The Restoration of Celia Fairchild - Marie Bostwick Page 0,34

needs to talk about it. That about sums it up.

But you’re never out of place when you’re walking a dog. A dog gives you purpose, a reason for being wherever you’re at. I’d have handed over twenty bucks for a rental dog that day. Everybody but me seemed to be traveling in a pack.

South of Broad, gaggles of tourists posed in front of mansions and took each other’s pictures. At White Point Gardens, a park at the southern tip of the downtown peninsula, a dozen or so women wearing silk dresses and pearls, accompanied by men wearing sport coats and shined shoes, stood at the foot of the gazebo to watch a bride and groom exchange vows. Two little boys in blue suits and a girl with a wreath in her hair, having apparently lost interest in the proceedings, played a game of tag around the massive trunks of the ancient oaks. At the battery, a group of twenty-somethings in shorts and backpacks stood at the railing and gazed across the harbor to Fort Sumter as a tour guide in cargo shorts and a broad-brimmed straw hat gave a CliffsNotes version of the history of Charleston. On East Bay Street, couples held hands as they strolled past the ice cream–colored town houses of Rainbow Row.

I passed at least a dozen churches of Charleston’s four hundred houses of worship on my walk, and all of them seemed to be doing a bang-up business. Charleston isn’t called the Holy City for nothing. When the double doors opened at St. Philip’s, a Bach organ sonata spilled out onto the street along with streams of worshippers in their Sunday best, chatting and smiling and pausing to shake the hand of a priest wearing a white robe and green chasuble.

There were one or two faces I thought I recognized in that crowd, but it was unlikely: I hadn’t gone to a service at St. Philip’s since before I’d left for college, more than twenty years ago. Though she was standing with her back to me, when I glimpsed a tall, willowy figure with a tangle of red curls, I thought it might be someone I’d known once, a long time ago. But she looked different from the front, too old to be my onetime friend. Our eyes locked for an instant, then she looked away quickly and I felt sort of silly. I don’t know why I’d thought it might be her; she’d left Charleston years before and never even gone to St. Philip’s, or any church as far as I knew. Wishful thinking, I suppose.

I walked away, feeling empty and invisible, averting my eyes from the cemetery across the street, taking a roundabout route so I wouldn’t have to walk past that far corner of the churchyard where Calpurnia was resting beneath uneven ground and new sod. It was too soon. I wasn’t ready. Maybe I never would be.

Feeling like the only untethered person in town resurrected that sole-castaway-on-an-overpopulated-island sensation I’d experienced during my first months in New York. But this was worse. It’s one thing to feel all alone when you’re in a new city and another to feel that way in the place where you grew up. Every building, monument, bush, and tree was as familiar as my own reflection, but the city had forgotten me. I felt almost spectral, like a ghost who could see others but couldn’t be seen herself.

“Eat something sweet and the feeling will pass” was my Grandma Beebee’s advice in regards to basically everything. Knitting and eating pralines were her primary occupations, which probably went a long way toward explaining her size and health problems. On the other hand, she always seemed to be pretty happy. When I walked through the open sheds at the Old City Market, past the vendors selling trinkets and candles and sweetgrass baskets and muslin bags of Carolina Gold rice, then exited onto Market Street and spotted River Street Sweets, it seemed like an omen.

The pralines were fresh and buttery and ridiculously sweet. The momentary pleasure of eating them dulled my mood but didn’t lift it. I thought about going back to the hotel, but the mental image of me sitting alone in my room as the sound of laughter and tinkling glassware floated up from the courtyard where families and lovers and friends would be enjoying brunch was too pathetic to contemplate. Calvin was right; the life I’d led in New York was over. But so was the life I’d once