One Last Saturday In March

Chapter 1
The End of the Day

One last Saturday in March, with the late afternoon sun bearing down into their eyes, Hattie and Pitts wandered over rough-cut fescue across the field, two-thirds blitzed, one-third gutted, and another quarter relieved. Around them, as far as they could see, all the way to the tree line, Explorers and Rovers and F-150s rumbled away through sandy dust. They stumbled over the rutted grass track, squinting to see Aunt Lottie at the gate post waiting for them to catch up, her epic-brimmed red hat forming a silhouette in the haze. College girls with spaghetti-strap sun dresses and keel-length wedges and their boys’ navy blazers cried out to one another their Drunken Friendship Oaths in full guttural shouts, even as they locked their arms, shoulder to shoulder, clutching coozies for dear life. The distant jangles and yips of glam country from pimped-out diesel pickups with their commercial-grade subwoofers had shirtless tie-clad Gamecock freshmen swearing the words along the outside fence of the racecourse, trucker caps with Fish Hippie and Costa and Southern Tide logos pulled down low over their brows. Pitts carried Hattie’s heels hung by his fingers in one hand, with his other clasping around the soft cooler’s black strap over his shoulder. Hattie walked barefoot and harder and ahead, more of an evacuee than a departure. She stopped abruptly amidst the exodus of the bacchanal, spun back on one heel to Pitts, her straw bucket hat framing her face like an image from the 20s. She pinched her face as if realizing that a scabbed elbow might hurt.
“It’s like this for yall, every time, isn’t it,” she observed.
Pitts lugged up next to her with the cooler, peering ahead at Lottie. “It’s not for everybody.”
Old Aunt Lottie looking back at them, feeling the warm dust on her cheeks, the sunshine at her back, leaned against the worn pine fencepost, clutching it against her for support. She heaved tight breaths and clutched her leather handbag. She looked out on the panorama of flags atop poles bent in the warm breeze – St. Andrew’s Crosses, Tiger Paws, red Palmetto State ensigns, tartans, broadcasts of Greek letters – and she sighed. It was a year like any other. A moment together in a time broken apart. As she looked out on the vacating infield of old Springdale Race Course in Camden, South Carolina, with revelers winding down after the 75th running of the Carolina Cup steeplechase, the largest annual sporting event in the Carolinas, she took stock in the long inventory of her years hosting the family along the infield fence tailgate. Amongst the memories of 60s Mustangs and 70s Broncos, the hippies showing up in the sixties to the hipsters in the 2000s, the one social event that brings together the entire Palmetto State – students and seniors, doctors and contractors, Cocks and Tigers, families, friends, and strangers – was a pretty fine day. This year was pretty fine.
Pitts and Hattie finally reached the outer fence gate. Lottie frowned. “Fix your tie, Pitts.”
Pitts glanced over at the shirtless SAEs at the fence, still singing to George Jones. “I don’t think I’m the least-dressed person here, Aunt Lottie.”
Lottie looked over to the bare-chested, strapping undergrads. Without looking back at Pitts, she replied, “Pitts, you’re not the talent at this show. They are.” She offered him a wry smile and turned to the parking area to find the Explorer.
Hattie hooked her arm in Pitts’. “Well, I guess you know your place now,” she said, smiling, leading him on.

