Stiltsville: A Novel (33 page)

Grady was talking about the time he and the family had run across a corpse in Biscayne Bay. It was an old story, but Stuart had never heard it, so Grady was animated and bug-eyed as he spoke. “Mercy!” he was saying. “We thought it was just a bit of detritus, something that had snagged a piece of fabric.”

“It was clearly fabric,” said Gloria. “It had that shine of fabric in water.”

“Exactly,” said Grady. “So we idled up to it and I cut the engine, and when our wake hit it, it turned a bit in the water”—he made a gesture with both hands, like rolling a log—“and there was his eye looking straight up out of the water, this blue face.”

“Blue?” said Stuart.

“Black and blue,” said Gloria. She waved her hand around her face. “Beaten. It was horrible.”

Grady said, “Gloria covered the kids’ eyes, but they saw—we all saw.”

“I lost my cool, you might say,” said Gloria. “Here you are, in your boat, with your family, on a Sunday afternoon—”

“And suddenly—” said Grady.

“And suddenly you’re faced with this gruesome thing, this
news story
.” She shook her head. “We’re used to it now, but Miami was still just a small town then. The drugs were small potatoes, and the mob was a country away, in New York.”

“Obviously not,” said Stuart.

“No, that’s right, obviously not. It was like the end of innocence, that day. That was the year that both these lots were built up.” She pointed on either side of the house. “And that was the year they built the expressway.”

“My grandparents left Florida,” said Stuart. “Then my parents left.”

“Everyone left,” said Grady.

“You didn’t,” said Stuart.

Grady shook his head. “This is my home. This is where I was raised. This is where I raised my family.”

I didn’t know I was going to speak before I spoke. “Lots of people leave their homes,” I said. “I left mine.” It felt strange to put it that way, strange to recall that there had been a time when Georgia was my home, and Miami had been just another distant city where I’d never been. Over the years, every time my mother had visited, usually in the winter months for a week at a time, she’d commented on the transition I’d made. “Miami suits you,” she would say. “Too harum-scarum for me, but it suits you.”

Grady looked at me. “Sure, but where would I go? Where could I dock my boat behind my house year-round? Where could I fit in a round of golf after getting off work?”

“True,” said Stuart.

We were quiet for a moment, and then Marse started talking about a man she’d met, a man who owned a chain of car washes, but I had trouble paying attention. Beside me, Dennis was taking long, slow bites, as carefully as a child who didn’t want to spill.

After clearing the table, we opened gifts in the living room. I sat cross-legged at Dennis’s feet. Dennis’s family were gift-givers and always had been, no matter how trivial the occasion. Gloria had once brought me a ceramic garden toad when I’d been promoted at work. They kept the gifts simple, at least, and I suspected that Gloria had a place where she kept a stockpile of possibilities to pull from when events (or semi-events, like Valentine’s Day, which Dennis and I had never celebrated) came up. This was a practical birthday, it seemed from the start. Margo and Stuart gave me a new Speedo swimsuit, a swim cap, and a pass to her health club, where I was signed up to take water aerobics once a week for two months. I wondered, meanly, if this was a hint about my weight—if I’d gained, I hadn’t noticed—and I kept myself from mentioning that there was a pool in my backyard. (I’m glad I stayed quiet, because I realized later that Margo had become fond of her water aerobics classes, and meant for us to take the classes together, even though to me they seemed like an older person’s exercise.) Gloria and Grady gave me a gardening service to come twice a week and water my roses. This was a generous and helpful gift, as watering the roses—Dennis had given them to me for our anniversary, to replace the ones we’d lost in Andrew—was a huge chore that Dennis and I had once shared. I was less and less available for chores that took me away from Dennis. I had been neglecting the roses—Gloria had noticed, surely—and so this was a small weight off my shoulders.

