Pawleys Island-lowcountry 5 Read Online Free PDF

held you. Period. End of story. And Sallie Anne Wood’s work was lovely but it would never keep you up at night. Well, I hoped there wouldn’t be a catfight between the two of them. You know how artists can be. I would simply flatter Miss Wood to pieces when she arrived and hope for the best.
    So after I had my little tour, Huey and Byron, his houseman, propped me up here in this chair like the reigning queen. I don’t like to get knocked around, and heaven knows, there must be two hundred people expected here tonight. Why in the world I would want to meet all these people eludes me, but Huey insists that I am his good luck charm, so I haven’t missed an opening since he started up this business. I try to be gracious, but so many people! It is a little annoying, and besides, these days I feel a little more tired. I keep telling him that my get up and go got up and went. He just smiles and asks me what color my dress is going to be so he can go waste his money on another corsage.
    It certainly would be nice to have a little something to drink.
    I turned to see Huey approaching with a young woman on his arm. It had to be Rebecca, so I sat up straight and smiled to meet her while giving her the once-over in a way that could not be detected as a once-over.
    “Mother?”
    “Yes, dear?”
    “This is Rebecca Simms. Rebecca, this is my mother, Miss Olivia.”
    “Well! I am so pleased to know you,” I said. “Huey has told me all about you.”
    “And he’s told me all about you! I am so happy to meet you too.”
    I took her hand and held it for a few moments. She did seem like a very nice person, so tiny, like a Dresden figurine. She had a nice watch and no manicure.
    “Huey? Be a dear and bring your mother a little glass of sherry, won’t you? Then I can have a few minutes with Rebecca. Come sit by me!”
    Rebecca smiled, sat down, and Huey winked at me as he walked away.
    “Now, then. Tell me all about yourself! Where are your parents from?”
    “My parents? Oh! Um, Manning. My family is from Manning. My father was a farmer—cotton and soybeans—and my mother, well, I didn’t know my mother very well.”
    “Oh! I am so sorry. Was she ill? Did she pass away at a young age?” I took the glass from Huey, thanked him and fastened my attention on Rebecca’s face. She had very pretty blue eyes, and if she tweezed her eyebrows, one might even notice them.
    “So that’s pretty much the story about my mother,” she said.
    “Oh! I’m sorry, dear. You’ll have to pardon me. I was just thinking you had the prettiest blue eyes I’ve seen in many a day. Yes, you do. Now please indulge me and tell me again about your mother.”
    Well, don’t you know she told me that her mother had stayed on her father’s farm just long enough to get her out of diapers? She left town with a cigarette salesman and ran off to Spartanburg and then Santa Fe, New Mexico. It broke her father’s heart but at least the hussy had the consideration to leave a pantry filled with hundreds of mason jars of bottled string beans, corn, tomatoes, chow chow, bread-and-butter pickles and two kinds of jam—peach and strawberry. Her mother died of a lady cancer before Rebecca was twelve, not that she ever did the poor child a lick of good as a role model, and her death? Well, it served her right. Jezebel.
    “My! Goodness! Gracious sakes alive! Some people in this world…” I just shook my head and she nodded in agreement.
    “It’s the truth. I don’t know how some people live with themselves.”
    “So then your daddy raised you?”
    “Well, I guess, but my grandparents moved in and helped. They were wonderful people. My daddy worked by his father’s side every day, and then there was a drought that lasted for four or five years. Daddy saw that he couldn’t support us with what the farm was bringing in, so he quit farming and rented the land to somebody else. Finally, my granddaddy retired and my daddy opened up a Tastee-Freez and ran it for