 
Chapter 2
Pitts

William Pitts Broadaway had accumulated the necessary momentum for a lifetime of unrealized promise – More than enough for himself and plenty to share and go around.
Really, for a guy in his early thirties with a graduate degree in history and a semblance of a career doing niche historical research for developments in South Carolina to qualify for historic (and, more importantly, tax-exempt) status, he wasn’t a disaster. His parents and aunts and uncles didn’t groan and roll their eyes when he strolled into the room. They simply sighed in an empathetic acknowledgement that, well, Icarus only made it to low Earth orbit, and then only made it around the globe once or twice.
Pitts Broadaway was the physical manifestation of the Southern idiom Bless His Heart in human form.
You could sense the air of misspent youth around him: Lots of wry observations, lots of great stories, and not a lot else to show for his lifetime of misadventure. He could be entertaining at a cocktail party – or a six-year-old’s birthday party, or an election victory party, or a Bat Mizvah, or a wake – and yet, because he could be entertaining, always so talented, that there might be more to show for it. That he was entertaining for a reason.
Pitts had not fully discovered that his very existence might only be entertainment for entertainment’s sake.
In the meantime, he was trying to half-heartedly keep up appearances of aspiration: Plying away at his trade, finally buying a little bungalow in Greenwood instead of paying rent, canceling his Pornhub subscription. He was doing everything right, more or less – or, as his friend Sean had coopted from an 80s movie, “considerably less or more, than more or less.”
Pitts hadn’t really exhausted his options, because he was simply not bothering to use any of them. But the other week, in the middle of yet another afternoon in the Abbeville County Deeds Office, digging through nineteenth-century title transfers, it occurred to him that keeping his option open might be no different than refusing to exercise them. If one of his options was the winning powerball ticket, then it suddenly dawned on him that he had left it on the Hot Spot cashier counter, instead grabbing and going with his chocolate mini Entemann’s donuts and a packet of Lance’s spicy hot peanuts like a bandit who makes off with an empty cash zip bag.
It wasn’t as if he had any inherent physical traits that left him at a disadvantage to the rest of the male species. He had fading wavy auburn hair, he had average height, blue eyes, the slightly bent, slightly distinguished nose that ran in his father’s family. As his friend Brant had once commented of him, “He’s like an espionage agent assigned to spy on everyday living. He’s virtually invisible until you hear him speak.”
Brant’s observation was a subtle, elegant southern double entendre – and a metaphor for Pitts’ entire story so far. He often found himself moving through two worlds of meaning at once – and both worlds dismissed him. Another friend of his, Arthur Muhlmeyer, once advised: “If you don’t understand Pitts, you can ignore him because he doesn’t make sense; if you understand Pitts, you can ignore him because he’s full of shit.”
Pitts had vague, incoherent aspirations as a visual artist, at which he was good, despite Hattie’s complaints that “people were fuzzy” in his paintings. He worked in oils, usually on wood, which gave the paintings a heft that otherwise would not have appeared. He mimicked French landscape garden fantasy paintings, and recast them by painting them as if though a diffuse filter, like the way they record Barbara Walters in interviews. When put on top of the wood, the paintings resembled exotic curios of nineteenth-century plantation house décor: Paintings aspiring to fine art, produced far away from the alteliers of Paris, in Piedmont barns on fire-dried slats of black walnut.
Of course, everybody hated the paintings. He’d held one showing in an old textile warehouse owned by some in-laws in Greenwood. Half of the guests told him he should paint on canvas and told him where the Piece Goods shop was so he could get some. Half thought the French landscapes were corny and a waste of good hickory. Everybody drank the wine and then some of the late-evening hangers on sneaked over to the Greenwood Country Club, stole some golf carts and accidentally drag-raced one into the pool.
Bobby James, a local defense attorney who happened to be president of the club that year, left his business card hung in the pane of the gallery the next day, which mysteriously was missing one painting when Pitts arrived to clean up. On the back of the card, it read: Damn artists.







