Folly Beach Read Free

with certainty when he would rate my performance after a holiday or a dinner party for clients.
    “The centerpieces looked cheap, Cate,” he might say. Or, “The meat was overcooked. Shoe leather.” Or, “Your staff didn’t show well tonight, Cate. Service stunk. I thought you knew how important this dinner was to me.”
    It was never, “Gosh, honey, you went to so much trouble! I’m a lucky man! Thanks so much!”
    He was so self-absorbed and pressured with work that days would pass without him saying anything particularly personal or pleasant to me, or without even making eye contact. I knew he was preoccupied because he was extremely worried about his investments, but still, his freezing-cold attitude chipped away at whatever affection I felt for him and I felt more and more detached from him. But I was grateful to God to have my children and I gave them everything there was in my heart. I had Patti. And Mark.
    It didn’t pay to moan about life in the gilded cage. Not a single member of the human race would have felt sorry for me for one second. Especially Addison. His familiar bark went like this: “Look, Cate. I work like an eff-ing animal, putting in crazy hours, dealing with more stress than the GD eff-ing president himself. So? When I come home I want to look around and believe, somehow believe, even if it’s just for five minutes, that it was all worth the sacrifice! Why is that so eff-ing hard for you to understand?”
    Nice, right? My neck got hot even then, remembering how terrible he made me feel. How low. How insignificant. The belittling, the judging, and then the terrible silences that followed.
    Addison became possessed by the decadent spirits of his own desire. If he wanted to get in his Lamborghini and run it, he did. If he wanted to open a five-hundred-dollar bottle of wine and drink it with microwave popcorn, he did. Many afternoons I would find him downing an old Bordeaux while he watched the Golf Channel ad nauseam on our home theater screen that rivaled an IMAX. Once he paid to play with Tiger Woods to raise money for some charitable cause he could not have cared less about just so he could tell that story over and over as though he was Tiger’s best friend. He stored a set of custom Majestic golf clubs in ten different locations from St. Andrews to Pebble Beach so he didn’t have to say, “Gee, I wish I’d brought my clubs.” He kept his G 550 at the ready, in case he wanted to fly to Vegas with a few of his partners or friends and hear Barry Manilow sing or watch Siegfried and Roy play with their big cats. Sick.
    I hated all his toys because they represented just how horribly shallow he could be. We could’ve done so much good with all that money. If I wanted to support something like the library or the children’s schools, he refused, saying he only wanted to give money to things that would thrill him . And he also never missed an opportunity to remind me that he earned the money, not me. He could and would do as he wanted.
    He wanted, he wanted, he wanted . . . well, the wanting was at an end because the greedy, covetous, acquisitive son of a bitch was dead. Did he run around? Probably, but I never really knew for sure. That didn’t mean I didn’t have some very real suspicions.
    In the last few years, it came to a point where Addison barely resembled the wonderful extraordinary man I had married. How, I wondered, had I managed all those years to keep my mountain of frustrations and deep disappointments out of the conversation with my children? It was either a miraculous accomplishment of mine or massive denial on their part that they merely viewed him as a well-meaning, very distracted man who was sometimes a difficult and demanding grump. I mean, they had their criticisms of him. When Russ was a teenager, he thought he worked way too much and would shrug his shoulders in disappointment when his father missed a basketball game. Russ was the captain of his team and had gone to