Heart of Palm (43 page)

“Ask me,” she said.

And so he did. And she said yes, and they walked through the open doorway, into the still, hot night, into the woods. They walked through the old pathway to Uncle Henry’s, into Frank’s office. They lay down on the soft couch under the window, not speaking, only touching. And as he entered her he thought nothing of Carson, or Arla, or Bell, or betrayal or sin or darkness, and he thought only of Elizabeth, of warmth and goodness and light and freedom, which was all he ever wanted to begin with.

SEPTEMBER

S
EVENTEEN

The fritters were going to burn, was what Arla Bravo was thinking the moment her oldest child and only daughter turned her face to the sun and murmured her wedding vows to Biaggio Antonio Dunkirk under a wrought-iron arbor laced with silk carnations on the back deck of Uncle Henry’s Bar & Grill. My Lord! It was bad enough, this confounded rush to the altar, Sofia in a hell-fire hurry once the cat was out of the bag, insisting the wedding take place before the sale of Aberdeen and Uncle Henry’s to satisfy her confounded allegiance to order and planning. What was it, three weeks since they’d announced their engagement? Must everything be a fire drill? Arla had scarcely had time to adjust to the unbelievable sight of Dean Bravo sitting in her kitchen every morning when she’d found herself shuttling around St. Augustine with Sofia, haunting the aisles of Hobby Lobby to pick out wedding invitations and party favors. And now, with Frank standing up for Biaggio, and with Morgan lounging at the kitchen door and watching the ceremony, all soft-eyed and dreamy and not paying a lick of attention to what was going on in the deep fryer, the God-damned fritters were going to burn. Did she have to do
everything
herself?

She craned her neck around, tried to catch Morgan’s eye. But then Mac Weeden, officiating on his notary’s license, pronounced Biaggio and Sofia husband and wife. Somebody hit the button on the CD player and here came Bon Jovi’s “Thank You for Loving Me” (good Lord in heaven, what kind of music was that for a wedding?), and all the guests stood up and clapped. Sofia and Biaggio kissed, and Morgan retreated to the kitchen, where he was supposed to be, so finally Arla could relax and worry about the next problem, which was having to sit at the same table as Dean Bravo, her long-lost husband, for the next three hours.

But all this, she supposed, was better than thinking about the
real
problem, the
big
problem, which was that she was moving out of Aberdeen on Monday, exactly two days from now. The new condo was painted and ready—eggshell Berber carpet in the bedrooms and wood parquet in the living room and kitchen. First floor, no stairs. A screened-in lanai overlooking a crisply manicured retention pond the shape of a gel-tab. Willough Walk, it was called. The Villas of Willough Walk. If that wasn’t dumber than a box of rocks.

But she couldn’t complain. She mustn’t complain. It was the right thing to do. She couldn’t continue to be the holdout, the one Bravo barrier against big money, “real money,” as that hobgoblin Cryder kept calling it, for all her family. For Carson. For Frank. For Sofia. Even for Morgan. She’d made the decision. She’d stick with it.

It’s just that it was all happening so
quickly
. Sofia and Biaggio—married, just like that. “Why wait?” Sofia had said. “
Mon dieu
, we’re not getting any younger—
any
of us.” Sofia—her lovely, addled daughter. She’d stood before Arla, told her she was marrying Biaggio, and Arla had been unprepared for the pain of this announcement, for the way the words made her heart fall, her stomach lurch, her fingers turn cold. She had a flash of memory—azaleas blooming off the lanai, the look on her mother’s face when she’d announced her engagement to Dean—but then she shook herself, forced her consciousness back to reality. Biaggio was a good man. He’d take care of Sofia. “Won’t your family come to the wedding?” she’d asked him last week. “Your mother? Your brother?” He’d turned pink, had looked at her in a funny way, half sad, half contented, and then he’d said, “You’re my family, Miss Arla. All ya’ll here. You Bravos.”

And she’d felt then, for the first time in many, many years, that perhaps Sofia was going to be all right.