Chapter 3
Hattie

Martha Harriet Adams routinely questioned her decision to study database administration at Clemson. Sure, it allowed her to have a steady job in Atlanta and a semblance of a career. And sure, she was a catch for employers – the distinctly Dutch-looking redhead girl who also knew how to tune T-SQL stored procedures.
But did she really want a career of this? Of spending days and nights online, waiting for overnight processing of millions of lines of data, just to check the line count and make sure it was “all there”? During her time as an entry-level database analyst at the Reasonably Large Old Bank in Atlanta, she learned how to set up monitoring to buzz her (or anybody else she felt worth of torment) if the processing was not complete. Yet now, back living in Greenwood after a horrific breakup with a douchebag legal associate at King and Spalding with legal aspirations – which may or may not have involved vintage steel lawn darts, a intervention by the Georgia State Capitol security force, and a Volkswagen Golf convertible running over a homeless man sleeping in the middle of Decatur Street at the steps of Georgia State University College of Law – she was working for a niche concrete company whose owner belonged to the long-cherished line of management that believed numbers only if a person stopped to think about it first. Even if they had to think about it when the processing completed at 2am. Every. Single. Night.
Hattie was usually three or four Sweetwater 420s in each night by the time she hit the Send button to confirm that the load job of 2,427,660 lines did, in fact, complete that night.
At least, back in “g-dub”, she was in town with her sister Nan and her cousin Krista. They were living different lives in town – doing the Country Club and nonprofit board thing, getting sufficient time in down on Hilton Head – but they shared a competitive amateur tennis team and had The Weekly Book Club That Dare Not Speak Its Name.
Hattie had somehow threaded the needle precisely between possessing easy social grace and detesting others who valued it.
To put it another way: Hattie was just as fine with a beer and a plastic basket of pulled pork at a roadside shack as she was with sunset gin and tonics at the Quarterdeck in Hilton Head.
Hattie was profane as hell. And she kept her powder dry: When she did curse, you felt it like a slug upside the head. She didn’t use vulgarity as punctuation: When she cursed, she meant it.
She was comfortable with firing for effect.
At the end of the day, the biggest problem with a career for her was, well, why? She wasn’t really bent on being a big-league corporate success. She remained indifferent to her work, because, honestly, her real goal was just not to have to work hard. In her mind, working hard only meant that somebody else was not doing the work for her. That was not a step in the right direction.
Her father, a shockingly successful small-town local attorney who had been the lead in a now-classic popular class action crusade that, as the dream case result that every moderately honest lawyer craves in their marrow, righted great wrongs and made good people good money in doing so. He set an impossible standard to exceed. In his greatest failing as a parent, he was the epicenter of the family instead of the bedrock.
That became apparent the day a few years ago when he died in a freak underwater cave-diving accident at an abandoned, flooded kaolin mine outside of Sandersville, Georgia, momentarily losing his sense of which way is up, then plunging ever deeper into the chasm to his doom.
Shortly after his death, Hattie met Pitts on the job – sort of. She was documenting parcel entries in the concrete company job database, and Pitts kept moving the hulking, aged circa-1870 plat book because he was trying to figure out if a squiggly line on a hand-drawn map was a river, or just the handiwork of a remarkably drunk surveyor. After blessing him out at top volume in the Abbeville County Deeds Office, he responded by asking her out to happy hour that evening. Bewildered, she accepted mostly out of curiosity.















 

Chapter 4
Breakfast

“Oh my god. We can meet them at the slot. There is no way we are going to make it to breakfast at the house,” Hattie said, rolling over in the hotel bed, burying her head under the pillow.
Pitts, sitting up from the bathroom floor, propped himself up on the rim of the john. “We totally have to be there. It’s okay. Everybody runs late.”
Hattie groaned. “Ugh. Why do they insist on doing this? Don’t they know we were already out all night at the McClendon’s party? I mean, everybody was.”
“It’s the way they’ve done it for decades. They serve up breakfast and everybody has to get there by 10am, wherever they’re coming from. Really they only do it that way because they need people to pack the trucks to take to the slot.”
“Can’t we just show up at the infield slot?”
Pitts laid his cheek on the cold ceramic rim of the john, caught a whiff of vomit from the bowl, and felt his stomach tremble. “I mean, we could, I guess. They’re totally going to know we’re hung over anyway.”
“Yeah, we’re not going to be keeping up any appearances,” Hattie said.
“Well, usually several of us are hung over. That’s why they have the bloody maries.”
She lifted her head at the mention of bloody maries. “All right - I guess. Maybe that’ll help. FUCK I am dying. I didn’t even have that much at the party.”
Pitts crawled to the rim of the shower tub, preparing to turn on the shower and soak until some toxins had sweated out of his pores. In the background, he could hear showers running, toilet flushing, sorority girls frantically shouting through the hotel walls. As he lifelessly laid his hand on one of the faucet knobs, he heard Hattie wrestle out of the sheets, her feet hit the carpet, and an uneven series of steps fight their way to the bathroom. The room went dim as her body blocked some stray light from the window in the bedroom, streaming through the doorway.
“I need to shower,” she announced. Pitts heaved a rattled, sour sigh and fell back from the tub. Hattie stepped over him, slapped the curtain across the rod, and unleashed the steaming spray.

