Pamela Browning - Snapshots

Rick hadn’t seen this coming at all. “Extended leave?”

“Don’t worry, we’ll welcome you back after a few months. We’re giving you time to pull yourself back together, that’s all. I’ll keep in touch, and—”

“What have I done wrong?” Rick was in a state of bewildered disbelief; how could this be happening? On top of everything else?

Shorty sighed and stared out the window for a long moment. “Son, you’re not playing at the top of your game. People complain that you don’t call them back, you forgot an important meeting last week, and I suspect that your mind’s not focused on your work. I’m doing this for your sake as much as the department’s. I don’t want you finding yourself in an edgy situation and getting into trouble.”

I’m already in trouble, at looks like. “My divorce will be final this week. After that—”

“Please don’t argue, Rick. What’s the name of that place in South Carolina you go to every summer? Where your family has a vacation cottage?”

“Tappany Island,” Rick said in a low tone.

“Take a break—that’s all I’m asking.” Shorty paused at the door and appeared to be thinking something over for a moment, before abruptly leaving the room. Rick sensed that the conversation had been almost as hard on his boss as it had been on him.

Numb after this dismissal, still scarcely believing it, Rick cleaned out his desk and set about getting roaring drunk as soon as he got home. When he emerged on the other side of this binge with a nasty hangover, he tossed some things into a suitcase in preparation for leaving.

He’d planned to head for Sweetwater Cottage anyway. He just hadn’t expected to be going alone.

1981

Click: Class picture of Miss Davison’s third grade, Class 3-A, Eugene Field Elementary School, Columbia, South Carolina. Rick, the new boy in class, stands in the back row because he’s tall. I’m grinning, Martine is biting her lip, and we’re holding hands.

The first picture of Rick, Martine and me was snapped on his second day in Miss Davison’s third grade. There he is, standing in the back row with the other big boys, grinning widely and completely at home.

In the picture, Martine and I sit in the front row, two skinny nine-year-old girls missing various front teeth. We were the twins. Our names were always scrunched together—TristanMartine. If you’re not a twin, you probably have a hard time imagining how we were never separate identities but a collective noun, not to mention that people could hardly tell us apart, though we are mirror twins. I’m left-handed, Martine is right-handed. I part my hair on the left, and Martine parts hers on the right.

Rick was a transfer student who arrived in the middle of the semester, and we were drawn to him as soon as we spotted him shuffling his feet beside the teacher’s desk on that first morning. He had sandy hair shading toward brown and blue eyes tending more toward gray than ours, which were on the violet side. Freckles. A strong, straight nose. High cheekbones that were to become craggy in adolescence and a ready smile that would become his trademark.

I can’t explain it, but it was as if the three of us were instantly connected on sight, as if someone somewhere had thrown a master switch and we were three instead of two plus one. Soon we were no longer TristanMartine; we were Trista, Martine and Rick. Three names were more difficult to run together than two.

By Rick’s second week in our class, we’d formed a secret club we called the ILTs. This came about when the school cafeteria served tacos and we discovered that we all loved them more than any other lunch food at Field School. For some reason, Rick felt compelled to trade his prized red-and-blue Richard Petty Matchbox car for Goose Fraser’s unwanted taco and chivalrously presented it to us. We showed our appreciation by sharing it with him, after which the three of us raced through the wide halls back to the classroom in spite of the No Running rule, screaming, “I love tacos!”

Even today I can almost smell the chalk dust in the air as I remember how, under Miss Davison’s stern eye, we laboriously wrote “I will not run in the hall” a hundred times on wrinkled notebook paper with our stubby pencils. In the back of the school bus on the way home, we unanimously agreed that ILT was our shorthand for I Love Tacos. On the reverse side of one of the “I will not run in the hall” papers, the three of us added our first initials to ILT so we’d have names that rhymed. Rick became Rilt, Martine was Milt and I was Tilt. The password to our secret club was “Burrito,” and that was what we also named the club goldfish, which belonged to Rick.

I was the introvert, my nose always stuck in a book. Rick was outgoing, the kind of guy everyone liked. And Martine—well, she was artistic and creative, mercurial, flighty and fun. It wasn’t long before we discovered that we worked well together. Never a dull moment, Dad would always say, but it was clear that he doted on Rick, and soon, he considered Rick to be the son he’d always wanted.

By the time summer arrived, the three of us were inseparable and our parents had become good friends. We all lived in a new country-club subdivision grandiosely named Windsor Manor and populated with big two-story brick houses where professional people like my dad, a criminal lawyer, and my mother, a volunteer in local charities, lived and reared their families.

Windsor Manor abounded in vacant lots lushly shaded by tall and fragrant loblolly pines as well as a goodly number of oak trees cloaked in wisteria vine. The three of us claimed these lots for our own. Our tree house, erected in the low fork of an oak in the woods not far from our house, was the neighborhood gathering spot for all the kids.

Martine and I were raised Southern, my parents’ families both having settled South Carolina before the American Revolution; Barrineaus and Woods fought for the Confederacy in what we were taught to call the War of Northern Aggression. Our grandmother, Claire Dawson Barrineau, signed Martine and me up for the Daughters of the American Revolution the day after we were born, and Rick’s father’s most prized possession was a copy of the Order of Secession, signed by one of his ancestors. He hung it over his desk at Carolina Gas and Energy, of which he was president.

That summer after Rick arrived was the first year that we three spent time together at Tappany Island, an unspoiled barrier island off the South Carolina coast reachable only by a picturesque side-swinging drawbridge. Rick’s mother usually spent the whole summer there with Rick and his elder brother, Hal. Boyd McCulloch, Rick’s father, drove down on weekends, and the first time we were invited to the cottage, Martine, our parents and I accompanied him in his big Roadmaster station wagon.

After a wonderful weekend, Mom and Dad departed on Sunday night with Boyd, but Martine and I stayed for the rest of the week. We settled happily into a guest room connected to another by a bath. Our room was decorated with antiques, heirloom quilts and hand-crocheted dresser scarves. We loved the ornate iron bedsteads, delighted in the wispy, drifting curtains that could be looped back to expose the view of the dunes with a slice of blue ocean beyond. Ever after, that was our room when we stayed at the cottage.

I mean to tell you, Sweetwater Cottage was no palace. It was an unpretentious old grande dame of a house, built high off the ground but not spiked up on stilts like the ones they build in flood zones today. The cottage was surrounded by a veranda, which we always called the porch because, Rick’s father said, veranda sounded much too granda for a blowsy old lady like the cottage.