Oh, but
Aberdeen
—the weeks now come down to days, the packing cartons mounting up in each room, more and more piles of rubbish making their way out to the end of the long driveway for trash pickup. “You can’t take this,” Frank would say, again and again, helping her weed through the last four decades of her belongings, the last four decades of her
life
, and though she’d objected at first, clinging to the old lamps, the spindly furnishings, the stacks of books and yellowed linens and chipped hotel-grade china, she’d begun to acquiesce in the last couple of weeks. Let it go, she told herself over and over, staring forlornly at the piles of clothes, the baskets, the knickknacks, the magazines, the handbags, the wine racks and slipcovers.
Let it go
.

No more ironing, they said. No more worrying about the restaurant, they said. A nice, clean condo. Ground floor. Berber carpet. But scarcely any windows, she remembered now, thinking of the place again after having shoved the image of it out of her mind for the duration of Sofia’s marriage vows. And how could you trust a home that didn’t have enough windows? It was like a person with no eyes.

But she’d said yes. She’d said she would do it. She’d agreed to the sale not long after Dean had arrived back at Aberdeen, her resistance mortally wounded and gradually finished off after a week of coming down the stairs each morning to find him sitting at the table with the shakes, sucking on coffee and cigarettes and staring out the kitchen window at the light dawning on the Intracoastal.

“It’s a pretty place,” he said to Arla on the first morning. The night before, after Carson and Elizabeth had made up a bed for Dean in the room that used to be Carson’s, Arla had stayed in her room, keeping company with a bottle of Carlo Rossi, not even coming out to use the bathroom until she was sure Dean was asleep. “It’s sure a pretty place,” he said that morning.

Arla had fetched a cup of coffee and retreated back upstairs.

On the second morning, he had the coffee ready for her when she came downstairs, mixed up with two spoonfuls of sugar and a tiny blip of cream, just the way she liked it, and she thanked him, picked it up from the table and went back to her bedroom, even though these additional trips up the stairs were outside her usual ambitions and were beginning to wear on her.

On the third day, he’d made her a plate of raisin toast and even sprinkled a little extra white sugar at the edges, and she stared at him for a moment and then sat down at the table.

“What are you doing here?” she said.

He cleared his throat. “Well, Carson said—” he began.

“No. Not Carson. You. What are you doing here?”

He’d looked around the kitchen, at the Felix clock and the blue vinyl tablecloth and the stacks of Hostess crumb cakes and boxes of Little Debbies piled on one corner of the counter. The rust stains in the sink and the packets of take-out tartar sauce in the lazy Susan on the table, the bottles of pills on the windowsill, the canisters of Tang.

“I think we should sell the house, Arla,” he said.

It was the pronoun,
we,
that had gotten to her, making her angry at first, of course, but later working on her in a strange subtle way, the intimacy of the word, that oddly familial possessiveness he still had, the simple, unavoidable fact, that, to Dean’s way of thinking, they were still a “we.”

“I think ‘we’ should stick it where the sun don’t shine,” she’d said that first day. “You didn’t ask me if I wanted to buy it. Now you’re asking me to sell it?” She gripped her cane, resisted the temptation to bludgeon him with it, and clomped out of the room.

But he was still there the next morning. And the morning after that. After a week, she had an experience that felt like a hallucination, when she came down the stairs to start the linens and he was standing at the kitchen sink, looking vacantly out toward the Intracoastal, as he’d been doing so often since he arrived, just staring at the water. She saw him for just a moment as a younger version of himself, that handsome boy she’d been so taken with, back when they were both so stupid, so very, very stupid. Then the old Dean turned to her, and the image was gone.

“Are you here because you want to come back?” she said. “To me?”

“Would you have me?” he said.

“I don’t know.” She didn’t. She didn’t know much of anything, anymore. And this confusion was becoming a near-physical ailment, a nagging discomfort. She was sick of it.

“Well. Neither do I,” he said.

She sighed, sat down at the table, and propped her cane against a chair.

