Lowcountry Summer by Dorothea Benton Frank

humiliation. You must admit that the things you have done were absolutely irresponsible. And to be honest, criminal, Frances Mae.”
    “Humph. Well, that’s just fine because I don’t need no man to be reminding me for one more second that I’m not good enough for this stuck-up family of yewrs. I’ll go to rehab and I’ll get sober, but when I come back, I want my girls.”
    “Frances Mae?” Trip said. “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. So far there’s no evidence of your ability to stay off the bottle. Don’t you think you’ve embarrassed the children enough? Us all enough?”
    What happened next was almost unbearable. Her waterworks went into overdrive and she began to wail.
    “Oh God, why ? You know I love yew, Trip. I love yew with all my heart and I’m gonna up and die without yew. Please! Won’t you come back home? Let’s try again, Trip. For the kids? Please give me another chance. I love yew so much . I’ll never drink another drop! All I ever wanted was to marry yew and have a family with yew . . . that’s all I ever wanted in my whole life . . . my whole life is yew and our kids. It is.”
    “I know, I know,” we heard Trip say. “But it’s no good anymore, Frances Mae, and we both know it.”
    I looked at Millie and she looked at me. We were both in tears hearing Frances Mae’s anguish and feeling how completely chopped to pieces her heart was. It was just awful.
    “That cake ain’t working right,” Millie said. “St. John’s wort don’t agree with her.”
    “Evidently,” I whispered. “Is she gonna be okay?”
    “Oh, yeah. A few hours from now it’ll work its way out of her system.”
    “Oh God! Please no!” Frances Mae cried, and then her sobbing began in earnest.
    “I’m sure glad Mother didn’t live to see this either,” I said in a low voice.
    “We’re saying that too often around here,” Millie said. “We need this situation fixed! Awful to hear and painful to witness, I know, but things got to change.”
    Frances Mae must have signed the papers because about five minutes later we could hear Oscar say, “Okay. I think that does it.”
    We moved away from the door as quickly as we could and tried to look busy. Sure enough, in seconds Frances Mae came sailing through with Trip.
    She looked at me and said what she had probably longed to say for years.
    “You know what? This house was supposed to be mine . But noooo. Your life was supposed to be mine! But noooo. When your marriage didn’t work out with that ugly nasty Jew shrink—big surprise, city girl—you came running home to your crazy-ass bitch momma with your tail between your skinny legs and y’all both ruined my whole life. Well, guess what? You ain’t seen the last of me, Caroline La-veen! No, you have not.”
    “You’d better watch your mouth, Frances Mae.”
    I was boiling mad and knew I shouldn’t have said a word, but anti-Semitism was something I could not and would not abide. And nobody, but nobody, was calling Miss Lavinia names.
    “Come on, Frances Mae, let’s go,” Trip said.
    “Good luck, Frances Mae.” I was shaking with anger as my adrenaline pumped its way through my veins. I wanted to stab her but instead I said, “Get out of my house and don’t ever come back.”
    “We’ll just see about that, won’t we, missy?”
    “Humph,” Millie said when they were out of the door, making their way toward the van that had indeed arrived during the time we were listening at the door.
    “I really don’t like her,” I said.
    Millie looked at me and nodded. “Right now? There ain’t much to like.”

7

Chaos
    H E CAME BACK INSIDE THE house and we looked at each other, Millie, Trip, and I, dizzied by the shock of Frances Mae’s hysterics. Her fury was still whirling around the room like hundreds of tiny poltergeists, slamming from wall to wall and floor to ceiling. My throat quivered from the struggle to find words to accurately describe how I felt.
    “Oh my God,