Page 28 of Hello, Summer
“Oh!” G’mama said abruptly as they were passing through the island’s tiny business district. “Pull in here, Sarah.” She pointed at the island’s IGA. “Winnie and I need to get our groceries.”
“G’mama, we can’t fit as much as a stick of gum in this car right now. We’ll make a grocery run after we get unpacked.”
Five minutes later, she steered the Wagoneer onto Gulfview Lane, and a minute after that, she turned into the sandy driveway at the Dunes.
G’mama exhaled deeply and turned around in her seat to face Winnie. “The old girl’s still standing.”
“No thanks to that last hurricane,” Winnie said.
Conley was surprised to find herself blinking back tears as she surveyed the rambling old wood-frame house that had been the family’s summer home for the past sixty years.
The house had been built in the 1920s by a wealthy Birmingham department store owner who’d been one of Conley’s great-grandfather’s golf buddies. In the 1930s, after the man died suddenly, her great-grandfather agreed to buy the house, sight unseen, from the widow.
Hurricanes had buffeted this part of the Florida Panhandle for decades, but because the house was built on a section of beach that resembled a bite out of the curving coastline, it had somehow escaped the fate of other nearby Gulf-front homes.
The Dunes’s cedar-shingle exterior was painted a dark spruce green. The trim was white, and the front door was dark red. Mindful of hurricane-force winds and the threat of flooding at high tide, inthe early sixties her grandfather had the house jacked up and placed on concrete pilings. Four cars could pull underneath the house now, and a wide screened-in staircase led to the porch that wrapped all the way around the house.
Lorraine pulled a huge brass ring from the depths of her pocketbook. She looked at the stairs and sighed. “You know, when Pops insisted on putting in that doggone elevator fifteen years ago, I told him he was crazy to spend that kind of money. Wasn’t a reason in the world why able-bodied people like us couldn’t use the stairs. Told him it would keep us young.”
Conley recoiled in mock surprise. “Are you saying you were actually wrong about something? Stop the presses!”
“Smart aleck,” Lorraine said. “Go ahead and take Opie for a potty break. Winnie and I will take up the first load and get the house unlocked.”
“Leave the heavy stuff for me,” Conley said.
The front porch floorboards creaked with each step she took. G’mama had left the front door ajar. With a suitcase in each hand and a wriggling Opie tucked under her arm, Conley bumped the door with her hip and stepped inside.
She set Opie down on the floor, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply, letting the old beach house scents settle into her bones. It was a peculiar bouquet unique to this shabby but beloved home of her heart; of old wood and lemon oil, salt air, and maybe a hint of mildew.
Winnie and Lorraine were already busy, tugging at the heat-swollen sashes of the dozen windows that ran across the front of the house, separating the porch from the main house. Tattered cotton curtains fluttered limply in the faint breeze.
“Bring up the cooler next,” G’mama instructed. “I want one of those cold sodas we brought from the house.”
An hour later, Conley was drenched in perspiration, and her legs felt like rubber after making dozens of trips from the car to the tiny two-person elevator and into the house.
She sank down onto a wicker armchair near the fireplace, and a fine dusting of paint chips fluttered onto the hooked rug beneath her feet. There must have been two dozen pieces of wicker just in this room alone—a combination of living room, dining room, and library, united by the age-darkened, heart pine shiplap walls and the worn wooden floors. None of the sofas, chairs, rockers, and tables were an exact match, but all wore the same shade of pale aqua G’mama had been painting them for decades.
The lumpy cushions were in a faded deep green bark cloth pattern featuring ferns and caladiums, and Conley knew that when this generation of cushions got too threadbare, her grandmother would have Jacky, her seamstress in town, run up another set from the huge bolt of the same fabric that she’d purchased decades ago, long before Conley was born.
Her grandmother approached with a broom in her hand. She’d already changed out of her “town” clothes and into a neatly pressed flowered cotton top and pastel cotton pants. She had a silk scarf fastened over her hair and wore a pair of white Keds without shoelaces. This was G’mama’s cleaning uniform.
“I’m putting you upstairs in the big room,” Lorraine announced. “Winnie and I will stay down here.”
“In the girls’ bunk rooms?”
“It’s cooler down here,” Lorraine said matter-of-factly. “And Winnie doesn’t need to be climbing all those stairs, what with her bad hip and all.” She raised the broom and began batting at the long strands of cobwebs that crisscrossed the mantel and whitewashed brick fireplace surround.
Conley set her suitcase on a luggage rack she found in the cedar-lined closet of the “big room” on the second floor, trying not to feel guilty about occupying what was indisputably the best room in the house.
This had been her grandparents’ bedroom for as long as she could remember. Unlike any of the other five bedrooms in the house, including the two others on this floor, this one had a small, attachedbathroom, featuring a claw-foot bathtub, a commode with the original pull-chain flush, and a minuscule corner-mounted sink.
The heavy brass bed was dressed with a white chenille bedspread with a pattern of blue-and-green peacocks that Conley had always loved as a child. As G’mama had pointed out, there was no air-conditioning up here, only a ceiling fan whose blades whirred ineffectively overhead.
The room was stifling in the late-afternoon heat, the wooden floor littered with the dried corpses of long-dead bugs.
She wrenched open the heavy french doors at the foot of the bed and stepped onto the porch.
The shimmering turquoise waters of the Gulf of Mexico beckoned beyond the dune line. The water was calm, but she could hear waves lapping at the sand. She needed to unpack and find sheets to make up her bed. She needed to sweep the floor and find a putty knife to pry open the heavy wooden window sashes that were nearly impossible to open. Then she needed to go downstairs and take her grandmother to the grocery store.
