Heart of Palm (46 page)

“I met Arla,” he said. “That day.”

They sat together for a long time after that, Elizabeth and Dean, until the sun began to bring the trees outside the kitchen window into focus and the morning’s first birds began to call.

“I can’t stay,” he said finally. “I can’t.”

“Okay.”

“I ain’t saying it’s right. It’s just the way it is.”

“Okay.”

“They’re better off.”

She didn’t answer.

“Too many ghosts,” he said. “I’ll stay till Wednesday, but then I gotta go.” He stood up, walked out the back door.

“Dean, wait,” she said, and he turned back. “Why did you tell me this today? About your parents?”

He nodded, pursed his lips. “Because I thought you should know that we’re all a little messed up,” he said.

“Oh, I knew that already,” she said, smiling.

“We’re messed up, but we’re still family,” he said. “And maybe we’re still family
because
we’re so messed up. And that includes you, missy.” He raised a shaking hand and pointed at her. Then he turned and walked out the back door.

Elizabeth got up and collected the cups from the table, brought them over to the sink. Her hands were shaking, and a vision of Dean, a young Dean, came to her. She imagined him looking like Carson, so bold, that thick black hair, those broad shoulders. Why had nobody ever told her about Dean’s parents? Surely Frank and Carson and Arla knew about this. She thought she knew everything about the Bravos.

She closed her eyes. When she opened them and looked out the kitchen window, Dean was standing at the water’s edge, arms crossed, just standing and looking.

And then Bell was there at her elbow, pulling at Elizabeth’s sleeve.

“There’s something wrong with Granny,” Bell said.

Elizabeth turned and looked at her, saw the child’s big eyes and quivering chin.

“Sit down here, Bell,” she said, pulling out a kitchen chair.

She took the steps two at a time, running to Arla’s bedroom, though she knew, somehow, that she needn’t rush, that the thing that had happened was done, it was over, it was final.

“Oh, Arla,” she said, when she reached the open bedroom door and looked inside to see the body on the bed, still and cool, her face at peace but one eye lagging, strangely open as if in some sort of wink, the fat bandage from last night’s fall still taped to her forehead. Elizabeth looked around the room, searching for she didn’t know what, and then she touched Arla’s neck, picked up her wrist—she had to do this part, she had to be sure.

“Oh, Arla,” she said again. She went back down to the kitchen. Her breath felt shallow and ragged, and the stairs, the kitchen, the house, the world felt off center, suddenly, weighted incorrectly.

“What’s wrong with Granny?” Bell said immediately. She sat where Elizabeth had left her, one foot up on the chair rung, a tattered stuffed bear clutched on her lap.

“Granny passed away, Bell,” Elizabeth said.

“You mean she died?”

“She died.”

Bell was quiet, regarding her. She didn’t cry, but her eyes exhibited an odd darkening, and Elizabeth thought she saw the first of a long series of difficult understandings pass through her daughter’s body, and the vision made her angry. Because this was always the way, things happening before you were ready. Pain showing up when you least expected it, so brazen, barging right in and making itself at home.
Shit.
She’d wanted to plan for this. She’d wanted to help Bell prepare.

“Well, what are we going to do with her?” Bell said.

“We’ll have to take her to the hospital.”

“You and me?”

“No, baby—we’ll tell Grandpa Dean, and Daddy, and Uncle Frank. We’ll call an ambulance.”

“What do we need an ambulance for?” Bell said, “If she’s already dead?”

“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said honestly. “It’s just what people do.”

“Oh,” Bell said.

“You want to come with me, to get Grandpa Dean? Or you want to stay here?”

“With you.”

They walked out the back door, down the sloping lawn to the edge of the water to Dean. “Good morning, lovely,” he said to Bell, and he smiled. He was once a handsome man. Elizabeth could see that.

“Granny is passed away,” Bell said.

Dean froze, looked at Elizabeth.

“You need to come in,” she said.

They walked back to the house, and Dean went for the stairs. Elizabeth did not follow; she returned to the kitchen and picked up the phone. The fact that it was Frank she dialed first, not Carson, came to her later.

