Heart of Palm (37 page)

“Fine,” Arla said. “We’re all fine.”

“What’ve you been up to, Doreen?” Frank said. Throw her a bone, he thought. She’s a sad lady.

“Oh, you know,” Doreen said. “Working, stuff.”

“Lots of real estate sales going on these days,” Frank said. “You all busy with loans?”

“Huh,” Doreen said. “
We’re
not getting the loans. Talk to Bank of America. These new buyers, they’re all from out of town. They don’t want to do business with a local bank. They want the big glitzie-bitzies.” She leaned forward, peered into the kitchen.

“I just came to pick up my lunch,” she said. “I get takeout. I don’t like to eat in here.” She lowered her voice, turned to Arla. “They’re lezzies, you know.”

“What do I care?” Arla said. “They make a good tuna melt.”

Doreen sighed again. “Oh, well,” she said. “Anyway. These yuppies, buying up the neighborhoods, I can’t say it’s a bad thing, I guess.”

“I can,” Frank said. “I’m pretty sick of the fool who built next door to me.”

“Yes, but Frank,” Doreen said. “Think of it. They’re cleaning up the streets, at least. We got some real trash around here, you know? Some real trash. You know somebody’s been shooting out the parking lot lights over where they’re building the new Publix?
Shooting
. My God, what is that? That’s gangs, is what it is. Gangs.”

Oh, for Christ’s sake
. “No gang is going to waste its time in Utina, Doreen,” Frank said.

“Oh, I don’t know Frank. We got some real trash here.
T-R-A-S-H
. You know what I mean,” she said to Arla. “So if these yuppies want to come in and rehab some of these old places in South Utina, for example, they’re doing us all a favor, if you ask me. Brightening it up a notch.” She winked, nodded at Arla.

“You mean whitening it up a notch?” Arla said.

“Well,
yes
,” Doreen said. “I do. And it’s about damn time.”

“Oh, Doreen,” Arla said.

“What? What, Arla? I’m just saying what we all know is true. I’m just saying some of these blacks—you know,
some
of them—well, they’re not doing much for the property values, now are they? I mean—”

Morgan returned from the men’s room, and Doreen clamped her jaw shut.

“Mrs. Bailey,” he said. He nodded.

“I need to pick up my order,” Doreen said. She moved to the middle of the lunch counter and sat down on a stool that had just been vacated. Morgan watched her, bemused, it seemed to Frank.

“You know why I got disowned by my mama?” Morgan said to Frank and Arla. “I was twenty-two, and I got disowned. You know why?”

“No,” Arla said. “Why, Morgan?”

“For marryin’ a white woman,” he said. “It works both ways.”

“I never knew that, Morgan. All these years,” Arla said. “Well, where on Earth is she now?”

“Mama died years ago.”

“No, your
wife
.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” He chuckled. “It didn’t end well.”

Arla sighed. “It never does,” she said.

Cathy brought the food, and for a few moments they were quiet. Then Frank put his burger down, took a long swallow of Coke, and turned to his mother.

“Mom,” he said. “What are we going to do?”

“The sale?” she said.

“The sale.”

She put her fork down. She stared straight ahead, over the lunch counter, watching Cathy and Magda hustle through the lunch orders.

“Sofia does not like change,” she said. “She can’t cope, you know.”

“We can take care of Sofia,” Frank said quietly. “We can get her some help.”

“She doesn’t need help,” Arla said sharply. “She needs
me
.”

Frank looked away.

“Morgan,” Arla said. “You want to sell?”

“I do,” he said, after a moment.

Frank looked back at his mother and waited, but Arla said nothing.

“Arla,” Morgan said. “You want to sell?”

“I don’t, Morgan,” she said. And then she started to cry.

Frank froze. He’d never, ever seen Arla cry. Not when Will died. Not when Dean left. Never. He knew she wept alone, in her room, in the bathroom, sitting down at the concrete table at the edge of the Intracoastal. But never like this. Never openly, unabashedly, unapologetically. His throat constricted. Oh, Jesus in heaven, this was killing her. We are going to kill her.

