Heart of Palm (51 page)

“I don’t know,” Elizabeth admitted.

“I didn’t think you did,” Susan said, and she reached for the wine bottle, topped off their glasses. “Now listen. I got the whole afternoon, and I can’t think of a better way to spend it than bitching about the Bravos.” She smiled, and Elizabeth reached for her glass. Oh, why not? It felt good, suddenly, to have a woman to talk with, especially a woman who wasn’t related to her husband. It felt like having a friend.

“Susan, have you ever heard of a veep?” she said.

“What’s that?” Susan said. “Some kind of fish or something?” Elizabeth laughed.
Go to hell, Myra
, she thought.
And take your fake boobs with you.

“Now,
dish
,” Susan said. “The Bravo boys.”

“Lord, Susan,” she said. “Where do we start?” She hitched her stool closer to the breakfast bar and got comfortable.

Later, when both Susan and the wine were gone and Bell was back at the condo, having been dropped off by Sofia and Biaggio, Elizabeth looked again at the lease, at Arla’s signature confirming the prepaid rent. Then she called Tony’s Hair Affair, and when he picked up, she said it quickly, before she lost her nerve.

“I need a job, Tony,” she said.

“Oh, honey,” he said. “You got one. I got product out the wazoo over here, all sitting in boxes, nobody will get off their asses and get it on the shelves. I got girls calling in sick. I got nobody but me answering the phone. I mean,
seriously,
” he said.

She’d start on Monday. When it was settled, she hung up the phone and turned around to see Bell lying flat on the Berber carpet behind her.

“What are you doing, Belly?” she said.

“Pretending to be dead.”

“My Lord.” Elizabeth’s heart dropped a beat. “Get up, Bell. I don’t like that.”

“What does it feel like?”

“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “I’ve never been dead. Get up, please.”

“Do you think it hurts?”

Elizabeth thought about it, thought about Arla’s face when she’d found her in bed, the way that one eye sagged, curiously open. She remembered Arla’s hands, how they’d seemed so relaxed, so open, in prayer, it would seem, or supplication.

“No, I don’t,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t know if it hurts getting there, but I think once you get there, you’re fine.”

Bell closed her eyes for a moment, lay very still, and then she opened her eyes, sat up straight, and looked at Elizabeth.

“I want to go home,” she said. “I hate it here.”

Elizabeth opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again, looked at her daughter. Bell’s jaw was set, her small, freckled face stony. For a moment Elizabeth wanted to smile at her moxie, her seven-year-old decisiveness. Bell always knew what she wanted. Elizabeth wanted to laugh, but then she realized it wasn’t entirely funny.

“Are you hungry?” she said to Bell. “Do you want a snack?”

“I said I want to go home.”

“Maybe we could start with a snack.”

Bell frowned, furrowed her brow. But she got up from the carpet and stomped to the kitchen, pulled open the refrigerator. Her head disappeared from view. Beneath the open refrigerator door, her small toes gripped the tile.

When the phone rang Elizabeth didn’t even look at the caller ID, just picked it up, expecting Tony again. When she heard it was Carson she tightened her grip on the phone and sat down. The wine rushed quietly in her head, making her vision slightly softer. She thought of those filters the Hollywood people put on the cameras, in the old days, when it was time for the starlet’s big scene. What were those?

“Yes?” she said.

“We got Mac all patched up,” Carson said.

“Lovely. I’m sure he’s very happy.”

“And my father. He’s back.”

“Back?”

“Back with the money, back with everything.”

Elizabeth closed her eyes, tried to process the implications of this information.

“I needed that money,” he said. “There’s a lot at stake.”

“I know.”

“More than you realize.”

“I know more than you think, Carson.”

He was quiet for a moment. “So do I,” he said.

She put her head in her hand and listened to Bell puttering in the kitchen. “Well, then maybe we’re even,” she said. And maybe they were.

“Elizabeth,” he said, and his voice was soft and open, a voice she hadn’t heard in many years. “We’re scattering my mother’s ashes on Friday. Can I pick you up?”

