Moon Over Edisto Read online

  PRAISE FOR BETH WEBB HART

  Sunrise on the Battery

  “[Beth Webb Hart] knows South Carolina’s fabled lowcountry well and shares her knowledge with skill, wisdom, and beauty.”

  —PAT CONROY, BEST-SELLING

  AUTHOR OF THE PRINCE OF

  TIDES AND SOUTH OF BROAD

  “Sunrise on the Battery is a beautiful story of discovery and rebirth, of changing gears in mid-stride, and trusting in God’s guidance. On the surface, Jackson and Mary Lynn Scoville have it all: a great marriage, a fabulous historic Charleston house, and three terrific children. But in their quest to overcome their humble beginnings, Jackson and Mary Lynn have managed to squeeze God out of their seemingly perfect lives until a crisis of conscience turns their world upside down, illuminating the empty spaces once filled with the minutia of society’s demands. Ms. Hart describes in exacting detail the fine bones of her hometown, peopling it with characters you care about and want to root for, and who you will find yourself cheering for at the startling conclusion.”

  —KAREN WHITE, NEW YORK

  TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR

  OF THE BEACH TREES

  “Beth Webb Hart is fast becoming one of my favorite authors. Sunrise on the Battery is one of the best books I’ve read all year. Hart’s smooth prose prepares the reader for a surprising challenge while leaving them with hope and courage to change. Don’t leave this book on your TBR pile. Pick it up and read it.”

  —RACHEL HAUCK, AUTHOR

  OF DINING WITH JOY

  “A beautifully crafted story of the power of love and the joy of living in surrender. From the characters to the setting, Beth Webb Hart will draw you to Charleston with her winsome prose and a fabulously crafted tale that will be with you long after the last page is read.”

  —JENNY B. JONES, AWARD-WINNING

  AUTHOR OF BOOKS SUCH AS SAVE THE

  DATE AND THERE YOU’LL FIND ME

  “Do we always want what we pray for? Sunrise on the Battery takes a poignant look at the intersection of faith and family responsibility, of a life for show and a life that feeds the soul. Beth Webb Hart writes with a sense of Southern culture and the holy city of Charleston that is simply mesmerizing!”

  —LISA WINGATE, NATIONAL BEST-

  SELLING AUTHOR OF LARKSPUR

  COVE AND DANDELION SUMMER

  “Sunrise on the Battery is a rich story that hit me where I live on many levels. Beth Webb Hart has tapped into the layers of a family with her portrayal of the unit as a whole while exploring each individual’s complex interior life. I especially enjoyed her portrayal of the lives of teens, and the challenges of raising them. Beth is a talented author who has brought us another thoughtprovoking story.”

  —MARYBETH WHALEN, AUTHOR OF SHE

  MAKES IT LOOK EASY AND THE MAILBOX,

  DIRECTOR OF SHE READS, THE FICTION

  DIVISION OF PROVERBS 31 MINISTRIES

  Grace at Low Tide

  “Hart’s evocation of the ways of Charleston society—blueblood and redneck alike—is right on target, her evocation of the landscape here sure and certain.”

  —BRET LOTT,

  AUTHOR OF JEWEL

  “. . . an aromatic bouillabaisse of Southern manners, island life and God’s redemptive love. Readers who love Oprah’s book picks will find this title in keeping with the best contemporary fiction.”

  —LYNN WAALKES,

  CBA MARKETPLACE

  “A lovely, gifted writer.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  The Wedding Machine

  “[Hart’s] charismatic cast of characters resonates long after the last page is turned.”

  —CHARLOTTE OBSERVER

  “. . . [an] engrossing novel with weddings as the centerpiece . . . Hart’s writing is lovely, her characters endearing, and humor leavens the darker moments.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “The Wedding Machine is one of the most charming books I’ve read in a long, long time. The local belles of Jasper, South Carolina, comprise the wedding guild, a group of unforgettable women who made me laugh, cry, and cheer—as all good weddings do.”

