The Last Cadillac (15 page)

“You have theez hurricanes. Why?” he said.

“God only knows,” I said.

“Ah, yes, zee gods. They have made quite a mess here, no?”

“Yes.”

Lucy sat down on one of the broken chairs. Ellie and Bruce were out at the water's edge thirty yards away with a case of beer and enough oil to grease their way back to Chicago. They were asleep, or dead, face down on the towels with their feet in the water. The Gulf had again performed. Yesterday she was a grey demon. Today she was a rare jewel. The day was glorious, a perfect specimen of fall in Florida.

They'd had themselves quite a time at the Blue Dolphin, partying through the storm and ending with a very early morning skinny-dip in the motel pool. They made more noise than Josephine, so they got kicked out of their motel rooms. They decided to end the weekend with a sort of camping arrangement in the remnants of the cottage. It was turning out to be an open-air adventure. Most of the northwest corner of the cottage facing the beach, including the door, had blown away. They dared not use the upstairs for fear of crashing into the living room, although Lucy fearlessly crept up there to one of the side bedrooms for towels. The interior was safe and dry enough to survive, so they were reasonably comfortable, which didn't seem to matter, since the whole bunch of them were pretty much anesthetized with various types of liquor.

We studied the picture in the newspaper. We were not in danger of having the cottage come down on our heads because the contractor, my savior, hurried over and propped up the second floor with two-by-fours.

“What a mess,” said Lucy. “I hope we don't have to clean this up.”

I raised an eyebrow. “When have you ever cleaned anything up?”

She tossed the newspaper in the direction of a sand-clotted plastic chair. Marque plopped down next to her on the new, small dune on the porch floor. Lucy still wore her black bathing suit that clung to her like skin. The front of it plunged to her navel with peek-a-boo silver net coverage. She didn't seem to care what she wore, as long as she could shed it quickly.

“Now, you're giving me another headache. How about we forget this,” she said. “Want to go to the Sand Bar for margaritas?” She stuck a fingertip in her cheek and looked to the heavens. “Or piña coladas?”

“Now there's the answer,” I said. “Happy birthday.”

“Ah, my sweet,” said Marque. “I do not try to escape you, but I think I will go have a little nap, down there on the water with those terrible people we came with.” He broke into an incredible grin, already flushed with a sunburn to match his deep brown, bloodshot eyes. He was still the most gorgeous thing this side of Antonio Banderas. “You go with your seester.” He got up and kissed Lucy on the top of her head and dashed off toward the beach, his backside a display of muscles carved from perfection.

“Nice,” I said.

“Yes, nice, and young. I think too young.”

“Really, how mature of you.”

Lucy shot me a look. One thing she avoided at all costs—from imperfect teeth to grey hair—was maturity. She did not wear it well.

“OK, let's go,” she said. “But first, I have to primp, make myself cute as I can.” She headed off to the bathroom where the sand was piled up all around the toilet bowl—which, surprisingly, still worked. The electricity worked, too, even with most of the porch gone. Lucy and her entourage would content themselves for the duration of their stay with what was left of the cottage—the kitchen, still functional, and still bedecked with its orange Formica bar—surrounded with new sand dunes.

I'd swept up a bit, but it was pretty useless. The boards had popped up and curled like fruit peels. They would eventually retreat to their once level plane after they dried out, like a dozen times before. The cottage had survived one more storm.

And all the previous and glorious bright spots remained. The sunsets, the beach, washed clean and newly reconfigured, the birds that didn't seem to mind a bit—all reasons why my grandparents chose the island.

“It's a postcard, sent from God Almighty Himself,” my grandmother said. “If He had written anything on it, it would be to remind you that life is all about change. Just keep going and nothing will ever get you down.”

This was true, even though Josephine tore a hunk off my postcard and took it with her into the Gulf.

“Ready?” Lucy swayed across the porch. She'd wrapped a pareo around her middle in a bow to modesty, but the plunging suit scarcely hid the rest of her. I wore wrinkled shorts and an oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up, ready for action, which involved working on a Cuervo margarita with
a tequila floater, and Shrimp Frances, a deliciously famous dish of shrimp served in hot garlic butter.

