Isle of Palms Read Free Page A

I’m gonna tell you a lot of secrets, but if I hear them told, I’ll come after your tongue with my shears. Or worse, my hammer! Yes, I will. This entire tale is true to the very last word and all the names and places are real to expose the guilty.
    I was telling Arthur the other day—Arthur is the man who drives me crazy with the shivers—that I had been thinking that maybe it was time to tell some people about how my whole world had changed in just a few months. If it could happen to me it could happen to anybody, right? He laughed so hard I thought he might up and die on me, so I said, Just what the hell is so funny, and he said, Since when don’t you talk? I was not amused. Not at all. No.
    Besides my own discoveries, it had occurred to me that it would be très cool if people knew about another side of life in the Lowcountry and baby, there’s plenty to talk about. Every possible thing you needed to know about southern living was discussed under the roof of Anna’s Cabana—and don’t tell me, I know: Anna’s Cabana sounds like the name of a seedy juke joint on the back beaches of the Virgin Islands. It does! But, when you come to understand how it was given that name, you’ll see why I let it happen.
    In any case, my crazy little salon is a gold mine in human behavior studies. When you take one part old salts, mix it up with gentrification and garnish it with tourists, you got yourself one mighty cocktail, ’eah? What happened here a few months ago literally turned the tide. It did. In any case, if I charged the same for listening as I charge for fixing hair, I would own the biggest house on this beach. No joke.
    And this whole drama isn’t just about what I hear at work. No, no. There’s a whole universe here on this island. We say we are from Charleston, but we are really from East of the Cooper—Cooper River, that is. Around here you’re either from Charleston, East of the Cooper, West of the Ashley (that’s the other big river), or out by Awendaw. Maybe you lived in one of these weird developments that keep cropping up that look like a movie set of downtown or one of the islands you could only get to by boat. The point is that in this neck of the woods, you can better believe that where you hang your hat makes all the difference in how you tick. I am and have always been an island girl and there was nothing to be done about it.
    My family hasn’t been in Charleston for a thousand years. We don’t have some grand family home, plantation or any silver we rescued from the Yankees by hiding it in the bricks of our chimney. In fact, I don’t own a lick of silver and it suits me fine. Polishing silver would not be the best use of my time. But we do love the history of the Lowcountry with a wild passion and we romanticize it all, telling ourselves we are anything except ordinary just because we can call this place home.
    My momma and her people were from Beaufort and I guess the only thing unusual about my background is that my daddy immigrated here with his parents after World War II. They wound up in Estill and were peach farmers. That means my daddy and his daddy worked like coolies to get to where they got and what they got was a comfortable but unspectacular life with no frills.
    I can tell you right now that I was never indulged, coddled, or overly nurtured. But that was probably because my daddy’s family had to fight for their very survival. Things were tough in the early days for them and for me too. For the longest time it seemed like my life would be an endless exercise of pushing big rocks up a hill. Take money. My daddy was the one who taught me the value of a dollar. Okay, he’s got a reputation for being a massive tightwad but he can’t help it. And, sometimes when I least expected it, his wallet would open, the moths would escape, and then the buckolas would start to flow. He’s full of contradictions, just like everybody else. Anyway, I learned from him that saving money and