Heart of Palm (22 page)

Bell scrunched her eyebrows and looked at Elizabeth.

“And because you can help me move the piano out,” Sofia said to Bell. She pulled her down on the sofa and tickled the little girl until she screamed.

“Oh, my Lord,” Arla said.

They piled into Elizabeth’s car and headed for Utina. When they pulled up in the driveway of Aberdeen, Biaggio was outside, hosing the sticky residue of fallen oak leaves from the front steps.

“Watch it, there, Miss Arla,” he said, holding her by the elbow as she plodded up the wet ramp to the front door.

“You too, now,” he said to Sofia, and he reached to take her hand and guide her across the planks.

“Oh, I’m fine,” Sofia said, but she took his hand. Biaggio’s face turned red.

“How was the trolley?” he said to Bell.

“Fun,” she said simply.

“Hot,” Elizabeth said.

“Hotter than hell,” Arla said.

“Belly, go take this bag and find your bathing suit,” Elizabeth said. “Let’s get you wet.”

Elizabeth pulled open the screen door.

“Mind the piano,” Biaggio called. “You gotta go over.”

Elizabeth regarded the Steinway in the hallway for a moment but decided against asking any questions. She climbed across the top of the piano and went to the kitchen to make a pitcher of iced tea from a powdered mix, and then they all sat on the porch and drank the tea out of aluminum cups that tasted like summer. The sun was so bright and high that the air looked brittle. Sofia jangled the ice cubes in her cup and hummed. Arla put her foot on a wicker stool and picked up a straw fan. Biaggio loped around the yard and turned the hose on Bell and they watched her dance, skinny and wet, through the spray. Her hair stuck to her face. Her white knees shone.

Utina, Elizabeth thought. Aberdeen. An Odditorium. Where else could we possibly all go? It was ironic, she knew, that in separating from Carson she would come here, to Aberdeen, his own mother’s house. But it just felt right. She didn’t even know for sure where her own mother was anymore. And she didn’t care. She felt like a Fiji mermaid, a firewalker, a shaman, a ghost. She felt like the world’s largest woman, with the world’s largest love, and the world’s largest pain. And for the first time in a very long time, she felt like she was home.

“More tea, Arla?” she said.

“No, love,” Arla said. “I’m fine.”

S
EVEN

She was mine first.
The thought passed through Frank’s brain for the billionth time.
Elizabeth.
He stood at his kitchen sink, rinsing sluice from the scales of a three-pound bass steak, freshly cleaned, thick and dense in his hands. He’d taken the kayak out for a quick run, had headed north along the mangrove banks of the Intracoastal, past Uncle Henry’s, until he could look back and see no sign of the restaurant or, beyond, of Aberdeen. The bass had been an easy catch, pliant and stupid, in fact, hardly worth the effort that afternoon. It was the red drum that had given him a run, a ten-pounder, no doubt, making him stand up in the kayak, nearly toppling him with its pull, its desperate battle to overpower the line. He’d planted his feet, regained his balance, toyed and teased and tugged the line for a half hour or more, sweating in the searing heat of a crooked little elbow of mangroves. But the red drum won. It snapped the line finally, disappeared in a last triumphant roil of brown water, slapping a fat tail along the surface of the water, giving Frank the kiss-off, clear as day. But he smiled in the end. “Tough little pisser,” he said to the fish, watching the last of the ripples disappear on the water. “Good for you.” He settled for the one bass, which had obediently gasped out its last breath on a bed of ice in the Coleman chest strapped to the deck.

Trout, he thought, wiping the sweat from his face. He leaned out of the kayak, dipped water into his hands, splashed it onto his neck to cool off. One day it’s going to be trout. Rainbow trout. Up in the mountains where it’s cool. Cullowhee. He pictured the colors—a blaze of pigment along the fish’s scales, the deep greens of pines along a bright mountain lake, a blue, cool sky—not this charred-out, fried-out, burnt-out Florida scrub, everything a circus of browns and grays, the sky white-hot, every bit of it looking like it was about to spontaneously combust. Jesus, sometimes he was sick of Utina. He was forty years old, and he’d never seen snow. He watched the surface of the water, imagining the red drum beneath, swimming slick and powerful. Swimming away.