Elizabeth looked around the condo at Willough Walk, the lanai, the carpet, the empty red wine bottle shining like blood against the stark white of the kitchen counter, the stupid, idiotic wall sconces. She could do this. She could go with Carson to his mother’s funeral. She could. After that, well, she didn’t have the slightest idea what would happen.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

T
WENTY-THREE

Frank drove up Cooksey Lane, having stopped twice on the way home from the clinic: once at Sterling’s Drugstore to fill Mac’s pain pill prescription, and once at the package store for a bottle of whiskey for Dean. “Thank you, Frank,” Dean had said quietly, and Frank had not looked over at him, or at Mac either, for that matter, who was painful to behold, his eyes now nearly swollen shut, his cheeks flushed and damp, a thick white piece of tape extended over the bridge of his nose and two fat rolls of gauze stuffed up into his nostrils to stem the bleeding. Good God, he was a sight.

“How bad is id?” Mac had said, climbing into the cab of the truck.

“Holy shit!” Dean had exclaimed, staring at him. He edged to the center of the bench seat.

“Not that bad,” Frank said quickly, and Mac had slumped forlornly against the passenger door.

“Dere goes my social life,” Mac said.

“What social life?” Dean said, but Frank elbowed him in the side, hard, and Dean gasped in pain. “My cheek,” he moaned.

Frank let them both off at his house. Sofia and Biaggio had returned to the trailer, having presumably deposited Bell back with Elizabeth, and they were now sitting on the white steps with a bag of chips. Frank let his passengers out without a word. Let them do all the explaining, he thought, watching Mac and Dean shuffle up the path toward the porch, Sofia and Biaggio gaping at the sight of them. He pulled back out onto Cooksey Lane. He had something to do.

He left Utina, headed south on US1, then pulled up at the county municipal complex and drove around the back to the jail. The swelling in his cheek had subsided a bit, but his shoulder was aching something fierce from the impact of hitting his dirt driveway after tackling Carson off the front porch. But at least the rain had stopped. The sun was blazing hot again.

He entered the building and approached a glassed-in counter. “Tip Breen,” he said to the clerk, and then he filled out a form on a plastic clipboard. The clerk showed him into a small visitation room, a bank of telephones mounted on a Plexiglas barrier down the center.

After a few minutes, Tip was ushered into the room, and his mouth fell open when he saw Frank on the other side of the glass. He sat down heavily, picked up the phone receiver, and stared at Frank.

“Bravo,” he said. “Frank.” His huge face was slack, drooping, and he looked like an old chastened bloodhound, morose, defeated, broken-hearted.

“What have you gone and done here, Tip?” Frank said into the phone. “What’s this I hear about you shooting up the Publix?”

“Aw, Frank,” Tip said. His voice was raspy through the wire. “It’s a damn racket, Frank. It’s a conspiracy against the poor folks, that’s what it is. It’s Ponte Vedra, the rich bastards, taking over the world.” Evidently Tip hadn’t lost his proclivity for editorial. “They’re killing us, Frank. They’re killing us all.”

“You don’t have the bail?” Frank said.

“I don’t have the damn bail. I don’t have any money—and it’s all about money, you know. If you got money you do anything you want. O.J. cut off Nicole’s head and they let him go. Why? Money.”

“You can’t go shooting up the Publix, Tip.”

“I know.”

“You can’t go threatening people, Tip, with a
gun
, for Christ’s sake. People don’t like that.”

“I know, Frank,” Tip said. He sighed. “I got no money, Frank.”

“You said that.”

“I lost my apartment. I been sleeping in my car. I got no friends, Frank.”

Frank looked at the floor.

“I got nothin’, Frank,” Tip said, and Frank looked up to see his rheumy eyes welling up. “My little girl won’t see me. I haven’t seen her in years. My ex-wife won’t let me. . . .” He trailed off, his chin quivering.

“People are afraid of you, Tip,” Frank said. “And maybe they should be.”

