Isle of Palms by Dorothea Benton Frank Read Free Book Online Page B

through every blessed detail of my life. I just want to give you some highlights. Highlights? Get it? Salon humor. God, I just crack myself up sometimes. Sorry. Occupational hazard.
    Where were we? Ah, yes. The present situation. Here’s something nobody knows except me and the South Carolina Federal Bank. I have seventy-four thousand eight hundred and eighty-three dollars in my interest-bearing account, not that interest is anything to brag about these days. But, I have no debt. I never thought I’d see the day, but here it is. But there was this monumental problem blocking the path of my beach house spending adventure.
    Daddy.
    I knew it was time for me to leave because he had been completely driving me out of my cotton-picking mind. But I was afraid to go because, somewhere along the line, I had forgotten to get a life for myself.
    I love when people say that. Get a life. What is that stupid cliché anyway? (I think, if one wants to be taken seriously, one should avoid clichés like the plague.) Some guy cuts some other guy off in traffic. Get a life! the guy in the other car yells. Well, my father spends years in front of a television. So, get a life! I think to myself. Wouldn’t you know, this stupid get a life business finally got around to me. Thank you so much. Took long enough! My eyes got yoinked open in a most unceremonious and insensitive blast delivered by Jim and Frannie.
    Jim lives in San Francisco and Frannie lives in D.C. They’re my best friends in the world since forever. We were doing our monthly conference call last week and they gave me the freaking, red-suited devil. I made the foolish, self-indulgent, tiny mistake of complaining once too often about Daddy’s moodiness.
    “Anna? Girl?” Jim said. “You know, Frannie and I are so not ready for you to start your rag on Doc. I think it’s a little tired, you know? Like a lavender, glen plaid polyester pant suit.”
    “With a safari jacket,” Frannie said. “And shoulder pads. With epaulets.”
    “Oh!” I said. “O-kaaay.” I started feeling largely and understandably defensive. I mean, if I couldn’t take my troubles to my dearest friends, who could I tell?
    “Give it up! It’s worn out!”
    “Anna, Jim’s right,” Frannie said. “Look, you haven’t had a date in two years, that I know of. You haven’t been to the movies since when? I mean, do you even know who Cameron Diaz is?”
    “Yes, I do. But who cares?”
    “Look, hon,” she said, “and I mean this in the nicest possible way, it seems to us that when you come home from work, you piddle around in the yard, fix dinner, and go to bed, only to start the whole thing over again the next day! You’re acting like you’re sixty years old! Like me dear old granny from Waterford was fond to say, you need to dry your arse. Go have more fun, excuse me, any fun in your life and then your daddy wouldn’t bother you so much. Or us!”
    “Anna? You need to rise from your rut and never go back.”
    I exhaled my disgust at myself and my frustration with them. Dammit all to hell. I hated it when I was wrong. “Well, you’re right, all right? You both are. I know that.” I was chewing on the ends of my hair, a disgusting habit of mine, I suppose, but one I had found comforting since I was a kid.
    “Well, that’s a start. It’s just that I hate to see you like this, you know? We both do. Hell, Anna, Frannie and I love you!”
    “Listen to Jim. You need to move out of your daddy’s house, Anna, and you know it. It just ain’t natural for our generation to go through menopause under our daddy’s roof. It just ain’t becoming for a Magnolia to pale on the branch in daddy’s shadow.”
    “Ouch! Jeesch! Menopause! Of all the despicable and totally disgusting thoughts!” That would have been the old proverbial cold water sloshed in my direction. God. Reality truly sucks. Sometimes. “Frannie? Okay. You’re right. Listen, I know y’all won’t believe this but I’ve actually