Free Return to Sullivans Island by Dorothea Benton Frank

climbed the steps to the front porch. Beth and her clan had made hundreds of trips up and down those steps all day long, bringing out tables, chairs, candles, hurricanes, and Eiffel Towers to serve as centerpieces so the tablecloths wouldn’t blow away if the breezes turned to wind. She had helped to string Christmas lights between the palmettos to light the yard and jammed tiki torches filled with citronella oil into the soft ground near the dunes to ward off bugs. It had been like a cardio workout all that day and Beth was already hoping for a short night.
    “Your mom is the best,” Mike said.
    “Yeah, she is. Thanks. I’m real proud of her.”
    “Yeah, so you graduated. Congratulations.”
    “Thanks. Now I get to spend a year here losing my mind, going completely insane, doing nothing, withering in total obscurity.”
    “Obscurity? That’s a pretty big word for someone your age, isn’t it?”
    “You must’ve missed the memo. I graduated from college? And where’s my gift, you cheapskate?”
    Mike was waving his three-year advantage over Beth’s just to irritate her. Boys were all the same, she thought. Everything was a big, fat, stupid competition.
    “Right. Sorry. Well, a year in obscurity sounds good to me. I’m still Uncle Henry’s personal slave in Atlanta working hundred-hour weeks. I could come and hang out, you know, so you don’t go nuts or something.”
    She gave that a moment’s consideration and then brightened up.
    “Yeah, that would be really, really good actually. No doubt I will want some company. Plus, we can go downtown, check out the bars, you know, have some fun?”
    Beth was thinking that sooner rather than later she was going to need to go over the causeway, and get some kind of a life going. She had not had the time or the desire to dig up her old friends from high school and see what they were doing. Half of them were probably married because in the South it seemed that people married young, as though a marital partner would make the transition into adulthood easier emotionally and financially.
    “Oh? You have a fake ID?”
    “Hello? I’m twenty-three, hello.”
    “You look like you’re sixteen.”
    “Yeah, right. You need an eye doctor. And why are you still gelling your hair? It’s like so nineties.”
    Beth snickered and Mike looked up at the sky.
    “It’s wet, moron. I just took a shower.”
    “And the world is a better place for it, Mr. Hamilton.”
    “Let’s get a beer and go torture Bucky.”
    “Sounds good.”
    Bucky and especially Mike were Beth’s favorite cousins because they had practically grown up together. Her Uncle Henry came home to Sullivans Island with his family once a year and her Uncle Timmy came only for important occasions. Timmy’s daughters, who were decked out in pink and green sundresses with pink pedicures and white headbands and whom she had not seen in ages, were avoiding her. Beth sucked her teeth when she saw them, feeling a thousand years older than them, and realized her Aunt Maggie was exaggerating to say they were dying to see her. They could not have cared less.
    In addition, Timmy’s sons, the biblically named Mark and Luke, were friendlier with the other boys, especially when it came to family outings that usually excluded the fair sex like dove hunting in the woods and gigging for flounder at midnight. Those other cousins, Phillip and Blake, even though they had reached the ages of twenty and eighteen, were just as annoying as they had been since the day they were born. Still, Beth marveled at the way they all came together, her aunts and uncles and their herd of offspring.
    The desire to remain close and in touch with one another was propelled by the lone but stalwart efforts of Maggie. Beth wondered who among her generation would emerge as the matriarch or patriarch and work to keep their traditions alive? Or would they all drift apart and never see one another except for weddings and funerals when their parents went to