“Whatever happened to us, Dean?”

“We got old.”

“I mean before that.”

He looked away.

“I don’t know, Arla.”

“We’re not who we used to be.”

“I don’t think I ever was,” he said.

She’d thought about that for a long time. Funny, that he appeared only now to have begun to accept that notion, that disillusionment in himself. He’d always been so confident before. For Arla’s part, she’d had her moment of epiphany so long ago, when she was married only a couple of months, and she remembered it clearly, lying beside Dean in their bed as he slept, letting the truth of her own imperfections wash over her like rain. Now he was there, too, he had arrived at that moment. He knew what he was, knew what he wasn’t. Knew what they could not be together. So what did Aberdeen really matter? What was a house, anyway, in a world where nobody was who you thought they were, not even yourself? She was a long way from the Arla Bolton she’d once been. She once thought that everyone loved her. She was wrong. She once thought that Dean was forever. She was wrong. Now she thought she needed this house. Maybe she was wrong about that, too.

The next time he asked her about the house, she’d signed the papers: the sales contract, the title search, and who knew what else. Carson met with Cryder and worked it all out, and she signed anything they put in front of her. Susan Holm had arranged the condo—lease with an option to buy. “For when you decide what to do with your money,” she’d said to Arla.

And now the closing was set for Wednesday at People’s Guarantee. “Unless you change your mind,” Doreen Bailey had said over the phone when she’d called Arla to finalize a few details on the forms. But Arla knew none of the parties involved would be changing their minds. They’d settled on a handsome price with Vista: nine million dollars for all the properties, which meant six million to the Bravos and three million to Morgan Moore. Morgan was leaving for Memphis tomorrow, would close on the deal by proxy, have his proceeds wired. So this was it. Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Their last days at Aberdeen.

She looked at Sofia now, on her wedding day, and it pained her how much Sofia—though forty-three and no spring chicken—reminded her of a younger version of herself. Sofia wore a creamy linen sundress and wedge sandals, and her red hair hung loose around her shoulders. She was beautiful. Just like Arla used to be. And Biaggio, oh dear, that man, looking hot and uncomfortable in a shirt and tie—but had she ever seen anyone so happy as Biaggio was today? She just hoped he knew what he was in for.

How long ago? 1964. Dean’s eyes upon her. An A-line silk gown, a chapel-length train. The cool red tiles of the Cathedral Basilica. Her two smooth white feet in creamy ballerina flats, the toenails underneath painted the color of peonies.

“You okay, Arla?” The voice was Elizabeth’s, who sat down next to her. Arla was surprised to find her eyes had grown wet, and she dabbed at them quickly, before anyone else saw.

“Oh, I’m fine,” she said. “Dandy.” She cleared her throat. “How about you?”

Elizabeth shrugged, grinned. “Well, I’m not so much on the marriage train these days myself, you know, but they sure look happy.”

“You and me both, honey,” Arla said. “What were we, crazy?”

“Must have been, Arla. Crazy. They got us with that Bravo charm, I guess. Pow.” Elizabeth feigned a pistol shot with her right hand.

Arla snorted. She looked over at Carson, first in line at the bar now that the ceremony was over, and then at Dean, who was looking pained, sitting on a plastic deck chair with a bottle of Diet Coke clamped between his knees. The wedding guests flurried around him, but he sat very still. She had no idea where he planned to live next, and she had no intention of asking. She wondered how far he was planning to push his “we,” how far he thought it would take him, if he thought, in fact, that it would take him all the way into The Villas of Willough Walk, and she laughed a little bit. “Yes, that’s it,” she said. “The Bravo charm.” She had another vision of herself then, eighteen and haughty, sassing her parents on the day of her engagement to Dean. Oh, she was something then. Maybe she still was.

Sofia clutched Biaggio’s hand in a childlike way. They still stood under the tiny arbor, evidently bagging the planned recessional march through the dining room and beginning to laugh, to relax, as the first of the wedding guests—An-Needa Lovett, looked like—approached them to offer congratulations.