Sherryl Woods - Flirting with Disaster

Way back then, lugging a Barbie suitcase packed with Oreos and her favorite stuffed toys, Maggie had set out to show her parents that she didnt need them anymore. But by the time shed wandered a few blocks away from their Charleston home onto unfamiliar streets, and by the time darkness had closed in with its eerie shadows, shed begun to wonder if she hadnt made a terrible mistake.

Still, shed been far too stubborn to consider backing down. Shed climbed onto a wicker rocking chair deep in the shadows of a deserted front porch and, tightly clutching her tattered Winnie the Pooh, gone to sleep. Her frantic parents had found her there the next morning, thanks to a call from the owner of the house, whod been alerted to her presence by his son. Leave it to terrible Tommy Henderson to rat her out. No wonder no one in first grade liked the little tattletale.

It seemed more than a bit ironic that twenty-six years later, Maggie was running away from home again and that she was still trying to prove things to her parents. The only difference this time was that Tommy Henderson was nowhere around. Last shed heard, he was working somewhere overseas as a CIA operative for the United States government. At least hed put his capacity for sneakiness to good use.

Sitting in a rocker on the front porch of a tiny rented beach house on Sullivans Island, Maggie sipped her third glass of sweetened iced tea and watched the fireflies flicker in their endless game of tag in the evening sky. The air was still and thick with humidity, the night quiet and lonely. Even though she was all grown up, in many ways she was just as scared now as she had been at six, and just as stubbornly determined to stay away till she made sense of things.

She couldnt recall exactly what had sent her fleeing into the night back then, but now it was all about a man, of course. What else could possibly drive a reasonably sane and mature woman to run away from her home and business and fill her with enough self-doubt to keep her on a shrinks couch for years? She didnt miss the irony that it was, in fact, a shrink whod turned her world upside down.

Safe, solid, dependable Warren Blake, Ph.D., had been the kind of respectable, charming man her family had always wanted for her. Her father had approved of him. Predictably, her mother had adored him. Warren didnt make waves. He didnt have any pierced or tattooed body parts. He could carry on an intelligent conversation. And he was Southern. What more could they have asked, after the parade of unlikely candidates Maggie had flaunted in front of them for years?

Basking in all that parental approval for the first time in her life, Maggie had convinced herself she loved Warren and wanted to marry him. The wedding date had been set.

And then, with the invitations already in the mail, Warren had called the whole thing off, saying he had come to his senses and realized their marriage would be a mistake. Hed done it so gently, at first Maggie hadnt even understood what he was trying to say. But when the full import had finally sunk in, shed been furious, then devastated. Here shed finally done the right thing, made the right choice, and what had she gotten in return? Total humiliation.

Shed packed her bagsLouis Vuitton this timeand run away from home again. In terms of distance, it really wasnt that much farther than shed run all those years ago, but Sullivans Island was light-years away from Charleston in terms of demands on her shattered psyche. She could sit on this porch, swatting lazily at mosquitoes, and never once have to make a decision that shed come to regret the way she regretted her decision to get engaged to Warren.

She could eat tomato sandwiches on white bread slathered with Miracle Whip for breakfast and an entire pint of peach ice cream for lunch. She could play the radio at top volume and dance around the living room at any hour of the day or night, if she could summon the energy for it. She could go for a swim without waiting a whole hour after eating, and she could track sand through the house, if she felt like it.

In fact, shed been doing all that for a while now and, she was forced to admit, it was getting on her nerves. She was a social creature. She liked people. She missed her art gallery in Charleston. She was almost ready to start seeing her friends again, at least in small doses.

But shed made up her mind that she wasnt going home until shed come to grips with why the devil shed been so determined to marry Warren in the first place. There had to be a reason shed talked herself into being in love with a man who was the complete opposite of every other male shed ever dated in her life. When she was willing to give Warren credit for anything, she conceded that hed only saved them both a lot of misery. So why had the broken engagement sent her packing?