Page 29 of Hello, Summer
But Conley did none of these things. Instead, she kicked off her flip-flops, peeled off her sweaty clothes, and climbed into her bathing suit. Then she hurried down the back stairs, through the path across the dunes. She waded into the warm Gulf water and dove headlong into the first medium-size wave she could find.
11
When Conley returned from the IGA, she saw her sister’s aging silver BMW parked under the house. She considered making up another errand for herself, but shrugged and pulled in alongside Grayson’s car. No use delaying the inevitable.
She found the three of them—G’mama, Winnie, and Grayson—seated on the back porch, their chairs pulled into a companionable semicircle, highball glasses in hand, gazing out at the sky, which was blazing coral and orange and pink as the sun sank toward the horizon.
The frosty glasses were beaded with condensation, and Conley knew they were drinking what G’mama called hersunsetters—pink grapefruit juice, vodka, club soda, and a slice of lime.
“Oh, hey, Gray. Did you drive all the way out here to make sure I’m taking good care of G’mama?”
Her grandmother shot her a reproving glance and tapped the folded copy of theBeaconresting on the wicker table beside her. “Grayson always delivers my copy of the paper in person. Every week.” She gave her oldest grandchild an indulgent smile. “It’s an excellent issue. I think that new reporter of yours did a nice job on the train derailment piece. What’s his name again?”
“Michael Torpy,” Grayson said. “He’s a good kid. Young, but definitelya hard worker. And he’s willing to learn, which a lot of these millennials aren’t.”
Lorraine picked up the paper and ran her finger across the front page, bringing it to rest on the column running down the left-hand well of the page.
“And then there’s this.” She jabbed at Rowena Meigs’s outdated photo topping the Hello, Summer column and sighed deeply. “I hate to say it, but I really believe it might be time for Rowena to retire.”
“I’ll second that motion,” Conley said eagerly. “I know she’s a friend of yours, G’mama, but the truth is, Rowena is a dinosaur. Her writing stinks, she’s out of touch, and she can’t even spell. According to Lillian, half the time, she doesn’t even get the names right. She’s an embarrassment.”
“I’d love to fire Rowena,” Grayson said. “Or retire her or whatever. But it’s not that simple. She’s as beloved and unmovable a community fixture as that damn Confederate statue on the courthouse square. Plus she basically works for free.”
“Goes to show you get what you pay for,” Winnie commented.
Grayson gulped a slug of her cocktail. “Have you two forgotten what happened the last time we tried to get rid of Hello, Summer?”
Lorraine rocked backward in her chair, shaking her head. “Actually, I had forgotten. Never mind. We don’t need to go through allthatagain.”
“All what?” Conley asked.
“It was years ago. I can’t remember the specifics, just that it was so awful, so libelous, that Popsdidfire her.”
“I remember,” Winnie said suddenly. “It was Rowena’s usual crap column, rich-lady tea parties and such, but then she wrote something about the new youth minister at the Baptist church, how he’d been seen ‘gadding about town’ in a shiny new convertible with the pastor’s wife.”
Lorraine shuddered. “Oh dear Lord. It’s all coming back now. Rowena as much as inferred that the youth minister and the pastor’s wife were having some sort of torrid affair. She wrote some catty comment questioning how he could afford an expensive car on his salary. She all but accused him of embezzling money from the church.”
It was Winnie’s turn again. “Turns out the convertible belonged to the pastor’s father-in-law, or maybe it was the youth minister’s father…”
“Doesn’t matter,” Lorraine said. “It was a deeply unfortunate incident. Pops made Rowena write a retraction, and he ran it on the front page of theBeacon,and then he fired her.”
“And yet she’s still writing Hello, Summer, with the same airbrushed photo sig that she must have had done at Glamour Shots thirty years ago.”
“The day after she was fired, calls started coming into the office. Rowena’s friends from church. Her friends from the women’s circle, bridge club, garden club, the United Daughters of the Confederacy,andthe DAR.” Lorraine ticked off the list one by one. “They all threatened to cancel their subscription to the paper if Rowena’s column was dropped.”
“Pops folded to public pressure?” Conley asked, disappointed. “Rowena couldn’t have had that many friends. I mean, back in the day, theBeaconwas the only paper around. Every family in town had a subscription. I know, because I used to ride my bike to deliver the copies on our block.”
“It wasn’t the loss of subscriptions,” Lorraine said. “We could have withstood that. Two weeks after the firing, Sam Greenbaum came into the office and had a confidential talk with Pops. And the week after that, what do you know? Hello, Summer was back.”
“Sam Greenbaum?” Conley looked from Lorraine to Grayson.
“He owned Green’s Department Store,” Grayson explained. “They were theBeacon’s biggest advertiser. Back in the day, they’d run four, sometimes six full-page display ads. Every week. And in September, we’d publish a full-color back-to-school fashions preprint section. Eight pages. Same thing at Christmas.”
“I remember Green’s Department Store,” Conley said. “That’s where we’d go see Santa Claus every year. So this Mr. Greenbaum was a friend of Rowena’s too?”
“Oh Lord, no!” Lorraine said, chuckling. “Sam—may he rest in peace—definitely was not a fan of hers. But say what you want about Rowena—she may be crazy—but she’s not stupid. No, Rowena got allher friends, those DAR and UDC and garden club ladies, all of them, to march themselves down to Green’s and threaten to cut up their credit cards unless Sam Greenbaum persuaded your grandfather to put Rowena back in theBeacon.”
“Oh.” Conley shook her head.