Now, in his kitchen, the kayak returned to its hanging spot on the porch, Gooch still pouting in the bedroom over not having been invited fishing, Frank finished rinsing the bass steak, his consolation prize. It wasn’t very big. He thought of a story Biaggio had told him years ago, about a man who’d caught an undersize bass and had taken it home alive. The man had put it in a fish tank in his living room along with a bucketful of smaller fish. When the bass had eaten the smaller fish, the man dumped in another bucketful, and on and on, until the bass grew to ten times its original size and could scarcely turn around in the tank. “And then what?” Frank asked. “Well, then he ate it,” Biaggio said simply, and Frank had been surprised, taken aback, for some reason. It hadn’t seemed right. He’d hoped for more, for the bass. He didn’t know why.

He put his own bass steak in a plastic Baggie and sealed it. He turned off the water but stood for a moment at the kitchen window, watching across the yard as the banker next door raked at a saw palmetto at the front edge of his driveway, and then the familiar longing, the long-accustomed loneliness, came back to him.

Elizabeth.
She was his, first. Before Carson. They dated when they were in high school, and he told her he loved her then, but she looked at him skeptically, quizzically, that open stare, unbelieving. He kissed her passionately, but she never let him go further. She left him for Carson when they were sixteen, broke his heart, but they chalked it up, all of them, to puppy love and young crushes and that complicated, tumultuous time of hookups and breakups and tenuous betrothals that lasted until the next big game. It was the kind of thing you laughed about later, with the maturity and the distance of years. But he never laughed. Never.

When they were teenagers, she’d spend nights in Sofia’s room, stretched on a long piece of foam on the floor. From his bed, Frank could hear them talking, laughing. She’d come for dinners and birthdays and Christmases, would sometimes stay for days, weeks, before going home again to the darkness of her mother’s trailer in South Utina. She stood with the family at the water’s edge when they scattered Will’s ashes. And she made tea for Arla the morning after Dean left, had sat at the table with the rest of them, staring blankly around the kitchen.

When she married Carson she was young and pregnant. Carson got drunk the night before the wedding and spilled it to Frank in the parking lot at Uncle Henry’s, following a marathon, ugly alcoholic binge that Carson tried to spin as noble and traditional, the quaint, madcap bachelor’s party overindulgence, until he grew weepy and morose as the night wore on.

“My life is over,” he said to Frank. “Trapped. Caught. Game over.”

“You’re an asshole,” Frank said.

“You’re a free man,” Carson said, slurring. “I’m about to serve a life sentence.”

“Get away from me,” Frank said, and Carson turned away and vomited into the bushes.

But the baby died—she miscarried in her fifth month, two months into the marriage. Frank remembered her face, pale and empty, when she told him.

“So what does this mean? You’re staying with him?” he said, stupidly, and he hated himself for having said it.

She stared at him, and he could see anger in her eyes, and it broke his heart.

“He’s my husband,” she said, and she walked away.

And then Carson went away to college, and she went with him, and they’d come back with a focus, a mission—he was going to build an investment practice, not here, not in Utina but in St. Augustine, out of this place, away from all of it, Carson said, though Frank knew he really meant away from all of
them
.

Next door, the banker zeroed in on the stubborn palmetto, jabbing it with a metal rake, combing through the long fronds. He stopped, stared at it for a moment, then dropped the rake and grabbed the palmetto with his gloved hands. Frank smiled. This would be good. Just try it, he thought, watching the banker. There’s a reason those things are all over Utina.

The banker pulled at the plant, stopped, straightened up, then bent over and pulled again. His forearms and shoulders strained. The palmetto did not budge. He took a shovel and hacked a bit at the base of the plant, then resumed his pulling. Nothing. He pulled off his gloves, threw them to the ground, walked toward the garage.

Maybe it was the money she liked. Carson made money, no doubt, not huge money, but enough for a nice little house with a yard, matching furniture, and a savings account for Bell. Nine-to-five. An insurance plan. Not some hardscrabble restaurant work, peeling shrimp and wiping stale beer off the bar for hours on end, hauling Mac Weeden off the barstool at closing time, smelling like grease and fish every night. With his mutual funds and money markets and whatever they all were, Carson gave her a steady life, a real life, like she’d never had before. And then Bell—baby Bell, seven years old now and the glue—the
only
glue, as far as Frank could see—that was holding it all together.