“I could use a little respite of margarita. Or piña colada,” I said.

We walked off the porch, right through the invisible walls, and across the beach. We checked on Marque, Ellie, and Bruce. They were still passed out and snoring into their towels, so we left them alone. I was glad because I wanted to talk to Lucy alone. I had some things I had to say.

So, we headed to the Sand Bar Restaurant, which, through the years, had turned into a sort of meeting point—a place on the beach where we ate and drank and sat for hours, as if there were not a care in the world, even when there were plenty. Like now.

The Sand Bar, just a short walk from the cottage, escaped Josephine's wrath, probably because the restaurant was elevated on pilings, so that the water rushed under the building and slinked back into the boundaries of the Gulf. The height of only a few feet was all it took to save it from the claws of Josephine.

The Sand Bar actually began as a real sand bar in the '50s. The floor was nothing more than a tiny island pounded hard by the drinkers who stood up to one long counter. Liquor bottles lined up along the shack wall and a refrigerator kept the beer cold. The first time I went there, I was barely taller than the barstool. My dad drank a beer and talked with his friend Cosby Bernard, a Chicago architect, who said an explosion of condominium growth was set to go off along the barrier keys, all the way from Tampa to Naples. He was concerned about the density on Longboat Key to the south of Anna Maria Island where the high-rise buildings on either side of the key were so close you could throw a baseball from a bayside condo to a Gulf-side house and break a window. As he predicted, the multi-unit buildings, many over six stories,
went up on Longboat Key, and like clockwork, for three to six months, the northerners closed themselves up in their getaways of white carpet, glass-topped tables, and bamboo. Unfortunately, the only two-lane spine that ran through the island along Gulf Drive and Longboat Key couldn't keep up.

In contrast, the crowding on Anna Marie consisted of shacks and small stucco ranch homes. The two islands adjoined by a bridge were worlds apart. Anna Maria became a slightly quirky colony of northerners—many of them artists, teachers, professionals—who hung out on the fishing piers, and, of course, at the Sand Bar, and tried to preserve the feel of Old Florida.

But the Sand Bar changed. The one counter stuck in the sand grew into a beachfront destination where grouper and shrimp—blackened, broiled, boiled, or buttered—was served. Somewhere in the bones of the fancy wraparound teak counter, the original bar top still existed, and just north of that center, a wooden deck with umbrella tables now spread out to seat a hundred diners and drinkers.

Lucy and I sat at the bar and ordered margaritas, kicking them up a notch with floaters of Cuervo, while we waited for a table out on the deck. Over the years, as part of our Anna Maria ritual, we often ended up sitting out on the deck for hours. We covered the white plastic chairs with beach towels, so we wouldn't have the print of chair splats embedded on the backs of our flawless thighs. It had happened before.

That afternoon, a few regulars sat at the round white tables—Sharon and Vince from Sycamore, Keith Bailey from the bait shop at the Rod and Reel Pier, and a short, bald, loud guy I'd never seen before. He picked Lucy out right away, or rather the front middle section of Lucy, as he opened and closed his legs and yakked into a cell phone. It was clear
he had the office on the line, and he was working hard to impress everyone on the deck that he had big business to attend to. He annoyed me, but Lucy was already giving him and his skimpy little Speedo the once over.

“Will you stop?” I said.

Lucy shot me a look, like she'd been caught. “He's kind of cute, don't you think?”

“He's bald.”

“So?”

“He's talking loud so we'll notice him.”

“And again, so? He has a hot bod.”

“It looks like he thinks you do, too.”

“Well, he checked you out.” Lucy threw that in to mollify me, but it landed with a thud. I stared at the Gulf, where a pelican cruised and then abruptly dove after his unsuspecting prey.

I dove into the margarita. The lime bit my taste buds and the Cuervo went straight to my head. I sat back in the chair and twirled the plastic tumbler in circles.

“Lucy?”

“Huh?”

“Remember that morning?” She looked up at me as if she understood, and then, we were both back with Mom the day she died.