Marse saved her gift for last. She handed me a large pink envelope. “You can’t take it back,” she said. In the envelope was a gift card from a local catering service—I knew the name from weddings and other events, and knew that this caterer was not only good but considered the best in certain circles. Inside the card was a sheet of office paper with my gift typed in black lettering: two meals a day, six days a week (no delivery on Sundays), for six weeks. Marse patted Dennis’s knee after I finished reading. “I told them soft food,” she said. “They said that was no problem. Pumpkin ravioli, chicken casserole, things like that. It’s all set up.”

“How helpful,” I said. I tried to sound appreciative, but I was suddenly sad about something I couldn’t quite name, possibly the delegation of one of my principal wifely duties. I folded the paper and put it back in the envelope. “Does everyone want carrot cake?”

Marse followed me into the kitchen to help clean up. “You didn’t say anything about Paul,” she said.

“What?” I turned off the water and dried my hands. It was starting to rain. This was what happened in the summers in the subtropics: it was beautiful, clear, and sunny until mid-afternoon, then rained heavily for an hour, then the clouds cleared and the sun came out again. I loved this and always had.

“I thought maybe you’d have some words on the subject,” she said.

She was standing with her hand on her hip, wearing one of my aprons, a red checkered one I’d had since moving to Miami. It was too short on her. I looked at her, trying to recall the conversation from earlier. Marse didn’t often ask me to pay attention to her love life. Maybe I was out of practice. “Should I?” I said.

“He told me you might not think very highly of him,” she said, and that was when I realized that she was speaking about Paul of years past, Dennis’s old friend whom she’d briefly dated. Once again, Miami’s close boundaries, its intimate circles, flared. In twenty-five years, I’d come to understand that people bounced around their social stratum like pinballs, knocking into one another.

“I thought he owned a nursery,” I said.

“He did, but now he owns that car wash chain, with the big one on Dixie.”

“With the purple sign?”

“Yep.”

“Is there money in washing cars?”

“Apparently. He owns a condo on Fisher Island.”

I often passed the car wash on my way downtown; there were always dozens of black and Latino boys in purple shirts and black pants dashing to and fro with chamois in their hands, each attending to one part of a hulking SUV. “You like him?” I said, but I said it nicely.

“Very much.”

“Bring him over. We’ll have a meal. It will be good to catch up.” Since Dennis had started to lose his voice, we hadn’t entertained anyone but family. But once upon a time Paul and Dennis had been good friends.

“We’ll do that.” She had a look in her eye I hadn’t seen, or had seen only once: she was smitten. I’d been too wrapped up to notice.

“How long has it been?” I said.

“About two months.”

“And?”

“And it’s good.”

“This,” I said, “is wonderful news.”

That night, Dennis read and I lay in my bed, fidgeting, unable to relax. We’d put his bed next to a wall and lined it with pillows so he could hoist himself up and turn on a lamp when he wanted to read. The light barely reached me on the other side of the room. “Dennis,” I said. He put down his book. “Did you realize that the man Marse is seeing is Paul whatshisname?”

He made a sound like a snort and said, “Yep. I say good for her. Nice guy.”

Years earlier, after its edges had dulled in my memory, I’d told Dennis what had happened between me and Paul. I’d gotten the feeling he didn’t entirely believe me, or believe my interpretation—Dennis would have a hard time believing that a friend would ever make a pass at his wife—and I suppose his reaction had rubbed off on me, and I didn’t entirely believe myself anymore. “Would it be awful to have them over?” I said.

“Why awful?”

“I don’t know. Do you feel up to it?”

“Do you?”

“Good point.”

“Paul is a grown-up. We all are, especially you.”

I laughed at his joke. Dennis had teased me about my age on every birthday since we’d met. “ ‘Don’t worry,’ you say,” I said. “It’s like saying, ‘Stop breathing.’ ”

“I know,” he said softly, and the sounds slurred together. I missed his clear, strong voice. When I lay beside him that night after turning off the light, I put my ear to his chest and listened to the steady rhythm of his hard-beating heart. Then I pulled myself away from him, and went back to my own bed.

