Heart of Palm (27 page)

“That’s messed up,” Seth said, gazing at Susan in the Mazda. “That’s fricking hilarious.” They stared at the car for a minute more.

“Frank, you think you might be hiring at the restaurant?” Tip said suddenly.

“Hiring what?” Frank said. “Hiring
you
?”

“I gotta do something,” Tip said. “I’m dying over there.” He gestured back at the Lil’ Champ. “No business. I can’t afford to pay my taxes.”

“Maybe you need to clean up your act,” Mac said, looking him over with disdain.

“Nah, that ain’t it,” Tip said, despondent. “It’s the fucking Publix. Walgreens. The fucking builders, these new buyers. Fucking developers, what have you.”

“I’m not hiring,” Frank said. He gave Mac a look designed to warn him against spilling the beans about the offer on the table for the Bravo properties. “Sorry, Tip,” Frank said. He pulled his cell phone back out of his pocket and tried Aberdeen again—nothing. Then, feeling guilty and obliged, he left Mac and Tip in the shade and leaned against Susan’s car in the blazing sun, and though he tried repeatedly to talk to her through the crack in the window, she stared straight ahead and said nothing.

After twenty minutes, his phone vibrated, and he looked at it, expecting it to be Aberdeen, but the screen said
CARSON
.

He pushed the button to accept the call. “Carson,” he said.

“You talk to Cryder again yet?” Carson said. Frank’s brother was never one for small talk, for idle introductions.

“I’m fine, Carson, how are you?”

“Did you?”

“No,” Frank said.

“Frank, he’s offering serious money.”

“How do you know? Did he give you a figure?”

“No. I think we can name our price.”

“We? Who is
we
?” Frank felt a sudden heat in his blood. Carson, calling from his office in St. Augustine, no doubt, far from the lunacy of Utina, and yet suddenly, with money on the table, the prospect of selling Uncle Henry’s and Aberdeen becomes a “we,” not a “you.”

“
Her
,” Carson said. “
She
. You know what I mean. Mom. It’s her deal. She’ll stand to gain if we get her to sell the house, dumbass. She can get her and Sofia a nice place to live, no stairs. No termites. No roof falling in. And it’s a family restaurant, if I’m not mistaken, so maybe you could concede that I might have a vote in that?”

“It’s Mom’s restaurant. And I run it,” Frank said. Seth walked over with another bottle of water for Susan, which he handed to her through the crack in the driver’s window. She looked at Frank forlornly.

Carson sighed. “All right, Frank. Whatever. You run it. You’re the hero. All hail Saint Frank.”

“Screw you,” Frank said.

“I’m coming up there,” Carson said. “We need to talk about this.”

“What, now?”

“Yes, now. I’ll come by the restaurant.”

“It’s not a good day, Carson.”

“Frank. Fit it in. This is important.”

“Lots of things are important.”

“When, then?”

The tow truck arrived, pulling up slowly while the driver and a second man leaned out the window to gawk at the sight of Susan’s Mazda wedged between the tree and the utility pole. “Hot damn!” the driver yelled. “This is a good one!”

“I don’t know, Carson. I gotta go, all right? I’m in the middle of something.”

“I’m coming up there.”

“Don’t.”

“I’ll see you later.”

Frank hung up the phone. The tow truck backed into position and hooked the cables under the axle of the Mazda.

“We got a lady inside, I hope you realize,” Frank said.

“Oh, we haven’t missed that, buddy!” the tow driver chortled. “Don’t worry, we won’t muss her up.”

Frank walked over to the Mazda, leaned in to speak through the slot. “You okay?” he said.

Susan’s face was pink, but she had calmed down considerably from the state she was in immediately after the accident. She now simply looked sad, and tired.

“I’m okay,” she said. “I just want to get out of here.”

“They’re getting ready to pull. Just sit tight.”

“Where would I go?” she said.

The tow truck revved its engine. “Heads up!” the driver shouted.

The palm tree shuddered as the Mazda’s chassis was forcibly dislodged from its position. Frank watched, feeling like he was having a tooth pulled, until the car was free and it lurched backward, bouncing once and settling in on Mac’s sandy driveway with an inglorious springy thud. Susan immediately tried to open the doors, first the driver’s and then the passenger’s, but they remained stuck.

“You might have to come out through the window,” Frank said. “I’ll help you.”

“I’ll do it myself, thank you,” she snapped. She shimmied awkwardly out through the open driver’s window, her blouse sticking to her back, her linen skirt hiked almost to her hips to accommodate the climb. Mac, Tip, Seth, and the tow crew stood watching. She stood, finally, wobbling on the driveway. Frank put his hand on her elbow to steady her.

“You all get a good view?” she asked. She smoothed her hair, straightened her skirt, glared. She looked at the Mazda, walked all the way around it. Both doors were crumpled, and the right quarter panel on the passenger side had suffered a brutal gash that ran almost the length of the fender. The car looked like it had been squeezed by a giant fist. It was cartoonlike, almost comical. But Susan was not amused.

“Oh, my Jesus,” she said, surveying the damage.

Frank walked over to the tow truck.

“You guys think you can go ahead and move it out of the driveway?” he said. “I gotta get my truck out.”

“Wait just a damn second,” Susan said. She turned to face him. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“Susan, I’m sorry, but I gotta go,” he said.

“This is your fault, Frank.”

“What?”

“This,” she said, gesturing at the car. “All this. Look at my car! I don’t have the money to pay for this, Frank. And my insurance . . .” She trailed off. The tears were up close again, mixing with a fury that Frank found considerably more dangerous now that Susan was on the outside of the wrecked Mazda. “I don’t
have
insurance,” she said.

“How can you not have insurance?”

“I missed a payment. I don’t have the
money,
” she hissed.

