It was, she supposed, predictable.
At the word, she glanced back at Blake’s table. Her heart sank to see it was empty. She stepped away from Devlin to walk to the table. There was no message scribbled on a piece of paper, no card with a phone number. Only a twenty-dollar bill that lay tucked under his plate.
Carson reached down to collect the money. It was a generous tip, but she still couldn’t help but feel shortchanged.
CHAPTER SIX
Harper’s first good news of the day came when the pilot announced that they’d caught a tailwind and that they’d made the trip from New York to Charleston ahead of schedule. But as she put away her iPad, she suddenly wished for that extra twenty minutes to wrap up her work.
She turned and looked out the window of the Delta jet as it broke through the clouds and began its approach to the Charleston airport. The descent sparked mixed emotions. From her vantage point, she could see the signature landscape of the lowcountry stretched out along the Atlantic Ocean. Long, winding creeks snaked their way through thousands of acres of green wetlands, looking like they’d come straight from a Mary Edna Fraser batik. It was a seductive landscape, undulating and lush. Even sensuous. It was no wonder the lowcountry was home to so many acclaimed authors, she thought to herself. The landscape was an inspiration.
Unfortunately, her father had never joined their ranks. Poor Daddy, she thought. Despite his dreams, he’d lacked both the discipline and the talent. Harper felt neither love nor scorn for her biological father. She’d hardly known him. Her mother had never discussed him or acknowledged their marriage, other than to give his daughter his name, and hyphenated at that. There wasn’t one photograph of him in their apartment. When Harper was old enough to ask questions, Georgiana told her only child that she’d married Parker Muir for his charm, wit, and potential. She’d divorced him because she’d discovered she’d been wrong. With an editor’s cruel succinctness, she summed it up: “Parker Muir could talk about writing better than he could write.”
The only meeting Harper had had with her father had been at Dora’s wedding. He might still have been handsome if he hadn’t been so thin, his face marred by an alcoholic sheen. She shuddered and clutched the armrests, a last vestige of her childhood fear of flying. One gentle bump, and the plane landed smoothly on the runway. Immediately she grabbed her phone and tapped her foot as it powered up. The two-hour plane ride was an eternity to be unplugged.
Before leaving the airport she slipped into the ladies’ room to take stock of her appearance in the mirror. She wanted to make a strong impression on Mamaw and her half sisters, showing them that though she was the youngest of the group, she was no longer the baby. She was an adult: successful and worldly.
Her hair hung like a sheath of tangerine silk, grazing her shoulders. Her large blue eyes stared back at her like a cat’s, with slick black eyeliner and thick, dark lashes. She’d had her pale ones dyed. Before she left, she powdered her skin, covering the faint freckles that peppered her cheeks and nose.
Harper brushed away lint from the tailored black cotton jacket and gave the hem a firm tug to smooth it where it just met her slender hips. She had to look perfect when she arrived, mature and confident. She wore tight black jeans and sexy, black, strappy high heels. They killed her feet, but they looked great. At five feet two inches, she didn’t want to be dwarfed by her sisters and Mamaw.
Harper would be like her mother, she decided. She needed to make an entrance.
She slipped her black designer bag over her shoulder and, with a final satisfied smile at her appearance, she muttered, “Nobody puts baby in the corner.” Then she gripped her roller bag and began walking toward the taxicabs in mincing steps.
When Carson pulled into the driveway, she was surprised to see her usual spot in front of the garage taken by a Lexus SUV. Squeezing out of the car, she pulled her gear from the passenger seat, then let her gaze linger on the SUV. Unlike her dented and rusting blue Volvo, the silver Lexus with the South Carolina plates didn’t have a scratch; even the black leather interior was pristine. A children’s puzzle book was in the backseat, along with a red sweatshirt. It could only mean that her half sister Dora had arrived from Summerville.
Carson sighed, annoyed. Why was she here today? Dora wasn’t expected until the weekend. It wasn’t that she wasn’t glad to see Dora, but she wasn’t feeling very social. And maybe it was selfish, but she wanted a few more days with Mamaw all to herself.
She lugged her paddleboard from the rooftop and stored it in the garage. The scent of moss and mildew made her nose tingle. Carson followed the stone path around the thick hydrangeas to the back porch, where an outdoor shower was hidden behind an enormous, blooming gardenia. Opening the door, she sidestepped the spiderwebs in the corner and the weeds poking up through the stones and turned on the faucet. The shower only offered cold water, but on the island in the summer, the water was always lukewarm. She slipped from her beach cover-up and showered in her suit, inhaling the sweet scents of lavender soap and gardenias as she felt the tension slide from her body. After she dried off, Carson loosely braided her dripping long hair, grabbed her towel and her patchwork bag, then made her way up across the porch to the back door.
There was a time when she would have dashed across the yard and burst through the door to greet her sisters. There would’ve been squeals and giggles and a rapid sharing of all news of the preceding year. They would speak so fast it was more a rattling off of headlines, details to be filled in later.
So it was rather a sad state of affairs that today, instead of rushing, she slowed her steps, delaying the inevitable. When Dora had turned seventeen she’d stopped coming to Mamaw’s house for long stays and instead only visited on the occasional summer weekend with a friend in tow. Even after all these years Carson still remembered the hurt and pain of being the odd man out as the older girls whispered and giggled together.
She remembered Dora’s wedding to Calhoun Tupper. For her half sister she’d worn an embarrassingly froufrou petal-pink bridesmaid gown with matching dyed shoes. It was an elaborate, high-society affair, the wedding Dora had always dreamed of. It would have been Carson’s nightmare. But Dora was a beautiful bride in a froth of white. Even if Carson cringed to think of poor Dora going home with that bore of a husband.
She kicked a pebble, wondering how the distance between them had grown so great. At best, they had little left to say to one another. At worst, each looked askance at the other’s life.