  —CASSANDRA KING, BEST-SELLING

  AUTHOR OF THE SAME SWEET GIRLS

  “Beth Webb Hart writes a beautiful story with compassion and an unerring eye to detail as she peeks behind the white lace, the polished silver, and the artfully arranged flowers of traditional Southern weddings to reveal the hidden flaws and secrets of four women friends. Reading it, you’ll feel like a member of the wedding.”

  —MARY ALICE MONROE,

  BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF

  SWIMMING LESSONS

  Love, Charleston

  “With this novel Beth Webb Hart moves up in the ranks of the accomplished southern writers.”

  —HUFFINGTON POST

  “Love, Charleston doesn’t fail to deliver the drama as this tale of three cousins unfolds . . . a heartwarming story of love and friendship.”

  —CHARLESTON MAGAZINE

  Moon

  Over

  Edisto

  Also by

  BETH WEBB HART

  Grace at Low Tide

  Adelaide Piper

  The Wedding Machine

  Love, Charleston

  Sunrise on the Battery

  Moon

  Over

  Edisto

  BETH WEBB HART

  © 2013 by Beth Webb Hart

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

  Scripture quotations are taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hart, Beth Webb, 1971-

  Moon Over Edisto / Beth Webb Hart.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-59554-202-1 (trade paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3608.A78395M66 2013

  813’.6--dc23

  2012039737

  Printed in the United States of America

  13 14 15 16 17 18 QG 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Edward

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1: Julia Bennett

  CHAPTER 2: Mary Ellen Duvall Bennett

  CHAPTER 3: Julia

  CHAPTER 4: Etta

  CHAPTER 5: Julia

  CHAPTER 6: Margaret

  CHAPTER 7: Mary Ellen

  CHAPTER 8: Julia

  CHAPTER 9: Julia

  CHAPTER 10: Jed Young

  CHAPTER 11: Julia

  CHAPTER 12: Jed

  CHAPTER 13: Julia

  CHAPTER 14: Julia

  CHAPTER 15: Julia

  CHAPTER 16: Mary Ellen

  CHAPTER 17: Etta

  CHAPTER 18: Julia

  CHAPTER 19: Mary Ellen

  CHAPTER 20: Margaret

  CHAPTER 21: Jed

  CHAPTER 22: Margaret

  CHAPTER 23: Etta

  CHAPTER 24: Julia

  CHAPTER 25: Julia

  CHAPTER 26: Julia

  CHAPTER 27: Jed

  CHAPTER 28: Julia

  CHAPTER 29: Mary Ellen

  CHAPTER 30:
Julia

  CHAPTER 31: Jed

  CHAPTER 32: Julia

  CHAPTER 33: Etta

  CHAPTER 34: Julia

  CHAPTER 35: Julia

  CHAPTER 36: Meg

  CHAPTER 37: Julia

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  For it is in giving that we receive.

  FRANCIS OF ASSISI

  CHAPTER 1

  Julia Bennett

  NEW YORK

  When the bright red delivery truck from Gravy parked halfway on the sidewalk by the doors of the Kent Risen Art Gallery on Prince Street, Etienne winked at Julia and went out to pay the delivery boy.

  “Po’boys,” she said as she glided back through the gallery’s thick glass door while lifting the greasy paper bags high. The smell of fried seafood filled the narrow space as Chih-Yang put down his wire cutters and rubbed his hands together. “I’m starving.”

  “Can’t.” Sanchez removed a nail from between his lips and began to hammer a hole in the black wall where he was planning to hang his 3-D “found objects” portrait of Bill Clinton, whose hair and eyebrows were made out of bubble wrap and crushed Diet Coke cans.

  Etienne rolled her dark eyes. Sanchez had ordered them all the macrobiotic platter from Caravan of Dreams the night before, and Etienne had spat out the bland mixture of tofu and sea vegetables before lecturing them on French cuisine and how sad she felt for anyone who didn’t regularly partake of butter or cream or mussels or red meat. Then she’d marched down the block and purchased a burger combo from the Fanelli Café that smelled so good even Sanchez asked for a french fry.