“I really don’t think you can consider this my fault,” he began.

“Oh, really? Well I really don’t think you know me very well, then, do you? If you hadn’t been trying to get in my car I wouldn’t have had to back up to get away from you.”

He stared at her for a beat. “To get
away
from me?”

“You heard me.”

“What, did you think I was
dangerous
? Did you think I was threatening you?” He was incredulous. This from the woman who’d been throwing herself at him for nearly thirty years.

“Look, Frank,” she said. She approached him, extended one long, white-tipped fingernail into his face. “You’re going to have to help me pay for this.” She caught her breath, half hiccup, half-sob. “You
owe
me.”

She turned on her heel and walked over to the tow truck. Frank stared after her. Mac and Tip watched. Susan turned back to Frank once more. “You
owe
me!” she said again.

Big money, Mac had said. Real money. It looked like Frank was going to need it. He whistled for Gooch, loaded him into the bed of the truck, and climbed into the driver’s seat. He watched in the rearview mirror until the tow truck had dragged the Mazda out of the way, and then he backed slowly out of the driveway, avoiding Susan’s stony gaze. He waved to Mac, headed east on Seminary Street. It was not until he reached the intersection at Monroe Road, where the work crews teemed over the new Publix, that Frank glanced down at the passenger seat, where An-Needa’s Key lime pies had melted into a thick, sticky soup, leaking steadily into the rest of the pie boxes and forming a foamy glaze all over Frank’s upholstery.

He turned, looked straight ahead, waited for the light to change. To his right, the backhoes had done their work, splintering the oaks and sweet gums, upturning the earth and tearing through the thick fabric of palmetto and pine. Some of the trees still lay at the perimeter of the site, yet to be cut up and carted away. Things falling, melting, crashing everywhere. All of Utina falling apart at the seams. And him right here in the thick of it.

N
INE

He’d never make it to St. Augustine and back for the bed in time. By now Morgan had made it through lunch, no doubt, and once Frank got to the restaurant they’d have only an hour or so before the dinner crowd began to arrive. He and Morgan had a gentleman’s agreement not to leave each other hanging for the early-bird diners, the oldest and most ornery of the lot, who hadn’t had the benefit of a sweet calming twilight or the evening two-for-one happy hour to improve their moods. An hour. Not enough time to get Bell’s bed from St. Augustine.

But a bed is a bed, he reasoned, so he left the Key lime mess in his front seat and drove down Cooksey Lane to his own house, where an extra twin mattress and box spring stood upright in the spare room. He left the door to the truck open and lowered the tailgate so Gooch could take the first crack at the pie cleanup, and by the time he returned he found the dog, bloated-looking and disoriented, lying in a cool patch of trumpet vine.

“Glutton,” Frank said. “Serves you right.” He loaded the mattress and box spring into the back of the truck and mopped out the rest of the melted pies. Then he left Gooch sleeping in the shade and pulled out of the driveway again, the mattress set flumping gently in the bed of the truck. He checked his watch—thirty minutes to dinner hour. He could slip out of Uncle Henry’s again after getting the early birds fed, make it to Aberdeen before dark, and help Elizabeth get the bed set up for Bell. At Cooksey and Seminary, he bumped through the intersection and pulled into the parking lot at Dollar General, where he bought a mattress pad, a set of Hello Kitty bedsheets, and, after a moment’s thought, a ceramic nightlight shaped like an angel. He felt odd, fatherly, buying such childish items, and he was pleased to find that he did not mind the feeling. By the time he reached Uncle Henry’s, he’d imagined vanilla cupcakes, a swing set, a pair of small white socks. He’d never thought of such things before.
A break
, she’d said.
A break. We’re in your old bedroom.

At Uncle Henry’s, he left the mattress and box spring in the truck and entered the kitchen in time to see Morgan ladling the first dinner-size order of hoppin’ John over a thick layer of white rice.

“Afternoon, darling,” Morgan said.

“Sweetheart,” Frank replied. And then they were doing it again, what they did every night, pulling down the orders as they came in from Irma, filling bowls of clam chowder and cheese grits, heaping baskets of corn bread, datil pepper jelly starters, and u-peel-um shrimp dinners, dirty rice and fried catfish. They hustled through the early-bird rush without speaking, and Frank loved that about Morgan. He bolted regularly out to the bar, filled the drink orders without a word, jumped back into the kitchen in time to pull the fries out of the fryer, perfectly browned, miraculous. It should have been an Olympic event.

“Cover for me for thirty minutes,” he told Irma during the five o’clock lull. He pulled off his apron, stepped out from behind the bar. The real dinner crowd would be arriving in earnest at about five-forty-five. “I’ll be back.”

He’d made it to the front door and had stepped out into the scalding late-afternoon sun when Carson pulled into the parking lot.

Shit
. Frank glanced at the mattress and box spring in the back of his truck.

He waited. Carson approached, his back straight and his shoulders squared. My God, he was uptight. If Frank hadn’t been so annoyed with Carson, he’d have surrendered to the impulse to reach out and tousle his brother’s hair, mess him up a little bit.

“Where you headed, bro?” Carson said. “Skipping out on business?”

“Just got an errand to run,” Frank said. “I’ll be back.”

“We need to talk.”

“Not right now.”

“Now.”

“Carson,” Frank said. “I’ve only got a few minutes before we get slammed. I’ll be back. I told you not to come tonight.”

“We gotta address this Vista thing. We need to talk.”

“Why can’t we talk tomorrow?”

“I’m here now. I drove all the way up here. Give me ten minutes.”

Frank sighed, and they stepped back inside the restaurant to escape the heat.

“We need to get her to sell,” Carson said immediately.

“What do you know about this deal?” Frank said. “What are they offering?”

“I don’t know for sure yet, but it’s going to be millions. You talk to Mac?”