“Dammit, where the hell did all these cars come from?” Hattie growled, leaning over the Explorer wheel.
Pitts looked around. “Columbia, I guess.” He sucked on a Coke from the Hardees.
“Don’t all those students ride in buses? I mean, that’s how we did it.” They sat motionless on US 1, AKA West Main, AKA Jefferson Davis Highway, surrounded by cars of people in blazers and sundresses, along with buses and prep-clad college kids with rolling coolers, angling for pickups from the side of the road.
“Fuck,” Pitts said.
Hattie glanced at his neck. “Fix your tie.”
“We have, like, a half hour before we get to Chestnut Street.”
“Do it.”
Pitts rolled his eyes and fumbled with his madras bow tie under the button-down white oxford collar.
“It’d be faster if we parked and walked,” he said.
“You’re about to test that out for yourself,” she replied.

The Chestnut Street house was a small 1870s cottage that had belonged to Aunt Lottie’s side of the family since it was built. In the old rambler tradition, section had been added on here and there – connecting the kitchen to the house, adding a master suite in the 1920s, and so on. It sat on a deep, multiacre lot with once-impeccable azaleas, camellias, gardenias – now all leggy and overgrown, suggesting a kind of English garden redesign that had gotten out of hand.
Hattie and Pitts rolled slowly up the gravel driveway with the hump of grass running up the middle, leading between the house and the old city firehouse that had been bought by a retired banker from Columbia for a residential renovation project and a lifestyle change. They pulled around toward the back of the ramshackle parking area, where several cars were already parked, and two pickups had their gates down, displaying folding tables, packed white canopy tents, folding chairs, and a warehouse worth of large plastic bins.
“We’re late,” Hattie warned.
Pitts laughed. “Hell yeah we are. Good for us.”
He checked out the cars already there. He saw the dilapidated, grimy red Mercedes convertible coupe of his cousin Brendan, who had spent most of the last decade wandering from job to job in the Charleston restaurant and bar scene. Well, really, just the bar scene, but sometimes there the bar was attached to a restaurant. He’d recently returned to his mom Lottie’s house in Camden after exhausting his options down in in Charleston – “Chuck,” as younger locals had taken to calling it.
Next to the Mercedes that Pitts desperately wanted was the mammoth black Yukon of his mother, Vickie. He’d hoped it wouldn’t be there, and next to it was his brother Ham’s BMW 325. With Ham living down in Atlanta and his mom in Greenwood, it looked like they hadn’t ridden together. Maybe Ham was planning to make a quick getaway back to his intown investment finance gig back in the ATL. Pitts wouldn’t blame him for that. Coming to this thing must feel like a demotion to him, or like camping without facilities.
Beside the BMW was a black high-end Lexus sedan. Pitts didn’t recognize it, but it definitely wasn’t the car of any of the geezers that would be at the family breakfast. “That must be the Simmons,” he said to nobody. His cousin Isabelle and her husband Matt had met in law school at USC and worked their way up in one of the midsized banking legal shops in Charlotte, working wealth equity deals.
“I’m surprised they found time to come down,” Hattie said. “I haven’t seen them since the wedding.”
“Well it’s only like an hour away,” Pitts said. “God, I bet they’re unbearable. I heard he’s already partner at this firm.”
“Like I said,” she affirmed.
The titanic burgundy Cadillac of Uncle Tootsie sat parked on the other side of the lawn, up from Beaufort, where he was retired from the Navy after a career as a carrier pilot at his home on Bay Street overlooking the harbor.
“Tootsie is here,” Pitts said. Hattie pulled up to park next to the Caddy.
“I wonder if they brought the crew,” Hattie speculated.
“Guess we’ll know in a minute,” Pitts replied with a shrug. He turned back to look up the gravel driveway to see the back of the house. Nobody was out on the rear deck – yet. “They must be doing blessing inside.”