And then Morgan was at her side, his arm around her shoulder offering a comfort and a salve that wasn’t Frank’s to give, so Frank simply sat on his stool stupidly, impotently. He didn’t know how to touch his mother, didn’t know how to speak to her,
really
speak to her, speak
with
her. He didn’t know.

Morgan stood next to Arla’s stool and hugged her to his shoulder, patted her wiry red hair with his scarred brown hand. “All right, now, Arla,” he said. “All right. We gonna work this out, Arla. We gonna.”

Near the register, Doreen stared at them, her eyes wide, her mouth open.

Arla sniffled, wiped her eyes with a paper napkin, and cleared her throat. She looked up from Morgan’s shoulder.

“Take a picture, why don’t you, Doreen,” Arla called over. “It’ll last longer.”

The ride back to Aberdeen was quiet. Morgan stared out the window, and when they pulled up to the house, he slipped out of the truck and turned to offer Arla his arm while she climbed down. Carson’s car was in the driveway. Brilliant, Frank thought. Fantastic. Just what we need.

“Thank you, Morgan,” Arla said quietly.

“Of course, Arla,” Morgan said. He stood awkwardly, holding Arla’s purse until she straightened her clothes and stood up straight with her cane. He handed her the purse and helped her position the strap over her shoulder, and Frank loved him then, for that small kindness. Nearly three million dollars. For a man who had shelled three million shrimp. It seemed like a pretty good deal to Frank. But then, what kind of judge was he?

Elizabeth appeared at the screen door, pushed it open and walked down the porch steps. There was something different in her gait today, something urgent.

“Frank?” she said. “I think you need to come in with your mother. Before you go to the restaurant. I think you better come in.”

Frank put the truck in park.

“What’s wrong?” he said, but she’d turned to go back into the house, holding Arla by the hand.

“Morgan, you can wait a minute?” he said. Morgan nodded, and the two men followed Arla and Elizabeth up the rough gray steps of Aberdeen.
Carson.
No doubt Carson was in the house, getting on Elizabeth’s last nerve, waiting to find out about the offer from Vista, his salivary glands probably kicked into overdrive at the thought of hearing exactly how much money was on the line. Frank set his jaw and walked down the dim hallway into the kitchen, ready to start it up with his brother.
Give her time
, he was ready to say.
Give her some God-damned time.

An old man Frank did not recognize sat at the kitchen table. He was gaunt and sinewy, wearing a black T-shirt and a loose pair of jeans belted tight around the waist. Sofia and Biaggio were leaning against the kitchen counter. Carson sat at the table across from the old man, a nervous grin creeping across his face as he watched first Elizabeth and Arla, then Frank and Morgan, enter the kitchen.

Arla made it all the way into the room before she stopped short and put an arm out in front of Elizabeth.

“Oh,” she said, and that was all, and then Elizabeth, God love that woman, was there with one of the unclaimed chairs from the kitchen table. She dragged it quickly across the kitchen and parked it in front of the refrigerator, where Arla promptly sat, staring at the man at the table.

Frank looked at him, too, feeling the faint gnaw of familiarity for a long moment before the full force of understanding hit him, and then the man spoke.

“Well, here we are,” Dean said. He was looking hard at Arla. “The whole fam-damily, what’s left of us. Can you beat this shit?”

“Are you insane?” Frank said. “Are you completely insane?”

He and Carson stood at the edge of the waterway. Inside the house, Sofia, Elizabeth, and Bell were making hot dogs—what else could they do?—while Biaggio sat at the kitchen table, making small talk with Dean. Morgan had left on foot for Uncle Henry’s, headed through the old footpath. “Ain’t no place for me in this scene,” he’d said to Frank, patting him sympathetically on the shoulder. Arla had retreated upstairs to her bedroom, the sight of the husband who had unceremoniously walked out of her life twenty years ago now sitting at her kitchen table proving simply too much to bear.