“Your mother, Frank,” she said. She could tell the phone had woken him up. “You better come.”

N
INETEEN

The tether snapped the minute Dean saw her there, prone on that littered bed where he’d left her the night before, that one eye lagging open, and he was ashamed of himself for the power of the longing, for the mad rushing of the intent, but the tether that had so tenuously secured his sobriety these last few weeks snapped irreparably at that moment, and every step he took from the first one out of her bedroom was a step toward a drink. Because he couldn’t stand up to this, Arla dying, could not, would not, should not have to. Not without a drink.

There were five people in this world that he should never have had to say good-bye to, and now he was down by two, and this was God-damned not fair and he wasn’t going to stand for it. All bets were off, including—
especially
—the one he’d placed on himself. The one Arla had placed on him all those years ago. What a stupid fucking gamble. What a pair of fools. He went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face and sat on the edge of the tub, shaking, until Frank arrived and called the paramedics and until Carson and Sofia and Biaggio came and they all sat stupidly in the kitchen, trying to decide what to do. He willed himself to stay in the chair, stay in the kitchen until he knew the Publix would be open, because it was Sunday after all and there wasn’t any other place to get beer in Utina at this hour, now that Tip Breen was in jail and the Lil’ Champ was closed up. He stared at the clock and didn’t listen to what anyone around the table was saying, and when it was seven-forty-five he got up and walked out of the kitchen without a word and started toward the Publix. His head ached and his hands shook and his stomach was filled with bile. The air was still, stagnant. He spit into the scrub on the side of the road and kept walking.

Arla. How many ways had he failed her? He’d lost count. The boat. The propeller. The shitty house. The bills. The drinking.
Will.

Oh, Will. The sight of Arla there on the bed this morning had had a peculiar effect, her dead body morphing like a dream into the lifeless body of Will, so cold and alone that night, so motionless, so still.
Drink up
, he’d said.
Another beer for my boys
, he’d said. He remembered Tommy Bolla, drunk on the stool next to him, Frank’s disapproving stare, Carson and Will taking the drinks gratefully, greedily. The sirens on Monroe Road. Will’s body, broken and bloody. And drunk. No doubt about it. Will had been drunk. Will had the wily reflexes of a fox, the sixth sense and survival instinct of a wild cat, and there was no way he’d have been hit by a car in the dead of night on a quiet county road, a car he would have heard coming from a mile off, if he’d been sober. Fifteen years old and stinking drunk. And whose fault was that?

But that was an old grief, and this was a new one, and the two together were threatening to blow his head apart and shut down what little respiration he had left in his diseased lungs if he didn’t get a God-damned drink, and get it fast. Another mile to the Publix. He picked up the pace.

He hadn’t felt this sick in years, not since the old days at the Rayonier paper plant, down in the hole, in the belly of a thirty-foot boiler, spraying coatings made of God knows what on the interior of the tank to prevent corrosion. He’d been good at his job; he’d had the benefit of a ballsy courage that enabled him to spend hours in the hole, in the dark, scrambling along on the spindliest scaffolding, tethered to the light above with thick safety straps grown slick with sweat and oil, with a heavy tank of chemicals on his back that, he knew now, were so carcinogenic it was a wonder they hadn’t raised a corpse back out of the tank every time a job was completed.

He remembered the darkness of the boiler, the rough metal under his fingers as he felt his way along the dark, searching for the worst areas of corrosion. When he found the pitted patches of metal he’d blast them smooth, beating out the pits and cracks and sanding away the irregularities borne from years of abrasion with the tiny waste particles that found their way into the boilers. And then, the metal made smooth, he’d apply the coatings—sprayed-on layers of metallurgic concoctions that would seal the cracks, erase the fissures, right the wrongs of time and friction and that interminable, beating abrasion. What he couldn’t do in life he did in the boiler. And he’d been good at it. He’d been good at something. It might have been the only time, the only thing. He’d made money then, too. Rayonier had paid well, and until the allure of a steady paycheck had begun to lose its long-standing battle with the allure of a sweet, warm bottle of Jack, things had gone well—well enough, anyway, never perfect, God knew, but all right. It was Will, Will’s death, that had tipped the scales. That had blown out the boiler forever, knifed in the fissures that could never be sealed, never be filled, never be coated. It was Will’s death that had pulled the scaffolding out from under him, broken the safety straps, blew out the vessel forever and always. That had made it all go dark. That had opened the bottle of Jack forever and had kept it open until very recently, until Dean had come back and sat down in the kitchen at Aberdeen and had watched Arla walk in the door and meet his eyes. “Oh,” she’d said, and that was all.

