupid.
    Miss Mavis and Miss Angel were the neighborhood’s official but revered old biddies. They had taught us plenty, and contrary to what Miss Angel thought about us being just a bunch of spoiled Geechee brats, I was to learn what hard times were.
    We climbed the steps up to Miss Mavis’s part of the house and the minute we stepped inside you couldn’t smell anything except dried flowers and pine. I sat on the couch, crying and hiccuping. Miss Mavis handed me a box of Kleenex, covered in needlepoint with magnolia flowers on a red background. She was one of those craft people.
    “I don’t understand,” I said. “Who was that man? Was Momma murdered? Was he a robber?”
    “No, baby, I’m sure he didn’t murder her. Good gracious! Too much television!”
    I started to wail. What a mean thing to say! I wasn’t crying because of some television program! My momma was dead! Daddy was rubbing a hole in my back. He was in shock himself and I guess he couldn’t begin to think of what to do with me.
    “Come on now, Anna,” Miss Mavis said, “let’s blow our nose, all right? I’m gonna go over to your house with your daddy and see what we can find out. You just stay put and we’ll be right back, okay?”
    “Okay,” I said, and thought for a second about why grown-ups said stupid things like let’s blow our nose. Miss Mavis was nice, but she was making me mad.
    When they closed the door behind them I felt very alone, confused and out of place. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing while they were gone. I mean, watching television seemed inappropriate. Calling Lillian didn’t seem right either. I guess I was sort of stupefied because the only thing I seemed capable of doing was looking around the room and wondering how something so awful could happen to me. I could feel a terrible weariness in my chest and for a moment I worried that there was something wrong with my heart too. What if Momma and I died on the same day? I didn’t want to die. I tried to relax.
    Miss Mavis’s coffee table was covered with magazines and her end tables were jammed with framed photographs. I wasn’t interested in any of it, but then my eye caught a picture of her in her wedding dress that must have been a million years old. She looked pretty in that picture and really young. Momma always said that her husband ran around on her like his pants were in flames, and he turned his liver into a rock. When he died, Miss Mavis went around telling the immediate world that he was a saint. He wasn’t any saint. Even I knew that.
    Daddy, who had as many stories as Angel, used to tell me a story about this pirate named Major Stede Bonnet. People said he became a pirate to get away from his nagging wife. Well, he wound up with his neck in a rope. I never understood how somebody could do something so mean to his family and his liver and then get to be a saint. I wasn’t absolutely positive what running around meant, but I figured it had to do with other women. Stede Bonnet would’ve told him he’d be better off to just stay home and behave himself. Anyway, this slew of happy family pictures was pitiful because Momma told