  “In honor of our Southern belle,” Etienne said as she unwrapped the shrimp po’ boys piled high with large fried prawns and creamy coleslaw.

  Julia winced ever so slightly. “What?” Etienne said. “I’ve read your bio. I know you grew up catching shrimps down in South Carolina.”

  “Sorry, Etienne.” Julia pushed her glasses up on her nose. “I just can’t do imported shrimp.”

  Chih-Yang, who had already taken a heaping bite of a po’ boy, began to chew slowly. Then he shrugged and swallowed. “Mealy Asian prawns with salmonella are my favorite.” He took another bite as Sanchez shook his head and lifted his portrait up. Then Chih-Yang hunched over for a rather impressive pec flex. (He was the youngest, fittest artist in the group.) “My body thrives on toxins.”

  “Well, how about some fried chicken then?” Etienne opened the second bag, which contained a bucket of wings and legs as well as a basket of biscuits.

  Sanchez was trembling as Julia reached for a wing. “Don’t worry, Joseph,” Julia said to her old friend from art school. “Do you think a restaurant this pricey would serve anything other than free range?”

  Sanchez fanned himself with one of the gallery’s brochures. “I think I need some fresh air.” Then he slid on his organic hoodie and headed out the door as Julia imagined throwing the cast net off the bow of her father’s old johnboat. And how, on a good day in late June or early July, their casts yielded nearly half a cooler full of the small, succulent tidal creek shrimp that her mother would boil up and serve with a bowl of melted butter at the end of their rickety dock on Store Creek on the south side of Edisto Island.

  “So how often do you go back?” Etienne tore open a biscuit, and Julia was mesmerized by the steam rising from it and the comforting smell of flour and butter. “To eat the nontoxic shrimps in South Carolina?”

  “Rarely,” Julia said. She hadn’t thrown the cast net, hadn’t stepped foot on the old dock, in nearly two decades, and she had no intention of ever doing so again.

  TWO HOURS LATER JULIA ROUNDED THE CORNER OF Fifth Avenue onto East 92nd. The hall entrance light was on at the bottom of her brownstone, which sat four doors down on the opposite side of the street. Well, it wasn’t actually her brownstone. It belonged to her old friend Bess, who was married and had four children. There were a psychiatrist and a chiropractor on the first floor. Bess lived with her family on the next three floors. Julia had the fifth floor, the “penthouse,” really just a large studio apartment with a nice-sized rooftop deck. Julia painted and gardened there by day, and by night she stretched out on the old Pawleys Island hammock beneath her potted ficus trees and stared at the sky.

  On a clear night she could see the moon. She would have felt like the luckiest woman in the world—a gainfully employed artist with a charming significant other and a rooftop view in the middle of one of the world’s greatest cities—if it weren’t for the forlorn look on the moon’s face. This will not end well, the face seemed to say. Buzz off, she said back to him sometimes.

  East 92nd between Fifth and Madison was nearly noiseless this time of night. It was a little after ten and most everyone in this little section of Manhattan was bedded down, sleeping deeply before the predawn wake-up call that catapulted them out of bed and into their designer suits and private school uniforms.

  Almost all of her colleagues at the college lived in either Brooklyn or the East Village or Harlem or the Bronx. Sometimes she felt a little silly living in the posh Carnegie Hill neighborhood on the Upper East Side, a stone’s throw from Central Park. Wasn’t an artist supposed to live in the real world? The earthy, gritty one where you were regularly intersecting both depravity and danger? Didn’t pure art spring from facing the grit and gristle head-on, and not only that, but from immersing oneself in it? Ah, well, she had done that. For over a decade she had done that, and it hadn’t proved to be nearly as inspiring or romantic as she’d hoped. In fact, it had left some scars as well as some steep therapist bills.

  So when Bess and her husband, Graham, bought the building a couple of years ago and invited Julia to check out the penthouse, she didn’t think twice. She was through with life-on-the-edge. She was a tenured professor in the art department of Hunter College with health insurance and a retirement plan. Within the next year she was slated to become department chair. She had finally entered into a season of balance and security on nearly every level, and she was not going to let anything keep her from her own little piece of Manhattan sky.