B
efore the wheelchair, there had been a walker. It was black with hand brakes and a leather shelf where Dennis could sit if he ended up stopping somewhere—in line at the grocery, or in the foyer when someone came by. Standing for long periods and sitting in a regular chair had become difficult, and so he was faster, really, with the walker than he was without it. It lasted almost six months, but then one afternoon I came into the kitchen to find him on the floor, using a kitchen cabinet to hoist himself up, his legs splayed out behind him on the tile. I helped him into a chair. When he was rested, he was able to stand with his right leg, and he used the walker to leave the room to go and lie down; but the following week at our appointment, Dr. Auerbach said it was time. “Better now than after you break a hip,” he’d said. When the wheelchair was delivered, Dennis had watched from the front porch as the driver unloaded it. “Once I go in, I don’t come out,” he’d said to me. It sat unused in the foyer for another week, but after that it became indispensable. The walker went into the guest room closet. Dennis surrendered to the wheelchair seven months after his diagnosis, and it was around the same time that he tendered his resignation from the firm where he’d practiced, happily, for a dozen years, and agreed to work on a for-hire basis. At first, he worked from home two or three full days per week, but as his voice weakened, he worked less, and then not at all, and then we were living off our savings and my meager salary from the medical practice where I worked, trying to stall retirement as long as we could. Out of kindness or loyalty, Dennis’s firm kept him on the books and continued to pay his health insurance.

Before the wheelchair, when we knew that it was coming but didn’t know when, Dennis decided I needed to learn to drive the boat. “It’s for our sanity,” he said. “I should have taught you years ago.” When he was at the helm, he had to stand for long periods at the console, braced against the waves, while Margo and I sat at the stern in cushioned captain’s chairs. I realized that he feared if I didn’t learn to captain, if he didn’t teach me immediately, he might never get out on the water again.

We went out one Sunday morning. We’d invited Marse but she had plans, so it was just me and Dennis. The lesson started as soon as we climbed into the boat. Everything he did was familiar, but I couldn’t have replicated it alone, even after watching him do it a thousand times: he taught me to lower the engines into the water, to check the fuel level of the starboard and port tanks, then check the oil level. Then he walked me through starting the engine in neutral and dropping the lines and reversing out of the slip slowly, facing behind me so I could see any boats that were headed our way down the canal. Once I’d backed up, I put the engines into neutral before putting them into forward, and headed slowly down the canal, pushing tentatively against the heavy knob of the throttle.

It was a different view from the helm. Driving the boat gave me less leisure than usual to stare into the backyards of our neighbors. The Kleins had moved away a year earlier, and a former Argentine Olympic swimmer had bought the house and added a sprawling coral rock patio and an enormous swimming pool; sometimes when he swam, I watched him from my back deck, entranced by his powerful flip turns. As I drove—considerably slower than Dennis would have done, though any wake at all was not allowed in the canal—I sneaked sideways peeks out of habit, and near the mouth of the canal, in the backyard of an imposing Grecian-style house with two stone lion statues bookending the back steps, I saw a couple entwined on a blanket. As we passed, they stopped kissing long enough to look up at us, and I waved and they waved back. I looked again before increasing speed, and they had returned to kissing. Briefly, I wondered if they were the man and woman of the house, or if someone was cheating. Surely two married people don’t make out half naked in the backyard of their own home?

Dennis stood briefly to point out the channel markers I should follow—we were headed to Key Biscayne, to stop at Sunday’s on the Bay for a sandwich so I could practice docking in a tight spot (Sunday’s was always crowded, and in my opinion a terrible place to practice, but Dennis was determined)—and then he sat down again. I stood alone at the helm, watching the span of the blue water, scanning the channel in front of me for other boats or the lighter color that indicated shallows. After ten minutes, I sped up, and Dennis yelled, “Yeehaw!” and my visor lifted off my head and flew into our wake.

When we arrived, I was able to idle while a family pulled away from the dock, and with little fuss fitted the boat into the space they left behind. Dennis affixed a line to the stern starboard cleat, but it was low tide and he couldn’t lift himself onto the dock. I cut the engine and hurried to step onto the dock and fix the bowline, but when I stepped back onto the boat, Dennis was shaking his head at me. “You never leave the boat,” he said. “You’re the captain.”