Page 19 of Leave It to Us
“Yes,” he said with a nod and a distinct southern accent. He extended a hand to Yvonne. “Yes, ma’am, you can just call me Jeremiah.”
The dark-eyed, nicely dressed man gave her a cute smile.
“I’m Yvonne,” she told him. “And these are my sisters, Lana and Tami.”
Jeremiah released her hand and followed her nod toward Lana, who had come to a stop on her left, and then Tami, who was on her right.
“Hello, Jeremiah,” Tami said, her tone much brighter than Yvonne’s had been. “It’s very nice to meet you.”
Jeremiah apparently hadn’t been lost to that bright tone, as he’d taken Tami’s hand and stared into her eyes. “It’s very nice to meet you too, Tami.”
“You have a ride for us, Jeremiah?” Yvonne asked, not bothering to give any extra attention to the way he was still holding Tami’s hand.
“Ah, yeah ... I mean, y-yes—yes, I do,” he stammered.
“Then why don’t you drop my sister’s hand and show us to the ride so we can get to the house?” Lana suggested. “We’ve been traveling all day.”
“Right,” he said with another nod, and then, as if on second thought, dropped Tami’s hand like it was scorching hot. “Yeah, I’ve got a cart right over here. Are those all your bags?”
He gestured behind them to where the ferry’s crew member had just finished stacking their bags on the dock. There’d only been two other people on the ferry with them, and they’d gotten off with their one bag and gone on their merry way—so yeah, the stack of four suitcases and two duffel bags was all theirs.
“Yes, they’re ours,” Lana replied, and went over to claim her two suitcases and duffel bags.
She stumbled away from the pile, looking exactly like she had when she’d come walking into the airport that morning. And neither Yvonne nor Tami offered to help her this time; they both knew how thathelphad turned out. But Jeremiah was trying to be a gentleman, and he reached for one of Lana’s suitcases.
“Let me get that for you, ma’am,” he said, and shockingly, Lana released the bag.
Then she tossed a raised-eyebrow look over her shoulder at Yvonne, who almost smiled, since apparently Lana didn’t like beingma’amed either. Yvonne retrieved her own suitcase, extending the handle so she could roll it over the dirt ground to the golf cart where she’d seen Jeremiah stack Lana’s bag.
“Is that a golf cart?” Tami asked.
“Yeah, it is,” Jeremiah replied with a grin as he took Tami’s suitcase and added it to the vehicle. “I’m sure you recall that’s how we get around here on the island—golf carts or bikes. You can rent both down at Jake Jemison’s backyard. He’s got a few that he saves for tourists.”
Grandma Betty had always had an older gentleman named Pete come to the dock and pick them up for their yearly visits. Ole Pete, as he’d instructed them to call him, owned a noisy, rusted red pickup truck that Yvonne kind of wished would come ambling down the road right about now.
“She already knows that,” Yvonne said as she slid onto the back seat of the golf cart. Lana slid onto the seat beside her, as the sisters had figured Tami would want to ride up front with Jeremiah.
The smiles the two of them were still sharing were bright enough to light up the night. It was a little nauseating. Or maybe Yvonne was just hungry too. Who knows. All she was positive of at that moment was that there was a bed at the summerhouse, singing her name.
“I mean, yeah, I did know,” Tami said, and then got into the cart. “But every time I come back, it’s with the hope that they’ve done more modernization.”
“Nah, my granddaddy says they like ole ’Fuskie just the way it is,” Jeremiah said, and started the cart.
Yvonne hadn’t heard the place called that in so long she’d forgotten how it sounded to hear natives of the island refer to their home in that way. Unlike when they’d been children, she tended to stay around the summerhouse when she’d visited Grandma Betty as an adult.
“Well, there isn’t much they can do about that now,” Lana said as they began driving down the dirt road. “I mean, there’s already three resorts on the island. Right?”
Jeremiah nodded. His hair was low-cut and wavy. He wore a white dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, with no tie and the top two buttons open. His slacks were dark, shirt just a bit dusty, most likelyfrom the dirt and gravel roads here in comparison to in the city, where she was used to seeing lawyers.
“There are, and they’ve provided jobs for some of the folk around here, but down in these parts, the motto is,If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” he replied.
“Well, I wouldn’t necessarily call itbroken,” Lana continued as she looked around at the trees they passed; a dilapidated house on the left; and an old, abandoned skeleton of a horse carriage up ahead on the right.
Yvonne knew the sights of the island would be much different in the morning light, but right now, the place was still giving her warm feelings and the sensation of long-buried memories sneaking up to the edges of her mind. It felt different from the other times she’d been back on the island, for some reason that she was too tired to try to figure out.
“Just could use a refresh of sorts,” Lana said. “At any rate, I can’t wait to get out here with my camera.”
Her sister sounded so wistful as she said those words, as if she were already lost in that place of creativity she liked to retreat to whenever possible. Lana had always been the most creative of the sisters, the one with a vision of things that the others never possessed. From the moment Daddy had given her that camera for Christmas the year she’d turned thirteen, Lana had been obsessed. Even though she’d been pretty and shapely enough to become a phenomenal model, the camera had whispered to her. Much to Mama’s chagrin, Lana had listened, and worked toward that one solitary goal, regardless of Freda’s attempts to reprogram her to find a more suitable career—something with a deeper foundation, a wider path to success. Lana hadn’t cared; she knew what her path was, and she’d followed it without ever looking back. Yvonne admired her for that.
