and my brothers sitting at the bar we owned, Southern Comfort. It was a still shot from an interview we’d done for a documentary called What is Love?
The headline read: A New Generation Challenging “The Comfort Curse.”
No wonder newspapers are going out of business if this is the crap that they are writing about.
“How in the hell is this front-page news?” I questioned.
“Not just front page,” Billy explained. “It continues on page five.”
I began to read, hoping that this was some elaborate prank my brother was pulling on me. With each paragraph, it became clear it wasn’t.
Firefly Island is making international headlines thanks to a new Netflix documentary What is Love? featuring the native-born Comfort brothers.
Named for its beaches that come to life with lightning bugs each night, Firefly is a small town with a big heart. Its population may be modest at a little over five thousand residents but it attracts over half a million tourists each year.
Nicknamed The Jewel of Georgia our cozy, coastal community is known for many things including thriving historic and arts districts nestled in the heart of the city, world-renown deep sea fishing, the tallest Ferris wheel on the East Coast on Firefly Pier, and Abernathy Manor which regularly makes “The Top Ten Most Haunted Places in The U.S.” list and has been featured on several paranormal investigation and reality shows.
For locals, our idyllic island is well-known for a more personal reason. The Comfort Curse. Legend has it that Lucille Abernathy had a torrid affair that ended in a secret engagement to Phillip Bruce Comfort, a longshoreman who was beneath her station. When her affluent family learned of her betrothal they forbid it.
Lucille chose love over family, giving up her wealth and inheritance and was disowned. In a cruel twist, after being shunned, Lucille’s beloved left her at the altar and ran off with a chambermaid who worked for the Abernathys. Brokenhearted and abandoned, Lucille tried to return to her family home but was turned away.
The next day, the family woke to discover a window broken in the parlor. Later they found her lifeless body in her childhood bed. She left a note explaining that she’d poisoned herself, but not before putting a curse on Comfort and all of his male heirs, dooming them to a lifetime of the same heartache that she had endured. Each of them would fall madly in love, only to have it end in tragedy.
For three generations the Comfort men have been cursed, whether from Lucille or just fate. Each man has either died prematurely or lost the love of their lives in tragic deaths.
(Cont. on pg. 5)
I sighed as I flipped to the next section.
Billy must’ve heard me turning the pages, he said, “This is where it really gets good.”
I doubted that. Against my better judgment, I kept reading.
Today there is a new generation of Comfort men who are known for more than just the curse of their bloodline. The three Fs. The current crop of Comforts each has an adjective beginning with F associated with their names. One for fighting. One for flirting. And one for another F-word that a gentleman wouldn’t say in mixed company much less put down in print.
Billy Comfort, known for the more shocking F earned the nickname Panty Dropper by his late teens. It looks as though leopards can change their spots because he has recently changed his womanizing ways. Billy is set to walk down the aisle in a month’s time with family law attorney Reagan York. After meeting at a will reading for his father, the late James Comfort, Billy wasted no time putting a ring on it.
But he’s not the only Comfort man to throw caution to the wind when it comes to love. The youngest Comfort brother was recently engaged to Isabella Santini, daughter of industry titan Miles Santini. As of yet, there is no date set for Jimmy and Isabella to say their I dos, but sources say that if it were up to Jimmy he’d have already made it legal.
It seems the only Comfort brother left standing in the shadow of the curse is the eldest Comfort. Hank, the fighter. Sources say that Hank has no plans to settle down and is happily, or if his brooding nature is any indication unhappily, living the bachelor life. Will he step in the ring and go twelve rounds with love? Or is that a fight that even Hank “The Fighter” Comfort isn’t ready to take on?