“Please. He killed me again this year. Well, that’s what I was thinking too. I mean, we owe them. Especially him. Forever. But next year I’m gonna get him out on the tennis court and destroy him.”
After that summer, time began to feel as though it was truly flying. As we knew it would come to pass, that fall Old Rufus went to dog heaven. He was just shy of his nineteenth birthday, riddled with arthritis and every ailment dogs can suffer in their old age. One day we let him outside and he didn’t come when we called him. Luke and Max were yelling his name for so long that, having a premonition and a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, I finally went outside in the yard to see what was going on. My worst fears were confirmed. When we found Rufus at the edge of the woods, the boys were very sad and so was Adam, but I cried like a baby. He had probably been trying to chase something, like a squirrel or a skunk, and his heart just gave out. Mr. Proctor dug a grave and we buried him overlooking the river with prayers and flowers.
“He was my best friend,” I said to Adam through my tears.
“He was an awfully good dog,” Adam said, giving me a hug.
“We can get another dog,” Max said.
“We’ll see,” I said.
Now, a few months later when Crank the cat gave up the ghost, there was no crying and no ceremony. In fact, Crank was merely assumed dead because she disappeared from our property and our lives.
“You think she was catnapped?” Max said.
“Catnapped! That ain’t even a word!” Luke said and laughed.
“Don’t say ‘ain’t,’” I said.
“Nobody in their right mind would steal that cat,” Adam said.
Despite my most fervent wishes that time would slow down, it did not. My boys were growing up too fast, I began to find white hairs on my head, and my hands and feet ached at the end of a long day in the kitchen. Even Adam was getting gray around the temples. And, as he thought he might, he bought us a three-bedroom condominium at Wild Dunes, blocking out two weeks for ourselves each year. Not to be outdone, Carl and Eve bought an almost identical one two doors away from ours.
I marked the passing of each year by vacations and holidays and photographs. Christmases, Easters, Thanksgivings, pictures taken around the Christmas tree, the table spread with food, or all of us gathered in my garden, holding tomatoes or corn. Pictures of the boys holding pumpkins they had grown, grinning widely, front teeth gone missing. Then there were my boys of summer, shirtless and freckled, tanned to a beautiful shade of café au lait, holding up watermelons so big they could take a prize at a county fair.
There were pictures of Luke and Max on their first bicycles and then later sitting up tall in the saddle on their horses. There were dozens of fish they caught spread out on the dock. Panoramic pictures of Luke and Max casting nets across the Carolina sky, standing in their johnboat out in the middle of the Stono. When they were about twelve, against my wishes, Adam bought shotguns and taught the boys how to hunt birds. There were pictures of ducks and pheasants they shot spread across the tailgate of Adam’s pickup, which kicked up great clouds of dust on dirt roads when they went hunting with their dad and their Pointers.
Adam had taken most of the pictures, but I was the one who edited them, carefully cropping and color-correcting each one. After deliberation over the worthiness of each photo, I printed and framed the ones that represented those moments in the most appealing and memorable way. Indeed, the walls of our den and the halls of our house were a chronicle of our lives. And interspersed between them all were favorite memories from all our summers at Wild Dunes with Eve, Carl, Daphne, and Cookie. Of course, Ted and Clarabeth continued to join us each year.
Whenever Eve paid a solo visit to her mother in Charleston, Ted and Clarabeth met them for dinner. They had become quite good friends. Clarabeth would confide to me that yes, she had seen Cookie and Eve, and naturally she would make a remark about Cookie’s very high opinion of herself and that perhaps she understood why Eve held such an affection for alcohol.
“I can’t imagine having Cookie for a mother,” Clarabeth said after the night she and Ted met them for dinner at Grill 225 to celebrate their recent marriage. They finally tied the knot! Clarabeth wanted no fuss about a wedding, so they went off to New Orleans, said nothing to anyone, and came back married. “I’m sure she never did a thing to boost that poor child’s self-esteem.”
“Cookie can be a bit of a stinker,” I agreed.
“Well, she has other redeeming qualities.”
“Such as?”
“She can be very entertaining. You know, most people think white wine is harmless, but it isn’t,” Clarabeth said.
“Do you think Eve has a problem?”
I had noticed the last time we were together at Wild Dunes that Eve seemed to be guzzling a whole lot more wine than usual, even for someone on vacation.
“Well, she drank an entire bottle herself.”
“Good grief!”
I didn’t like to think of Eve as an alcoholic, and I wasn’t proud that I was sort of secretly glad to have someone remark that Eve wasn’t perfect.
But all around, life was a whole lot better than merely satisfactory. Adam’s construction business continued to grow and I finally amassed enough photographs and tested enough recipes to piece together a draft of my cookbook. Sadly, all of it remained in a big box in the bottom of the guest room’s closet, because my growing boys and their very busy schedules devoured nearly every waking hour of my time. And I asked myself over and over, did the world really need another cookbook?
Once a year, while on a road trip to Florida, my brother, JJ, and his wife, Tasha, stopped by to spend the night. It always proved to be the predicted painful endurance contest for Adam, and by the time they left in the morning Adam was wrung out. After dinner the night before, when I’d grilled gorgeous rib-eye prime steaks, they said they really didn’t like to eat so much red meat. And, well, they were right, of course. I knew red meat was bad for you, but in my mind, it was a special treat. The next morning, I made them all breakfast—eggs, grits, and sausage with scratch biscuits so light they nearly floated across the room from the oven to the plates. JJ and Tasha pushed their food around their plates and ate like birds.
“Eliza, your biscuits are the best I’ve ever eaten, but I’ve never understood why people eat grits and say they actually like them,” JJ said.
“They’re gritty,” Tasha said.
“That’s why they call ’em grits!” Max said.
“Hmmm,” Adam said for the maybe hundredth time in the last twelve hours, checking his watch.
“It’s hard to find common ground,” I said, waving good-bye to them as they pulled away in their car with bottles of my homemade jams bubble-wrapped and tucked into a canvas tote. “I’ll bet they’re saying the same thing.”
“One can only hope,” Adam said.
“I did my best,” I said wistfully. “He’s my only brother, you know? I love him.”