And there they all were. The Bravos. All right here at Aberdeen as though Dean had just walked in from a shift at Rayonier instead of having been dragged back here by Carson after a twenty-year foray into boozing, brawling, and God-knows-what-else. They should have thrown Dean out on his ear, told him to take a long walk off a short pier. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out, they should have said. Instead they were browning hot dogs, asking him if the blue guest room would be all right, or did he prefer the couch? Frank couldn’t believe it—but wait, no, actually he could. If anybody could ignore an elephant in the living room and march on doggedly, asking each other to
please pass the mustard
and
where are we keeping the extra towels these days
it would have to be this family. Jesus. Out of control. Once he’d recovered from his shock at seeing Dean at the table, he’d grabbed Carson by the arm, told him to meet him outside.

“Are you trying to kill her?” Frank said, once they were beyond earshot of the house.

“Of course not,” Carson said. “I’m trying to help her.”

“By bringing him here? How is that going to help her?”

“Frank,” Carson said. He held his hands up in an obnoxious way, and Frank wanted to hit him. “We’ve got to get her to deal on this real estate thing. We can’t let her miss this opportunity. They’re still married, which means he’s still invested. This isn’t something I made up. This was inevitable. He has to be involved.”

“Like hell he does,” Frank said. “He hasn’t been involved in anything for twenty years, and now the only reason he’s back is because he smells money. And you did this—you spilled the beans to him and brought him back here and now you’ve got him sitting in her house like he owns the God-damn place.”

“He does. He’s her husband. He owns half of everything.”

“Bullshit,” Frank said. “There’s got to be some statute of limitations or something—some abandonment clause or whatever. No way he can still lay claim to anything.”

“It’s Florida law. He owns half. Cryder checked it all out, Frank. He’s the one who
found
him, for Christ’s sake. I just went and got him. It was Cryder tracked him down.”

“And where was he?”

Carson snorted, an ugly sound. “Hospital. Jacksonville. Fight.”

“Jesus Christ,” Frank said. His father, fresh from a hospital, probably detoxing at this very moment, now sitting in the kitchen and ready to insert himself back into this tenuous family for the sake of his own financial gain. It infuriated him. He’d spent the last two decades trying to protect Arla, trying to make things easier for her, trying to atone for what he’d done. For what they’d all done. He was pissed at himself for not realizing Dean could still be a factor. And he was pissed at Dean for coming back here. But he was even more angry at Carson, for bringing him. Carson should have known better.

“You are such an asshole,” he said quietly.

Carson’s eyes flashed, and he was there in an instant, ready to pick up the challenge.

“Fuck you, Frank. Just—just
fuck
you.” He took a step closer to Frank, leaned his face in. “Saint Frank. What are you gonna do, just sit back and let this whole thing walk away, the chance for her to have some money for the first time? Right now she won’t budge, but he can convince her. Even if he gets half, she still stands to gain a shitload of money. And that gives her a chance, Frank. A chance to get the hell out of this dump, live somewhere nice for a change.”

“She likes it here.”

“She’s dying here, Frank. This place is too hard. And you know what else? I think you want her to sell as much as I do. You’re just letting me be the heavy so you can go on being Saint Frank. As always.”

Frank let that one pass. “And what about Sofia?” he said.

“Yeah, what
about
Sofia? She needs help, Frank. She’s fucking
bent
. And sitting out here rotting away with her mother isn’t what she needs.”

“Since when do you care what anyone needs?”

“Since always.”

“Carson, admit it,” Frank said. “Just have the decency to admit it. The only reason you’re doing this is because
you
smell the money. You see a straight line from her to you, and you don’t want to miss out on this because it will benefit
you
.” There, it was out. He’d said it. “And that’s why you brought him back here. So he’ll convince her to sell.” It was crystal clear. Frank would have bet his life on it.