The Hurricane Sisters by Dorothea Benton Frank Page A

according to the papers, he’s showing no signs of settling down just yet.”
    “I know. Maisie told me. Well, it doesn’t matter because he probably already forgot my name.”
    “I’ll bet he hasn’t. I’ll bet you a new dress and shoes. Call me when he calls you.”
    “You seem pretty sure about this. How do you know?”
    “Because all men want what they can’t have. Every last one of them.”
    “Well, I’m not holding my breath.”
    “Listen to your mother. I know more about men than I care to divulge.” I laughed when I said that.
    “You sound just like Maisie,” Ashley said and laughed with me.
    “Lord, save us all. Listen to me, sweetheart, I just hope that when you do marry, that you are dead in love and that your lucky guy feels the same way about you.”
    “I agree.”
    “Love is the most important thing there is, Ashley. Love, family . . . these are the things that matter; the things to cherish.”
    “Who could argue with that?”
    If nothing else transpired, at least I had made her laugh with me and peace was restored.
    Shortly after that I left her and drove back downtown. She promised to sweep the steps and take out the garbage. And she promised to be more diligent about the house in general. It couldn’t be easy to be her age in today’s world. I thought about it as I passed over the causeway and through Mount Pleasant. Ivy was the one who rightly pointed it out. It couldn’t be easy at all.

 
    CHAPTER 7
    Ashley—Party On!
    Another advantage of staying in the family beach house, besides the killer view, was that we had a tiny ancient cottage in the yard. My family used it for sort of a metaphorical purgatory—a way station between a yard sale (heaven) and the dump (hell). It was filled with abandoned junk, stuff you no longer wanted to use but you couldn’t bring yourself to throw away—old box springs, rusty bicycles, broken chairs that never got fixed, et cetera. I had no memory of it being anything other than what it was. At one point I had thought about fixing it up and renting it, but it was such a wreck and I had, as we all know, limited resources. Besides all that, I didn’t have the first clue about being a landlady.
    Mom and Dad mumbled around and finally said they didn’t mind if I used the cottage as a studio so I configured it to suit myself. This meant the death of a million trees as cases of paper towels were squandered, many bottles of vinegar and cleaners were spritzed to their last breath, and the backbreaking work was done to haul ancient possessions and garbage to the curb. The neighbors must have thought we were total hoarders. Nasty!
    Originally, the cottage was a kitchen house back in the days of the Civil War, or the Recent Disturbance, as Maisie liked to call it when she was feeling her years. It was pretty common for kitchens to be separated from the main house because they were always catching on fire from flying embers, badly maintained chimneys, and so forth. I could only imagine someone rushing from the cottage to the house in pouring rain or gusting winds, hanging on to a platter of pork chops for dear life! How stupid. I minored in American history and it never failed to blow my mind how awful it was to be a woman a hundred years ago, much less in colonial times.
    Anyway, even after I cleaned up the cottage, it was still a serious dump. The walls were old Sheetrock and particleboard, cracked from abuse, and the ceiling was open with exposed rafters. The roof was missing so many shingles that it leaked like holy hell. But a little indoor precipitation didn’t bother me. I just placed garbage cans and pots under the drizzles and went on with my business. Who cared? I had my own studio! It was the rat droppings that were more bothersome.
    Actually, it was a good thing that the cottage was a pit because when you paint, you don’t want to have to worry about the floors. The floor of the room where my easel was set up was covered in the cheapest linoleum