Pitts yanked the rear screen door to the kitchen, and it swayed open. The kitchen was an add-on from the 90s – the 1890s. As they walked in, they saw the stack off secondhand Igloo and Coleman coolers piled up on the worn pine-plank floor – all bulk and no function. The pyramid of odd box shapes was a masterwork of overpacking.
“Somewhere in there is a whole pig of barbecue,” Pitts observed.
“It looks like they had ten locations each smoke a piece and then courier it in,” Hattie said.
She looked up to realize that Pitt’s cousin Brendan. Brendan had the short stout balding build of a younger guy who know how to carry a keg on one shoulder and a haunch of venison on the other.
“Just some butts,” he explained, smiling through Hattie’s dig. He pointed as the absurdly overlong white plastic cooler at the bottom. “I think they’re in that one. We had a guy do them.”
He waved at the top, with is pewter cup full of Bloody Mary. “I think one of those has…the, uhhh, deviled eggs.” He rolled his eyes at Pitts in gesture of foreboding.
“Well, I’m sure they’ll be great. From a distance,” Pitts answered. Bren laughed.
“How’re yall doing?” he asked. “Were yall in town last night?”
“Yeah,” Pitts replied. “We went to the McClendon’s pig pull.”
“Oh, right! How was that?” Bren asked.
“Solid night. They had a tent out back with a beach music soul band thing going across from the pigs. That old house is unbelievable.”
Hattie had done some consulting work at one point for Jimmy McClendon, when he lived in Atlanta. She said, “I knew McClendon had some money, but…damn.”
“Oh, yeah,” Bren agreed.
“Why weren’t you there?” She asked. “Yall are right around the corner.”
Bren inhaled with his shoulders and held up his hands. “We were getting everything ready for today. We had a lot to get done.”
Hattie looked around at the kitchen, which hadn’t had updated fixtures since…the sixties? There were biscuits piled up on a cookie sheet. The old enamel-topped spring-leafed kitchen table was covered with what looked like a stained blue bedsheet and that held the bloody mary silver service on top of it. Four full, tied plastic garbage bags were stacked up on the floor next to the white louvered pantry door.
“You clearly went above and beyond,” she said, raising her brow. “I think it’s time for bloody maries.”
“Definitely,” Pitts agreed, lunging for the pitcher. He heard the racket of others in the next room as he plucked ice from the bucket, fixing pewter cups for Hattie and himself.
“Oh, my GAWD. Is that PITTS and that LOVELY lady of his?” he heard gush in a tobacco-stained whiskey tenor from beyond the doorway to the dining room, “Pitts” elongated to three syllables, a la “Pi-yut-suh”.