Arla.

A pale blue bikini, white shoulders tinted pink on a deserted stretch of A1A. “You’re Dean Bravo,” she’d said, and he wished now that he’d denied it, had left her there alone, beautiful and rich and whole, instead of taking her and cutting her, slicing her up into pieces, chipping away at her soul the way he had through the years.

Arla.

Jesus, the Publix. Where was the Publix?

They’d scattered Will’s ashes in the Intracoastal, behind the house, had watched them hit the water like petals and drift quietly away on the tide. Some of them sank. Arla had held Dean’s arm as if he was the rock, the
hero,
for Christ’s sake, that was gonna make the whole thing okay instead of the son of a bitch who made it happen in the first place. The one who gave Will the drinks. The one who loaded the gun, knotted the noose, sharpened the knife, and then came home after the fact, stupid, stupefied, staggering, to find Arla ashen in the kitchen, Frank and Carson sitting like stones beside her.

They’d looked at Will in the morgue. His skin was pale and the freckles stood out on his cheeks like they did when he stayed too long in the sun, but the worst part was his blue eyes, wide open and scared but still as marbles in the bottom of a fish tank. And that was Dean—that was all Dean, he did that to Will. He knew it then, and he knew it still today. It was his. He owned it.

You can give a gift to someone, and make a person happy. But then you can take the gift away, and leave her hollow and cold inside. And what was worse, Dean wondered, the giving or the taking away? He’d never been able to get a handle on that one. Oh, Jesus, he thought, for the millionth time,
I fucked up.
More than once, that’s for sure, but once so big that the world split open and the stars went out and all the color drained out of the sky. Not just his own sky. Arla’s too. And how do you pay off a debt like that? That’s what he’d been trying to figure out. But now it was too late. The creditor had died, and the world was a horrid, black place, with only the green of the Publix sign standing out in bold relief, only the promise of a drink, one drink, and nothing more.

T
WENTY

On Wednesday morning, Utina smelled like a storm. The air pressure had dipped, and up and down Seminary Street the trees moved fretfully in a growing wind. The road was oddly quiet, everyday noises muffled and faint. Frank and Gooch sat in the truck outside the People’s Guarantee, waiting for Carson and Mac. The closing was scheduled for ten, and it had been Carson’s idea to try to stop it, to get Mac to bring in some statutes, demonstrate the need for probate intervention, prevent Dean from making off with all the proceeds from the sale now that Arla had died with no will, now that Dean, her husband, was sole beneficiary. Mac was reluctant. “I don’t know there’s much we can do, Carson,” he’d said when Frank and Carson had come to his office the day before. “He’s her husband. He’s entitled. It’s just the law.”

“Find some way to stall it,” Carson had barked. “Throw some language at them, I don’t care what. Stall this shit until I can get a real lawyer in here.” Mac was stung, Frank could tell, but he nodded and reached for a book of statutes. “Good stuff,” he muttered.

Now, waiting in front of the bank to try and stop a closing they had no right to stop, Frank was surprised that Alonzo Cryder’s black Mercedes was not yet present. He’d expected to see him here for the closing. He wondered how Cryder would respond to their attempt to stall, but given the events of the past four days—Sofia and Biaggio now living in Biaggio’s trailer in Frank’s front yard, Arla at the funeral home awaiting cremation, Dean AWOL since he’d left the kitchen table on Sunday morning—Frank was not inclined to care much about Alonzo Cryder’s emotional state.