WELCOME TO FLORIDA. THE SUNSHINE STATE.
“More like welcome to hell,” she muttered.
She waited until seven o’clock, central time, to call. Cocktail hour was sacred to Lorraine DuBignon Conley, and woe be to anyone who interrupted.
“Hello?”
“G’mama? It’s Conley.”
“Who did you say?”
“It’s me, G’mama. Sarah Conley.”
“Oh my goodness. Sarah, what a nice surprise! Are you still in Atlanta, or did you already move to Washington? I did get your Mother’s Day card with your new address, but I guess I’ve lost track of the date.”
Conley took a deep breath. “I’m actually on the way to see you. I’m probably still an hour and a half away, though.”
“You’re not in Washington? I thought you were moving. Now I’m confused.”
“You’re not confused. It’s a long, sad story. I’ll explain everything when I get to town. Is it okay if I stay with you for a few days?”
“Well, I guess that would be all right.” G’mama hesitated a beat. “Yes, I think there are clean linens in your old room.”
Lorraine sounded flustered. Conley frowned. Her grandmother was the most unflappable woman she’d ever met. “You’re out at the beach, right?”
Her grandmother opened the Dunes, the family’s rambling 1920s home on Silver Bay, every year on the dot on May 1. And every year, on Columbus Day weekend in October, she closed the house down and moved back to the tidy Victorian cottage on Felicity Street, where she’d been born.
“Welllll,” the word stretched out. “No, darlin’. I’m still in town.”
“Really? It’s the middle of May. Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m fine,” Lorraine said. “Your sister thought perhaps this year I should wait a few weeks before opening up. It’s a lot of work for Winnie, and she’s not getting any younger.”
“G’mama, Winnie isn’t that much younger than you.”
“Don’t be impertinent,” Lorraine said. “You know I don’t discuss my age. Anyway, I’ll probably open the house up in a week or so. It’s been so rainy here, the damp has been playing the devil with her arthritis. Now let’s talk about you. What time shall I expect you? And will you have eaten? Winnie’s gone home, but I can probably heat up a can of soup or something.”
“Don’t worry about feeding me. I’ll stop and get something. And don’t wait up. Just leave the porch light burning. Do you have any bourbon in the house?”
Lorraine’s throaty laugh erupted in a hoarse cough. “Foolish child. When have you ever known me to run out of bourbon? Now drive safe, and don’t talk to strange men.”
The familiar phrase gave Conley the first moment of comfort she’d had that very long, very bad day. She replied automatically, “But the strange men are always the most fun.”
Eventually, she exited the interstate and followed the two-lane blacktop west as it meandered through soybean and cotton fields and endless stands of longleaf pines. Occasionally, she saw lights glowing from within an old farmhouse or a knot of double-wide trailers. She slowed the Subaru as she passed through scattered tiny communities with shuttered downtown storefronts and the ubiquitous gas stations and dollar stores.
So much of this area had never recovered from Hurricane Matthew. Sure, the downed power lines had been fixed, and the mountains ofsplintered trees and ruined roofs, furniture, and construction debris had finally been hauled off, but the lasting cost of the devastation was still mounting.
She passed the abandoned Verner Brothers textile plant, with a fadedINDUSTRIAL PROPERTY AVAILABLEsign posted on a high, barbed wire–topped fence. The redbrick mill building’s roof had caved in, and sapling trees now poked through what was left. The plant, which had once produced denim for blue jeans, was shuttered in the ’80s, like so many other textile mills in this part of the country.
Conley’s mood lightened as she approached the outskirts of Silver Bay. Even from here, she could see the jaunty red-and-white-striped tower atop theSilver Bay Beaconbuilding, its searchlight bathing the downtown in an eerie yellow glow.
Her great-grandfather, Arthur DuBignon, had bought what was then a steeple from a financially ailing church in Pensacola in the middle of the Depression, and the family legend was that he’d hired two men to load it onto a mule-drawn wagon for the trip to Silver Bay. Great-Granddaddy Dub, as he was called, then had the steeple hoisted onto the roof of the yellow-brickBeaconbuilding and proceeded to install a light in the place of the old church bell.
“It’s a beacon of hope for the people of this community,” he’d told his wife, Mattie Lou, when she’d protested this foolhardy expense. “The Depression won’t last forever, and when it’s over, people will know thatThe Silver Bay Beaconwas a source of truth and enlightenment for this county.”
“They’ll know Arthur DuBignon had more dollars than sense,” Mattie told her closest friends, but she knew better than to try to dampen her husband’s grand schemes.
A blue-and-gray sheriff’s car sat idling in front of the magnolia-shaded redbrick Griffin County Courthouse. The granite plinth with the statue of a defiant Confederate general still stood, up-lit and oblivious to political correctness, in the middle of the grassy courthouse square, circled with neat beds of red geraniums, white petunias, and blue salvias.
