Slightly South of Simple (Peachtree Bluff #1)
Kristy Woodson Harvey
To my parents, Paul and Beth Woodson, who always told me I could.
PROLOGUE
seagulls
ansley
I still have dreams about that yellow-and-white-striped bikini, the one I was wearing the night I met Jack, my first bona fide summer love. I was fifteen going on sixteen, the perfect age, when your hair tints that summer blond that hairstylists become superstars for emulating. You have filled out enough not to be gangly but not so much that you can imagine a one-piece being in your future.
We spent those bikini summers in Peachtree Bluff, my family and I, at my grandmother’s waterfront home, the one that I didn’t realize until years later was truly something special. It was always blissful, always enchanted, but that summer, Sandra and Emily, my two best friends, and I spent nearly every day at Starlite Island across from Grandmother’s house. It was only a few boat lengths across the sound, but you couldn’t swim there and needed at least a kayak to go. It felt like freedom.
Those summers were all about seeing how close we could get to the wild horses on our favorite island and gauging if any of us could tame the wild boys who seemed as native to the beach as the crabs scurrying about. Skin tanned dark and hair sun-bleached, they sipped Pabst Blue Ribbon all afternoon, throwing footballs and telling (mostly false) stories about how cool they were back home, wherever they had come from.
I imagined then that no matter where my life took me, Peachtree Bluff would always be a part of my story. But it never crossed my mind that one day things would change so quickly and so fiercely that I would end up moving to my childhood paradise, my sanctuary from the real world, full time.
Wherever it may be, you always tell your kids that they can come home again. It’s the thing that, as a parent, you’re supposed to say. But maybe this is why so many people downsize when their children go off to college. Maybe this is why they move to condos on the lake, not the sweeping clapboard home that their grandmother left them in a harbor town in Georgia. If you don’t have five bedrooms and a three-bedroom guesthouse, there is no way that all of your children—families in tow—can descend on you like seagulls on the day-old bread the grandkids throw out on the dock.
But change is the only thing I’ve ever been able to count on in this life, the only thing that hasn’t let me down. And I am quite proud to say that although I may not always have done the right thing, I have survived it all. Hit after hit, storm after storm, I have weathered, I have protected. Like that dock across the narrow street from my house, I have withstood hurricanes, tornadoes, and even the occasional hailstorm.
When I was too scared to go on, too shaken to stand, too rattled to know which way was up, I carried on for the three best parts of me, for the girls who almost ruined my life yet somehow ended up saving it.
As I hear the voices upstairs, some happy, some mad—they are sisters, after all—I open the refrigerator door and wonder, not for the first time, how I got here. How is it possible that a couple of months ago, I was in my grandmother’s house on the sound, enjoying the splendor of the silence? I would open my fridge to find exactly three Smartwaters, one canister of coffee, two yogurts, and some old ketchup.
Now I open that same fridge in that same house to find it nearly spilling over, each item a reminder of one of my girls. The bottles of breast milk are the biggest surprise, the choice to nurse at all an unlikely one for my beautiful, smart, but somewhat selfish Caroline. But it is these very bottles that helped her gain back her trim, toned figure nearly instantly, the prenatal vitamins making her long dark hair even silkier and shinier.
The chocolate milk that you would think was for Sloane’s young sons, but actually is for her, comes next. That middle daughter, doe-eyed like her older sister, her hair a light brown, as though the dark hair gene got lighter with each girl until it eventually gave up and allowed Emerson, the youngest, to be fully blond, has loved chocolate milk since her first taste. Sloane is the least concerned with appearances and has adapted to the role of mother easily, as the hot dogs, grapes, string cheese, and Capri Suns will attest.
The fresh-squeezed green juice beside those bottles, stored in an unusually narrow yet still shapely carafe, reminds me of its blond-haired, blue-eyed owner, Emerson, with her high, sculpted cheekbones that still manage to make her look soft and feminine. Her looks and talent have combined to put her on her way to the acting career she’s always dreamed of. She is the one that, finally, looked like me. Though my hair is now clipped to right at my shoulders, the way hers runs long and free down her back reminds me of my younger days.
The takeout containers and the wine? Well, those could be for any one of my girls. The rows and the list go on and on.
But this is how it is, I’ve come to see. Sometimes you don’t know how empty your fridge—or your heart—can be. You don’t realize it, that is, until at long last, you find them full again.
civilization
caroline
I was the only one who wasn’t really into the whole Peachtree Bluff thing. It’s kind of like being the Grinch at Christmas. My sisters would be beside themselves about riding on the boat, shrimp boils on the beach, and roasting marshmallows all summer long, but I was more in a severe depression because I had to leave my friends in Manhattan and the subway and the lights and, well, you know, civilization. There were no museums—unless you count that pitiful excuse for a boat warehouse they call a museum. There was no theater—unless you count the high school’s horrific performance of Fiddler on the Roof or the annual drag queen fashion show. I’ll admit, that one was fairly Manhattan. But Rent on Broadway it was not.
Most of all, I couldn’t stand the idea of missing out on an entire summer’s worth of fun and gossip, even if it was just sitting around Jenna Franklin’s mom’s house when she was at work, talking about boys and painting our toes. All summer, every summer, I missed everything. And don’t get me started on the year my mom kidnapped us and made me move down there for a whole semester. It was like prison. Well, prison with a good view, I mean.