Reunion Beach by Elin Hilderbrand (best ebook reader under 100 .TXT) 📗

line at Lohman’s, certain they were never going to unlock the front doors to let you in for the Midnight Madness sale. You took it hard, Dot, and that got to me. I was there, now I’m here. It’s nothing to cry about.

Love ya, Pat

To: DBF

From: PC

You wrote another novel and turned it in on time? What are you, Dottie, a literary machine? You are a summer read wind machine! You write of Lowcountry beaches and shrimp boils and cocktails on the sand—soothing beauty and Southern lady hijinks. And there’s nobody like you. I wonder if you will get to 50 books before you take the flight home. To here. I bet you’ve got a hundred more ideas for novels. My mind did not work that way. I’d think about a story for years and it would chug around inside of me like waves of dyspepsia, followed by a bout of gas that kept me pacing the floor until I passed it, after which I would sit down and write I never saw you chug but I know you did. You worked hard. You tried to make it look easy because that’s what you wanted for your reader. Profound thoughts, sure. Family dynamics, what else is there? Food, absolutely. Your love of Sullivan’s Island and the Lowcountry? You were the ambassador of soul for those tufts of land you call home that floated on the ocean off the coast of South Carolina like a discarded wedding gown tossed off the side of a cruiser. You are the queen of all that, so I’m not surprised. Queen Bee? Do I have it right?

I heard you ripping the box open and you were shouting at Victoria to get a video for Instagram. In that moment, I was happy to be dead. Social and media are two words that should never meet, like child and actor or freak and accident. You should stop encouraging all that intrusion into your life by way of devices and get back to the basics. Everything we do is not interesting. Well, let me speak for myself. You are fascinating in your love of living and gracious dining and strong friendships. I know because I was the beneficiary of all three. Cassandra is still crying most nights. Give her a call. Will ya?

Love ya, Pat

To: DBF

From: PC

I have recognized no one, not a single person in the incoming area. I scan the crowd, thinking, there’s gotta be someone I know coming through, which makes me wonder in a serious way if publishers, editors, publicists, and morning-show bookers go somewhere else instead of here? I hope not. I’ve heard enough stories to know that you don’t want to go there. Are you laughing now, Dot? How many times did you say Don’t go there, Pat, and I had no idea where you didn’t want me to go. We’d go round and round about the meanings of phrases and words, as though we were the experts. Maybe we were. About some things. Here’s a list. You can add to it if you wish.

Pat and Dottie’s Areas of Expertise

The American South

Hush puppies

Whiskey

Peanut butter balls and divinity candy

Candy apples

Vodka

Boiled peanuts

Po boy sandwiches

Hash brown potatoes

Gingham fabric, Florsheim shoes, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

(Well, for you, the Charleston Post and Courier. Beyond newspapers, you fancied McCall’s magazine and Life. You remember Life. The big magazine when we were kids. The one the size of a turkey platter? I don’t know how it fit in the mailman’s bag. Did it? Did he carry it separately? Must have. Remember the pictures? You’d open those big, lush pages and find photographs so huge you could walk into them. You remember.) Back to the list.

Chryslers and Oldsmobiles and Fords

Cornbread

When men wore hats and women wore them, too. Hell, when everybody wore a hat when they left the house, including the children.

Gardenias

Magnolia leaves at Christmas (the dried ones)

I don’t know if I ever told you, my mother made her own marshmallows. Who does that? Why do that? Only Southern women would figure out how to make a marshmallow and then spend the rest of their lives making a better one than the woman down the street. I don’t know why it surprises me. They are crafty. They knit everything from bikinis to toilet paper holders shaped like mint green top hats.

It’s like the Sicilians down our way. They put up thousands of jars of tomatoes every August, even though a can of crushed and peeled tomatoes is cheap. Is the labor involved in crushing fifty bushels and cooking them on a hot stove and pouring them into mason jars that you’ve spent hours sterilizing commensurate to the low cost of a single can? Don’t know. Sometimes I get to thinking here.

Love ya, Pat

To: DBF

From: PC

Dot, heard you banging your head against the wall in your house in New Jersey. Enough with that. Getting a movie adaptation of your book is not the little piece of heaven you hope it will be. Sometimes they make bad movies of good books, and sometimes they make great movies of crap books, and sometimes they just steal your title and make a Porno. So, go figure and don’t get yourself wrapped up in Hollywood.

Take your head off that vintage Schumacher wallpaper, because if you keep banging your head, you will ruin the rose trellis design and then you’ll really hate yourself, more than you would if you never see a film adaptation of your books. Sit down. Listen to your old friend.

Art is not what it used to be, and it never is what it can be.

You are living in the world that produces too much of everything. There is too much to read, see, and do. The current state of art down below is a lot like the Mighty Cuyahoga in 1910 when they were dumping all manner of industrial waste into the river from the factory that made snow tires. The river became so infested with junk that