“Oh, god.” Pitts rolled his eyes until they faced Hattie, his back still turned to the doorway. He inhaled, threw back his shoulders, and turned slowly.
Aunt Lottie had framed herself in the doorway, surrounded by the circa 1910 white sink on one side and a circa 1981 white mini microwave on the other side, her arms lithely suspended against the sides of the entry, as if she had just sauntered in from the Paris salon conversations in the next room to freshen up her ladyfriend Simone’s absinthe. Her satin blouse draped over her in a sprawl of abstract greens and reds that looked like the fabric had been used to cover a horrific machine-gun massacre of Christmas elves. She had a red calf-length skirt and absurdly tall, sharp heels for a lady that was about to spend the day standing around in an open field. She had not yet donned her hat, so her dyed-auburn hair, rooted in Broadaway family white hair roots, held together in a vigorously sealed wavy perm that had not seen a flyaway since the Clinton administration. She held her pose as if she was waiting for the Dixieland band to break into her entry tune.
In all honesty, she was firmly a beach-music girl, like all the bad girls from Carolina in the fifties and sixties. She had spent her teenage years crashing parties at the Atlantic House on Folly Beach, jumping to Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts, and ultimately passing out on the floor at my mother’s parents’ house on James Island. She and my mom would try to hook up with Citadel Cadets, because, well, they weren’t deadbeats, unlike those College of Charleston boys.
In fact, Pitts could hear the beach music on the radio in the background, maybe on the sitting room stereo.
“Pitts, come here, darling,” she purred.
He wandered up. “Hey, Aunt Lottie,” he said like a dog that had just stained the rug.
“Yall need to catch up on your Bloody Maries. We got started before we even packed the trucks,” she announced. “Go on and drink those.”
Hattie obliged. Pitts looked at the pile of coolers. “It looks like yall aren’t done packing up.”
“Oh, we left those for you. Your parents said that Hattie had an SUV.” She wandered back into the dining room and Pitts and Hattie followed after quick chugs and refills of their drinks.
The rooms weren’t especially large, although the high 19th-century ceiling did give this part of the house a feeling of more space. The walls were a Victorian deep crimson and the windows had floor-to-ceiling white lace curtains. The dining table had a silver spread of more Bloody Mary pitchers, juice and champagne, and a panorama of biscuits – ham and egg and sausage, with the ham from a friend of Brendan’s who had a pig farm outside of town heading to Elgin, the venison sausage processed from Lottie’s husband James’ season out in the timber, and the eggs from their own coop that was discreetly tucked around behind their old carriage house in the rear of their yard, behind the big camellia bushes. It had been that way since Pitts was a kid – since before he was even allowed to attend the family slot at the Cup. Invitations to the slow had always been a strict adults-only affair. After his first year being permitted to attend, while he was in grad school at Georgia, when he saw his mom try to ride his father bareback using the straps of her sundress as whips, he finally understood why.
Of course, his parents were there again this year, over on the voluptuous wood and white-upholstered belle-epoque sofa, working through big ham biscuits and trying to disguise how much they’d already had to drink. Pitts’ mom looked up, surprised that he was there, like he’d run into her shoplifting at the Eckerd Drugs.
“Oh! Hi Pitts and Hattie!” She exclaimed, flapping a jaunty wave. She enunciated Pitts and Hattie like it was more of a pronouncement to the room that we had arrived. Pitts’ dad left his biscuit on the Staffordshire plate to foist up a hand to acknowledge his son.
James was there at the dining room table, eating the sausage out of the middle of the biscuits as Lottie complained, slapping the back of his hand. He wore a green Masters-style jacket with his Wylie family tartan tie, along with a Realtree camo bucket hat that he had clearly worn when he killed the deer he was now eating. “Heyyy Pitts! What you say?” he shouted, even though they were all of two feet away. He gave him a firm slap on the back that would have met the standard of corporal punishment at the private boarding school where he was vice headmaster and, more importantly, head football coach.
Toots emerged from behind James’s big green frame and thrust out his hand for a rock-hard handshake. Sporting his crisp white mane and rich Beaufort tan from days out fishing in the sound, he let loose with his big sonorous baritone that was built for issuing ridiculous military orders and telling wild stories about flying faster than sound itself. “There his is,” he announced. He shook hands hard. “Glad to see you made it, nephew! Somebody needed to class this place up and hold forth with me.”
