edisto

When my sister Billie graduated from high school she asked for a set of luggage to take with her to a new life in this place called Edisto. I’m not sure if Edisto ever existed but some trucker passing through Fast Jack’s had told her it was one of the best little vacation spots on the shores of South Carolina. The idea was that Billie and a friend of hers were to move down there, share an apartment, waitress at one of the hotels and then spend their free time on the beach. Graduation night came and went and the next day Billie started packing everything she could into the luggage Dad had given her. But then the friend she was to leave with called and told her that she was going to community college instead. Billie’s the kind of person that when she wants something then she doesn’t want anything else. Once she threw the phone down, she went right back to packing.

I helped her take the luggage out to her car – a Dodge Dynasty with a saggy felt ceiling filled with cigarette burns, a floor of Little King bottle caps and the weathered remains of scratch-off lottery tickets. The beach towels draped over the front seats, having absorbed Billie’s suntan oil over the years, gave the Dynasty its permanent smell of coconut and banana. When Dad asked her what her plan was now, she gave us each a half-hug goodbye and said she’d call us when she found out.

As the Dynasty turned out of the driveway, it wasn’t as if Dad and I turned away and had one of those moments where we wondered if we were ever going to see her again or not. It wasn’t one of those kind of goodbyes. Neither of us would admit it, but we were sort of relieved to finally see her go.  You don’t realize how much you care about a place until someone starts shitting on it.  All Billie had talked about for the last couple of months was how she couldn’t wait to get out of Bicknell.  The last thing Dad told her before she cranked up the radio before backing out of the driveway was, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do . . .”

Billie returned home four days later, the luggage gone, her clothes piled in the backseat of the Dynasty, and wearing a t-shirt that read Southern Chicks with little yellow chicks poking their heads out of eggs painted in the Confederate flag. Dad asked her what happened to the luggage and Billie explained that the closest she had come to finding someone else to go with were a couple of girls who were only willing to go as south as Gatlinburg so they could get a job at Dollywood. But Billie didn’t want Dollywood. She wanted Edisto – even if she had never been there.