  Julia crossed the quiet street toward home. As she got closer to her building, she spotted a figure just beyond the glass-paneled street door who had not yet been buzzed into the main entrance. The figure’s back—it appeared to be a woman—was to Julia, and she was leaning against the wall, head and all, as if she had fallen asleep standing up. The woman was slightly hunched over in a thin beige raincoat. Not nearly heavy enough for this crisp March evening.

  Probably one of Dr. Hu’s patients, Julia thought as her high-heeled boots steadily clapped the street before she slowed down and took a cautious step onto the sidewalk. She dug through her bag for her cell phone. She’d better wake up Graham, who was surely snoozing in the master bedroom on the fourth floor. She hated to bother him, but she didn’t need to be wrangling with a mental patient on an unpeopled street this time of night. Why a psychiatrist’s office in my building? she thought as she dialed Graham’s number. Why not an optometrist or a dermatologist? Why not two chiropractors? She might have called Simon too, but he was an ocean away in England visiting his sons. She missed him.

  As Julia waited for Graham to pick up, the figure slowly turned around. Julia pressed End and dropped her phone in her bag as her heart caught in her throat. Beneath the fluorescent light the familiar face looked as though it had aged twenty years. The last time she had laid eyes on it was at Julia’s father’s funeral four years ago. Her thick mane of rich, brown hair had thinned substantially and was streaked with gray. Her sharp azure eyes, blue like the center of a flame, were now sunken into a thin, weathered face. Her gaze met Julia’s. She looked almost fragile or elderly—like a deflated balloon or a carved-out jack-o’-lantern left out on the stoop too long. She was forty, just one year older than Julia, but she might as well have been in her late fifties.

  Julia ground her teeth, willing the familiar symptoms of her panic attacks t
o subside: sweaty palms, racing heartbeat, constricted throat. Once you’d had one panic attack, your greatest fear was having another—it was even greater than the fear of what might trigger it. No, she said to her pounding heart. Stop, stop, stop. Please stop. She breathed deeply and blinked several times, hoping the stars she was seeing would fade away. Lord, have mercy, have mercy, have mercy, she prayed. She had all but abandoned her childhood faith, but somehow this old prayer her Aunt Dot had taught her (when she was six and afraid to go to sleep because of some vivid nightmares involving Doberman pinschers) helped to stave off a full-blown attack. Christ, have mercy.

  When her heart slowed a little, the woman came back into focus. Then the thought crossed Julia’s mind: run, run down the street, hang a right onto Madison, and zip over to Zinnias for a nice glass of pinot noir. And maybe another. Though, truth be told, she hadn’t had a second glass of wine in years.

  Against Julia’s better judgment, against every signal from her tense and trembling body, she found herself slowly walking toward the door. This was her house, her life. Had she not learned anything from her therapist? She knew exactly what Dr. Johansen would say: don’t let anyone invade it.

  She set her jaw, and the woman shifted her weight and reached to the wall to steady herself. “This ought to be rich,” Julia muttered under her breath. Spite was the second best fuel she’d found to battle the panic attack symptoms, and as she bridled it in her gut, she could already feel her heart slowing down further, her throat muscles relaxing slightly. She took a deep breath and then found her key, shoved it into the hole, and turned it with a flick of her knobby wrist.

  As the door slammed behind her, the glass rattling in its pane, the woman slowly cocked her head.

  “Julia,” she said. “We need to talk.”

  Marney held a handbag that looked as though she had dug it out of some Dumpster in the textile district. She’d never had much taste. Much style. Much sense of fashion whatsoever. And that hadn’t changed. It was the eyes that she had. And at one time, curves in all of the right places and a full face with even fuller lips. Most of all, she had gall. Or maybe it wasn’t so much gall as it was ferocity. (Julia had received years of counseling regarding the subject of Marney.)