Free Pawleys Island-lowcountry 5 by Dorothea Benton Frank

alienate the children from the other.”
    “There’s a law?” Rebecca said. Her face drained of all color and I thought she might faint.
    “I wish it was, Rebecca. It’s called parental alienation—it’s a syndrome. Didn’t your attorney go over that with you?”
    “No. No, he didn’t.”
    I could see where this was headed, and I decided to just ask a few hard questions, intending then to change the subject so that Rebecca didn’t feel like she was getting raked over the coals.
    “Who did you use?” I asked.
    “Jeff Mahoney,” she said. “He lives down the street from our—I mean—where I used to live. He’s extremely nice. He usually does wills and estates, but he offered to handle this for me and I trusted him, so I said yes. Nat was furious with me and said we were just wasting money. He said I didn’t even need a lawyer.”
    “I’ll bet,” I said and winced. “Who did he use?” I was afraid to ask, knowing he had probably used a pit bull.
    “Harry Albright,” she said. “Do you know him?”
    I could feel bile rising in my throat. Harry Albright should have been disbarred years ago. He was totally unethical and always in the headlines, billed more phony hours than anyone, was on his fourth wife and I had always suspected that he drank. He probably kicked his dog, if he had one.
    “Yeah, I know him,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could master.
    “Dinner is served!” Byron announced in his theatrical voice.
    Huey got up to help Miss Olivia to her feet. Rebecca and I would follow them into the dining room, but I held back for a few moments to ask Rebecca a few other questions.
    “Rebecca? Wait. Listen, what did he have on you? I mean, is there any reason that the courts would have accepted you as unfit?”
    “Nat said I was mentally unstable.”
    “Are you?”
    “I was fine until I found out he wanted my house and children and then you can bet the ranch that I went crazy!”
    “Of course. Who wouldn’t? But did you have an affair or do drugs or drink too much?”
    “Heavens no! I taught Sunday School for goodness sake!”
    “Then what? What did he have on you?”
    “He said I was negligent. That the children had to wait too long for me to pick them up from school. And that I was impossible to please—that I nagged the children and made them depressed.”
    “Is that true?”
    “Sometimes. Look, I’m not perfect, but I was a good mother. A good mother.”
    I believed her. Somehow we got through dinner and got through it without any more conversation about Nat, the children and the divorce. But I was uneasy. I smelled a large male skunk, maybe two.

F IVE
THE SANDS OF PAWLEYS
    A LL through the night, the air in my bedroom nearly crackled with my annoyance. It was as though my body was producing its own heat lightning, flashes of warmth and the heavy stillness that followed. The hours passed as I tangled and smoothed out my sheets. The ceiling fan clicked, feeding my mood with each rotation. The pillows radiated under my neck; the hair at the nape of my neck was damp with perspiration, and no matter how I rearranged and replumped the pillows, I couldn’t get comfortable. I was having a rough night.
    If Rebecca’s situation was what I thought it was, my fury was going to torment me into the next century if I couldn’t do something about it. And why? Why did I care? I thought about it for a while. What had I been doing with my life? Becoming more and more useless to anyone, that’s what. Hedonistic. Self-serving. In perpetual denial. Cowardly. What happens to a woman with infinite blessings—good health, plenty of resources, a reasonably sharp mind, decent looks—what happens when she drops off the face of the earth to her entire past and begins again in a tiny magical kingdom like Pawleys with no demands on her time other than the ones she arranges herself? When she has no responsibilities other than to feed herself, dress herself, be witty and pleasant and pretend that her