Page 7 of Sweatpants & Sweet Tea

The scenery was peaceful. It was calming. It was making me yearn for a simpler life. Something my twenty-five-year-old self would have kicked my own ass for thinking.

“Hi, this is Heather. Thank you for holding.”

“Oh, hi Heather! This is Daphne Moore again. I was just wondering if you’ve had any luck finding my luggage.”

“Hello, Ms. Moore, yes, we have.”

“You have?!” I didn’t mean to sound so surprised. I had just been so sure that they were going to say no.

“Yes, it’s in Michigan.”

“Michigan?” I repeated.

“Yes.”

“Why is it in Michigan?” I’d flown from California to Georgia with no stopovers in Michigan.

“I don’t have an answer to that. However, it will be in Georgia tomorrow morning.”

Tomorrow morning. The ball that I’d come to Georgia for was tonight. My gown was in my luggage.

Cool, cool, cool.

Why had I checked my gown?

Because I hadn’t wanted to lug it through LAX.

“We’ll have a courier bring it to the address you left. It will be there by ten a.m.”

“Okay, well…thanks.”For nothing, I thought as I disconnected the call.

I knew that it was not Heather’s fault that my bag was lost, but she still wasn’t my favorite person at the moment. I stared out the window and thought about skipping the event altogether, but I knew that I couldn’t do that. Grammy Moore deserved to have her family show up for her, whatever was left of it. My father wasn’t coming, so it was just me and Aunt Rhonda. But all I had in my overnight bag were jeans, sweats, and my heels. That’s what I was working with, and I didn’t think sweats and heels were a fashion statement I could pull off. I wasn’t Rihanna.

As I pondered my wardrobe issue, my phone rang again. For some reason, I thought it might be the airport saying that they’d made a mistake. It wasn’t. It was my boss.

I wanted to ignore the call. The last thing I wanted to do was deal with some emergency at work, especially when I wasn’t there. But Alexandra D’Blanco wasnota woman to be ignored.Think Miranda Priestly fromThe Devil Wears Prada,but with even less of a sense of humor and a twitchier trigger finger for firing people.

“Hi, Alexand?—"

“Why didn’t you tell me that you were going to Firefly Island?” she interrupted my greeting.

I was silent for a minute, waiting for the punchline; sure this had to be some sort of joke. I had told her. Verbally and via email, and I’d even shot a text off to her on my way to the airport yesterday to remind her that I would be out of town for the next forty-eight hours.

When no punchline came, I cautiously ventured, “Um…I, I did.”

“Yes, you told me. But you didn’t tell me it wastheFirefly Island.”

How many Firefly Islands were there?I kept my question to myself because I liked my job, or at least I needed it if I wanted to continue eating, paying rent, my car note, and having health insurance—you know the basic necessities of life. Which was why I’d allowed myself to be the subject of the latest series on dating. It wasn’t because Iwantedto spend my time with narcissistic, insecure, and worse, boring men who were only there because it was being filmed and they wanted airtime—not to get to know me.

“Oh, okay, sorry. I didn’t know that you’d be interested in?—"

“Of course I would be interested! Abernathy Manor has been featured onGhost HuntersandHaunted Hallows. And Firefly Island was the backdrop of the Comfort brothers’ episode ofWhat is Love?They were interviewed about their generational curse.”

What is Love?was a four-part documentary that asked the question of the title: What is love? I hadn’t seen it mainly because I wasn’t even sure I believed in love, so why wouldI waste my time watching a documentary that explored the phenomenon? But I remembered Aunt Rhonda mentioning that the Comfort brothers were going to be on it because they were rumored to have a generational curse that basically meant any woman a Comfort man fell in love with would die tragically. As far as I knew, they’d managed to dispel the curse, since from what Aunt Rhonda said, they were all happily married men now.

I remembered the Comfort boys from the few summers I’d spent on the island with Grammy Moore. The oldest was Hank, and he was well… intimidating. Even as a teen, he was a head taller than everyone else and built like a Viking, or gladiator, or some other type of warrior. I remember once he stopped to talk with someone in front of me and cast a shadow over me so large and enveloping, I actually got chilly standing in it. The middle and youngest, Billy and Jimmy, were both really friendly. I had a major crush on Billy and kissed him under the dock down at the pier the last summer I spent here. He was my first kiss ever, actually.

I didn’t remember anything about a generational curse, but I was only ten the last time I was here.

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