Oh good lord, Pitts thought. Toots is going to make me trade drinks with him today. I’m a dead man.
“Let’s see if I can even keep up,” Pitts replied with a fearful chuckle.
“Well, you can try,” said Toots with a wink and a slap on the shoulder.
Mike Simmons and Pitts’ cousin Cooper, his wife, walked in from the sitting room. They were just a year or two older than Pitts and Hattie, and had had a much better run up in Charlotte. “Pitts,” Mike said, offering the Obligatory Corporate Handshake. “Great to see you.”
“Hey Mike. Glad yall made it this year,” Pitts replied in the spirit of suggesting that they participate in the misery. “Yall haven’t met Hattie, have you?”
“Hi Hattie. Mike Simmons.” Another Obligatory Corporate Handshake from a sufficiently tall, sufficiently slim man.
“Hi! Glad to see that they called in some mature adults,” Hattie said. She hugged cheeks with Cooper. “So great to see yall!”
Cooper nodded, “Great to have yall come too.” She was perfectly fine with not mincing words and was shockingly direct – which she could get away with, being a large-eyed blonde that looked like she had just escaped 1940s Central Casting. She was enough of a badass to wear Chanel to the Cup, and cool enough to somehow make it look like it was just an outfit she’d kind of thrown on.
“Your parents were just telling us about your art show a little while back. You should have told us to come,” she said, and then slugged back her entire flute of mimosa.
“Aww, no biggie. The stuff was pretty hideous,” Pitts laughed.
“Oh come on,” Coop protested.
“No, seriously,” Hattie said. “It was pretty damn bad.” She laughed, to take a little of the edge off of it. Mike and Cooper laughed along. Pitts rolled his eyes as they kept talking and he drifted over to his parents to say hello.
“Ready for a big day?” his dad asked, sitting on the sofa that looked like an aspiring fainting couch.
“Is there really any way to prepare?” Pitts answered.
“Well, have you prepared Hattie for the experience?” he replied.
“I think she’s been before when she was in college,” Pitts said. “I don’t think she really made it to the infield slots though.” Pitts’ mom stood up and he was answering, and saying “Come on, shag with me, young man,” she took his hand and started sashaying on the threadbare oriental rug. Pitts kept talking, oblivious.
“I think her sister’s husband’s got a corporate tent over near the stands today. We’ll probably go by there,” he said. In the next room, Tootsie bellowed to James about the quality of oysters off of Bull’s Bay versus Capers Island.
“Well,” his dad said, “They probably won’t have the family silver service out.”
“True. Hey, speaking of family,” Pitts interjected. “Where’s Ham? I saw his car.”
“Oh, he’s in the john,” his dad said. “You may want to go check that knob. You know how that door is. He might be stuck in there.”
Pitts looked around the corner and saw the closed bathroom door with the original white ceramic knob and latch mechanism. As if on cue, there was a subtle knock at the bathroom door. Pitts smiled and sucked down the rest of his Bloody Mary, wandering casually to the door and leaning his ear against it.
“May I…help you?” he offered demurely, politely, as the oyster debate raged ever louder in the dining room and his mother took Lottie to replace him and they shagged even more wildly as the morning sun streamed through the windows on the front porch.
After a moment of annoyed silence, Ham’s guttural tenor muttered through the door, “Come on, man, you know you have to open the door from that side.”
“Huh,” Pitts thought aloud. “I thought they had fixed that doorknob.”
“Of course not,” Ham groused. “They still have the same fridge from the 1960s. Are you going to let me out?”
“I dunno. It’s probably more entertaining in there.”
“Oh, you know it is, baby. But why deny the world Hammond Broadaway?”
Pitts shrugged. “I can probably work up a few reasons. Let me go get another drink and see what I can think of.”
Pitts walked off, back to the dining room and the Bloody Maries, smirking to nobody in particular. The white enamel knob and entire door rattled as Ham’s voice rose to an exasperated shout. “Dammit, Pitts! You’re a fool to screw me over this early in the morning! PITTS!”
Nobody paid Ham any attention, between questions of the size of Capers, gathering up the rug in five inch floozy heels, and scarfing down biscuits to prepare for the day. Outside on the front porch, Ham’s girlfriend Jessie had her first bounce on a joggling board with Bren’s school buddy Bob, who had come up from Charleston with an entire keg of Westbrook and a margarita table for the slot.