Tip wiped his face with his sleeve. “We go way back, Bravo.” He stared at Frank, waiting.

“We do, Tip.”
Way back.

“I heard about your mama.” Tip’s eyes filled again.

Frank didn’t answer, but he thought of his new money in the bank, the new debit card in his pocket. It was funny, how you could buy yourself out of guilt. Buy yourself out of remorse. Even if it was against your better judgment. He had a vision of Tip, nineteen years old, that night in the woods, when Kelly had been cut down by the car hood. Tip had put his arm around Will’s thin shoulder, tried to comfort him, quiet him. He was one of the last people to touch Will before he died. Tip didn’t deserve much. But did he deserve to sit in jail? The Bravos had sold Aberdeen. In some ways, the Bravos had sold Utina. There were a lot of things Frank could feel guilty about these days. God only knew. But maybe here was a chance to erase just one.

“Keep your nose clean, dumb-ass,” he said to Tip. “Get it together.”

He left Tip sniffling behind the Plexiglas, went back to the clerk’s area, and posted the bail. Then he walked out to the parking lot, climbed into his truck, and drove home, fighting a gnawing feeling he couldn’t put words to. It might have been fear. But most likely it was just grief, for people and for places, a sadness threading stubbornly around his heart, like the creeping jasmine of Utina.

Friday morning dawned clear, bright, and hot, and Gooch was missing. Frank stood on the porch, whistling, but the dog didn’t come. He sighed. Now this?

Not that he could entirely blame Gooch, who was probably staging a protest against the invasion that had recently taken place on his territory. Frank looked around the yard. His property was beginning to look like a bit of a circus, given Biaggio’s trailer and van, the palm ashes still blowing across the front yard, and, just to the right of the driveway, the newly deposited storage pod. The asshole banker next door must be loving it.

After their excursion to the emergency clinic on Wednesday, Mac had picked up his own car at Frank’s house and gone home. Frank had called him when he’d gotten back from bailing Tip out of jail.

“You all right, Mac?” he’d said.

“Bedder now,” Mac replied. “I dook some pain meds.” And drank a six-pack of beer, more than likely, but Frank was done with policing everyone else’s alcohol consumption, had given it up when he’d announced last call on closing night at Uncle Henry’s last week. Let them all get pickled. He couldn’t begrudge Mac, anyway, poor guy, trying to help out these idiot Bravos and getting his nose broken in the process. “Thanks, Mac,” he’d said on the phone. “Thanks for trying to help us.”

“Aw, shud up,” Mac said. “Good stuff.”

Dean had showered and borrowed some of Frank’s clothes and had spent a fitful night on the couch, in pain no doubt, and Frank had heard him up in the night on at least three occasions, stepping out to the porch to wheeze, smoke cigarettes, and, presumably, hit the bottle. Gooch had raised his head from the blanket each time, looked at Frank quizzically at the sound of the porch door opening and closing, but Frank had put his hand on the dog’s head, and Gooch rolled over and went back to sleep. Frank himself had slept little. It was strange beyond strange to have Dean sleeping in his house, for one, and the ghosts of Will and now Arla tugged at his mind and jarred him out of slumber each time he slipped into dreams. He fell asleep once for a longish stretch, dreamed of sliding on the hood of a car in the cool blue light of the moon, across wide white dunes. Firecrackers burst above.

Why did you tell me to leave him, Frank?

Why did you listen?

The screen door creaked again. Gooch sighed. The smell of cigarette smoke worked its way around Frank’s house, in through his bedroom window.

They’d spent the next day, Thursday, in a state of arrested development, not knowing what to do with themselves, what to focus on, what to say or do or even eat. Dean sat on the porch, alternately smoking and coughing, and around midafternoon Frank couldn’t take the sound of it anymore and he unhitched his kayak and took it out to the beach, where he plowed through the breakers and let the salt water dry on his skin until the sun grew fat and fuzzy and sank lower in the sky. Then he loaded the kayak back into the truck and picked up a couple of pizzas to bring back to his house.