When Elizabeth had told him she was pregnant again, with the baby who would become Bell, Frank had hugged her, told her he was happy for her, for them, but inside he felt the weight of a door closing, the end of the line. She’d never leave Carson now, he thought then. And he still thought so now.

It would take a miracle.

The banker returned with a saw. He pulled his gloves back on and hacked awkwardly at the base of the palmetto until he’d reduced it to a ragged, sprouting tuft of weedy green. Then he resumed his work with the shovel, digging deep around the edges of the root, looking for a purchase for the tip of the shovel’s blade. His shirt was drenched with sweat.

Good going
, Frank thought.
You dug a foot—only four more to go to get to the bottom of that root
.

The banker threw his shovel down again, stood back, wiped his brow, and regarded the palmetto, one of about ten thousand identical plants that rimmed the edge of his property and grew wild and thick all over Frank’s yard. The banker walked to the garage again, returned with a plastic jug of Roundup. He dumped the contents onto the palmetto root and stood back, gloating, victorious.

“That’s what you think,” Frank said aloud, though he was alone in his house and he knew the banker could not hear him. “Take more than that to kill that thing.” And it was true, he knew—the palmetto’s tips would turn brown and dry, the top of the root would become spongy and fibrous, and the banker would think he’d won the battle. But in a few weeks, the root would reawaken, pissed off righteously, in fact, and would thrust itself upward toward the light again, emerging from the poisoned soil stronger, thicker, and more tenacious than before. “Take a backhoe to be done with that sucker,” Frank said, and he smiled at this small, secret victory, this dormant, stubborn miracle.

“Asshole,” he added, watching the banker head back toward his house. Frank tossed the bass steak into the freezer, next to a dozen others, already frozen and gray.

That night at Uncle Henry’s, after the early birds and the dinner rush and the late-night gadabouts clinging to their barstools like life preservers, he closed the restaurant and fell asleep for a little while on the couch in his office, the day’s receipts slipping out of a worn file folder on his chest. He awoke in the dim light of his desk lamp, and he waited for his eyes to adjust, staring for a time at the Florida Gator pennant stapled to the wall above the couch. Preseason starting soon, Mac had said, and Frank was glad. He was always happy for the distraction of football. It gave a shape to the year, anchored it, somehow. And the Gator games were always good for business. In fact, he’d been considering adding another big-screen TV over the far end of the bar, and this might be the year he made the investment. Last year there’d been so much jostling and arguing around the bar among half-bagged Utinians trying to get a glimpse of the action at the Swamp without giving up their seats at the bar that he’d thought he’d end up with a brawl on his hands. A second TV would cost less than a lawsuit over a bashed-in head, he was pretty sure. The Florida football team. Jesus, it was like a religion for Utina.

When the boys were kids—what were they? Frank was eight, maybe, Carson ten? And Will six?— Dean had taken them to see the Gators play Ole Miss at Florida Field. He’d scored the four tickets from his buddy Paulie at Rayonier, who said he’d gotten them from his cousin (or was it his uncle?), and Paulie offered them to Dean at a quarter of their face value.

“For real?” Carson had said, when Dean presented them with the tickets. “We’re really going?”

“Go Gators!” Dean shouted, and he threw back his head and laughed, then went to the refrigerator and popped a cold can of Bud. “We’re goin’ to the game, boys!” Arla had rolled her eyes at the outburst, but then she smiled.

They loaded up in the old Chevy Impala, Dean and the three boys, and they drove down to Gainesville on a scorching hot September Saturday. They parked almost a mile away from the stadium, had to walk clear across town, through the seas of jubilant fans headed toward the game. Dean was giddy, buoyant. He carried Will on his shoulders for almost two blocks, then set him down and told him to walk his sorry ass, but he held Will’s hand and laughed when he said it. Frank and Carson wore matching Florida shirts. Arla had found them at the Dollar General the week before. When they arrived at Florida Field and stood at the gate turnstile, the roar of sixty thousand football fans ringing in their ears, they learned the tickets were phony. Counterfeit.