It took Kenny six hours and thirty minutes to drive from New York City to Richmond. It took another four hours and thirteen minutes for Kenny to drive from Richmond to Florence. Navigation tells Kenny it will take her an additional two hours and forty-five minutes to drive from Florence to Hilton Head.How many hours will it take for Kenny to drive from The Dollhouse to Pelican Pointe?
She was so distracted by her math problem that she almost missed the direction from Miss B that she had been anticipating since she pulled out of the parking garage on West Fifty-Sixth Street.
“Take Exit 28 to SC-462 E toward Coosawachie. Keep left toward Hilton Head Island,” Miss B instructed.
Kenny followed her reliable copilot and veered right off the Interstate she had spent the last two days traveling. She was laser focused on Miss B’s voice for the next several miles as she took a series of left and right turns down the narrow two-lane roads through the Lowcountry before reaching Okatie Highway that put her on 278 E, the Cross Island Parkway, and the final leg of her journey.
The Cross Island Parkway looked like the typical gateway to any island. A necessary link connecting a mundane, practical, busy highway to a slice of paradise, nirvana. The seven-mile stretch was a modest glimpse of the beauty that awaited at the end of it. The four-lane divided highway surrounded by marshland was separated by a grassy divider that was landscaped with palm trees and ornamental grasses. Every few hundred feet pops of color sprung from the scattered clusters of flowering pink crape myrtle trees and blooming purple lantanas. They reminded Kenny of the wildflowers on the cover of her planner.
It was a little before 11:00 a.m. and the overcast skies slowly gave way to puffy white clouds against a backdrop of bright blue. Rays of golden sunshine peeked through, and Kenny opened the sunroof and all four windows, allowing the warm island breeze to blow through the car. Traffic on 278 was much heavier than she expected for a Monday morning. She knew a lot of people who worked on Hilton Head lived on the mainland in Beaufort and Bluffton, but it seemed late in the day for commuter traffic.
Maybe this is what people mean by island time?
Kenny took a deep inhale as the gridlock came to a halt and had a strange, unfamiliar sensation after she exhaled. In that moment, she felt relief, at peace. For the first time in a very long time, she didn’t feel like she was suffocating. Maybe this sensation, this feeling, this “awareness of breath” as Yogi Marah called it was a real, tangible, beneficial thing. She closed her eyes for a split second and envisioned sitting bumper to bumper on the Cross Bronx Expressway, wondering if she could evoke that same sensation. She immediately heard the noise of sirens and horns; she saw the angry drivers and aggressive panhandlers hoping to score loose change from drivers who were trapped and had nowhere to go.
Nope, definitely not. Breathing would never be an option when battling tristate traffic.
Congestion let up by the time Kenny reached Hudson’s Seafood House on the Docks, one of the oldest restaurants on the island where the freshest catches of the day were served from the docks that they came in on to the picnic tables that dotted the banks of Skull Creek. She hadn’t had seafood since she was shamed by a cameraman from Louisiana into ordering a catfish platter dinner after an interview that she and the crew produced in Baton Rouge. It was still a bit early in the day for a crab cake sandwich and hushpuppies, but she desperately needed a coffee.
The fatigue from the long, monotonous few days of driving started to set in and the adrenaline she had been running on in both anticipation and fear of the trip was wearing off. Twenty minutes out from Sea Pines and four hours until check-in at Pelican Pointe, she had time to spare.
“Dunkin Donuts near me,” Kenny requested of Miss B.
As the route on the screen started remapping and shifting the aerial view it displayed,Hailey Lowcountryflashed on the dashboard.
Text from Hailey: (Emoji: waving hand)! Code 2 (Emoji: door) is #0830#. (Emoji: broom) (Emoji: sponge) is done!
Text from Hailey: & Savi’s havin LDW celebration (Emoji: fireworks). You can prbly c from (Emoji: beach umbrella). Chck it out!
“Wow, okay, Hailey,” Kenny sighed, “this is like hieroglyphics.”
Miss B immediately interjected, “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that,” before she started repeating, “recalculating, recalculating” after Kenny missed a U-turn, distracted by trying to decipher Hailey’s message of graphics.
Kenny pulled over to silence a clearly frustrated Miss B and reset the address to the new destination, Pelican Pointe. The coffee could wait. Reading between the tiny pictures and one-letter words, Kenny interpreted the message to mean that housekeeping was finished, and she could enter the villa. The second text was more elusive. She felt like she had a bad partner for Pictionary.
Kenny solved the fireworks and the beach part of the riddle. But who was Savi? Maybe she was a friend of Hailey’s and LDW was the latest fad theme party. Fordham didn’t have Greek Life, but Kenny’s friends who were in sororities and fraternities were forever going to parties where they had to dress like a sexy lion tamer or don nothing but strategically wrapped bed sheets. Either way, Kenny was past that phase of her life and wouldn’t be attending any party down the beach hosted by Hailey’s friend or anyone else, especially on a Monday night. Although she appreciated the invite and southern hospitality.
In that moment, she felt a pinch of sadness. It had been months, maybe even longer since Kenny had gone to a party or any type of social event just for fun. And the messages from Hailey were the exact type of thing she would have called Colby about to have a quick laugh and debate the cryptic language of college kids. She was lonely and missed her friend, but not enough to speak to him.
Pelican Pointe was on Sea Pines Plantation at the southernmost tip of Hilton Head, the shoe-shaped barrier island off the coast of South Carolina that stretched twelve miles long and five miles wide across the Atlantic Ocean. The shoe was developed into a series of eleven planned communities, called plantations, and Sea Pines was the toe of the shoe. Each plantation had its own identity, character, and feeling. As Kenny cruised down the palm tree lined Cross Island Parkway, she passed the Shelter Cove, Palmetto Dunes, Shipyard and Wexford plantations before dead-ending into her final stop, Sea Pines.
Kenny pulled up to an entrance labeled the Greenwood Gate where a tall, broad gentleman wearing khaki pants and an army-green short sleeve button-up shirt popped out of a tan hut and greeted her with a toothy, white smile.
“Good morning! Welcome to Sea Pines,” he enthusiastically waved.
“Good morning, Derek,” Kenny brightly replied, as she caught a glimpse of the friendly watchman’s name badge.
When she was nine years old, her grandfather taught her the importance of addressing people by their name.
“It makes them feel special, noticed,” he would say. “If you know a person’s name, use it. If you can’t remember their name, call men ‘John’ and women ‘Mary.’ They might be a bit confused at first, but they’ll feel appreciated and will respond.”
Until that point, Kenny thought that the Irish-Catholic coal miners of northeastern Pennsylvania weren’t too creative in the name game, so everyone ended up a John or Mary at birth. After she was let in on this secret, she realized that it was no coincidence that 85 percent of her grandfather’s acquaintances were “named” John or Mary.
“It looks like we don’t have a Plantation Pass. Will you be joining us here on Sea Pines for vacation or just visiting for the day, miss?” Derek trailed off, giving Kenny an inquisitive eye.
“Kenny, my name is Kenny. And yes, I’m here on a bit of an extended vacation. I’ll be staying at Pelican Pointe for a few weeks. My passes should be at the villa when I check-in. I’m headed there now,” she explained.
“Ah, Pelican Pointe, I believe that’s Mr. Cunningham’s newest property. The man is building quite the empire here on Sea Pines. He does many wonderful things for the community and plantation. I’ll give you this temporary pass for now, Miss Kenny, until you get all settled,” he said as he slid a date-stamped piece of postcard-sized flimsy pink paper stock onto the dashboard.
