Looking back, I realize that most of the reason I didn’t want to leave Manhattan was that I didn’t want people to talk about me when I was gone. I couldn’t deal with feeling left out of the circle that I had worked so hard to insert myself into.
Because, I’ll admit it, I’ve always cared a hell of a lot about what other people think. I used to believe it was human nature, but now I’ve realized it’s more akin to the nature of a New York City social climber. I call myself that affectionately, now that I’m back in New York, back in my apartment, back in my old life, yet somehow a completely different person. I’ve never felt that it was a bad thing to want to better your station in life. Which is why after my father was killed and my mother moved us to Podunk City, USA, I felt that, geographically and socially, I had moved in the wrong direction in a big way.
I used to thank God every night that I only had to live in that hick hellhole for six months. Only six months before I could escape back to NYU, aka civilization. I got that my mom was scared and all of that after 9/11. But honestly. The city rebuilt. Why couldn’t she?
I felt guilty leaving my two sisters to rot there. Emerson especially. She was only a baby, for heaven’s sake. Well, I guess ten isn’t a baby. But it’s young enough that you don’t know what you don’t know. And what she didn’t know was that our selfish mother had taken her out of the city of action and opportunity and dropped her into the cultural desert.
So I made it my life’s mission to encourage her passion for art and acting. And I guess somewhere in there, I forgot to work on my middle sister, Sloane. Bless her heart, as those degenerates say with their slow accents, she stayed in the damn place. Went to college in Georgia with all those peaches and practically no teeth. Married a guy in the military, which, I mean, yeah, is admirable and all that.
But we’re Murphys. We were destined for greatness.
Greatness was what I thought I was getting when I met James. His hair was great. His plane was great. His 57th Street apartment was great. Even his mother was great. For thirteen whole blissful years, we were great, too. Just great. Until he decided to come home and tell me, six months pregnant, no less, that he was no longer in love with me. He was no longer in love with me, you see, because he was now in love with a twenty-year-old supermodel who subsisted on squeezy applesauce and whipped cream vodka.
This is what you should expect when nothing in your life is ever good enough. You should expect that your husband will eventually trade you in for something better. Truth be told, sometimes I’m surprised I hadn’t traded him in, as hard as I was scraping to reach the top. But, well, it’s harder to climb when you’re pregnant in heels.
And so, when I decided to take a short sabbatical with my sweet, beautiful, fated for a Nobel Peace Prize daughter, Vivi, I figured I’d already fallen about as far as I could. Might as well fall all the way down to “my momma’s house,” as they would say in Peachtree, a town with too many mullets and too few chromosomes.
Had I known that we’d be Murphy, party of eight, I might have rethought my decision. But there are no people in the world to make you realize what a spoiled, selfish bitch you’ve become and put you right back in your place quite like sisters. All I can say is that for the state I was in, thank God I have two.
ONE
the tide rolls in
ansley
I love pretty much every quirky thing about my town. The weird people and the weirder traditions, the over-the-top celebrations and beautiful old homes. I love that I can feel like I am completely at the end of the earth but then, two bridges and twenty minutes later, enter an adjacent town large enough to have everything I need. I thrive on the quiet and privacy of the off-season but the summer vacationers who feel free to photograph my home and sometimes even peek in through my windows have never been my favorite thing.
And Caroline has never been my favorite child. I know that’s not nice to say, but it’s nicer than saying she’s my least favorite child, which is really the truth. I love her to pieces. I’d take a bullet for her. I’d sooner die than see something bad happen to her, and I would never, ever want to live without her. But she is . . . tricky.
So I guess that’s why I didn’t answer the first time she called. I was in Sloane Emerson, my interior design shop, which, yes, I did name after my other two, more favored children. It’s a bit of a family joke, actually. When we moved to Peachtree Bluff, Caroline kicking and screaming in her designer jeans the whole way, I acted casual about opening my store. I acted like it was something I was doing to take my mind off of my beloved husband dying, like it was something I was doing to assert myself. In actuality, I’d had to go back to work because, while we were told we would be receiving millions of dollars in life insurance, we hadn’t. I thought it would intensify the general panic and nightmares and PTSD around our new, very large, very potentially haunted home if my girls knew that.
So when I announced that I was getting back into decorating, my darling jewel of a daughter Caroline had said, “Oh, good. I hear the camper-trailer design business is really flourishing right now.”
And when I enthused that the business was going so well that I thought I would open a storefront, my sweet-tempered, well-adjusted child snapped, “If you name it Caroline’s, I will die.”
So I didn’t name it Caroline’s. I named it Sloane Emerson. It was the first thing I had done in quite some time that my eldest daughter thought was funny.
It was quiet around town that January morning, the tourists hiding wherever they had come from, not to return until April, despite it being my favorite time of year. Maybe it was the temperatures in the mid-to high sixties that made me love the winter so much. Maybe it was that only the locals remained. It was hard to tell.
I was pulling some Pine Cone Hill matelassé samples for two regular clients who needed to spruce up their yachts—in a town of three thousand people, boat owners had become my bread and butter—when the bell above the door rang.
Ah, yes. I would know that beard anywhere. Hippie Hal, reporting for duty.
“What’s up, Hal?”
“Oh, not much, Ansley. You know. The tide rolls in, the tide rolls out.”
“Sure does, Hal.”
This was a part of the morning. Whether it was forty degrees or 140, Hal wore rumpled jeans and a meticulously pressed white oxford. But depending on the heat, he’d layer a few of the shirts. It was his signature look. Hal, who had sold the three McDonald’s he owned in Tennessee and headed for the shore, lived in a small house two streets over that was always a subject of heated debate at town meetings. You see, Hal refurbished bicycles, saved them from the landfill, as he put it. So there were always a few on his front lawn to entice tourists ready to bike around town.