“I really don't want to think about it,” Lucy said. “Or talk about it.”

“I know. But I think about it. A lot. Did we do right?”

“What do you mean?” Lucy said. “She was crying; almost every day she was moaning and crying.” Many times, Lucy cried, too, telling Mom she could go, but, for some reason, she wouldn't.

Lucy looked like she was about to cry right then. Her
flirtation forgotten, she stared sideways out at the water, a shiny bleached lock of hair over one eye. She took a long slug of her margarita.

I felt uncomfortable bringing the pain to the surface again. There hadn't been a moment's peace since Mom's demise, and then all the confusion in moving Dad seemed to propel us both to this moment.

“It was the right thing to do,” I said, trying to elicit a response. We sat in silence then, each of us back in the doll-house, with the hospice nurse and Mom in the hospital bed.

“Of course it was. What else were we going to do?” she said. Instantly her expression switched. Lucy had a theatrical quality that changed the way she looked with every mood, a happy fanciful face that lit up and drew you to her. She was not exactly pretty, but neither was Scarlett O'Hara. Lucy could be silly and stupid, and sometimes I wanted to kick her, but she could be decisive without looking back. She surprised me with her decisiveness. This was where metal struck metal, and it never made us dull; it made us sharp. As the eldest, I had to believe that I was going in the right direction. It was expected. But it was important that Lucy and I agreed. I couldn't tell why that was true, but it was. We finished each other's sentences. She supported my way of thinking, even when, overtly, she didn't, because she said things that made me stop and think until it felt right. It was one of the good things about Lucy. It was one of the good things about having her as a sister.

A day or so before Mom died, it was my turn among the siblings to sleep in our parents' room and administer the morphine. Mom was in the hospital bed set up in the bay
window. Dad was asleep in their king-size bed. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the white mound that was my mother. I set the alarm for 1:00 a.m., but I didn't need an alarm clock. I didn't sleep. What was the use, knowing I'd be buzzed out of it in less than an hour? The morphine only worked for a little while, and then the cancer had its way. Again.

I put the dropper filled with morphine inside her cheek and slowly squeezed. One drop at a time, so she didn't choke. She absorbed the drug, rather than swallowing it. Almost instantly she was quiet again.

I sat back down on the edge of the bed between my parents. I gazed at my mother a few feet away, then turned to see that my dad was lying on the far side of the bed. His eyes were wide open. I thought he'd been sleeping, but he wasn't. I couldn't speak, and neither did he. In the faint night light, I could see the glimmer of one big tear spilling from the corner of his eye. That tear felt like a boulder smashing into me.

When would this ever end?

The night was black with another morning far off—when the birds would twitter in the holly bushes outside the window. My mother lingering in this comatose state. She was there, but she wasn't—even though the hospice nurse said Mom could hear us. I hoped she heard the twittering of birds and not the squabbling of her kids, day in and day out.

Still, I sat, propped on some pillows. Hadn't it always been like that? Me. Propped between my parents, seeking affection and approval, laughing and disagreeing, but often, in it together. I didn't feel together in this. I felt miserably distant, and I could see a door closing—and wondered what would open next.

My father rested with his eyes open, but not a sound or movement came from him. I touched his wrist.

Dad let out a low grumble, and I leaned forward to listen, but then he seemed to drift away. He was half asleep, his face relaxed into soft lines, eyes now closed.

“Good night, Dad. Please, sleep.…” I sang to him in a whisper:
May God bless you wherever you may go.

These words he sang to us at night when we were little, after making finger puppets, and making half dollars disappear, and telling us stories about McGillicutty, who got into trouble and then got out of it, a character, I guess, who bore a striking resemblance to my father as a child. Good night, Dad.

Like Mom, Dad was different now, too. More asleep than lively, and in that aspect, he was in tune with Mom. I still couldn't figure out how all this had happened so fast. Where did my parents go? Dad sang songs and told stories such a short time ago. He and Mom went to China only a few years ago, and last year, we were all down at Anna Maria sitting on the deck of the Sand Bar eating grouper sandwiches and drinking margaritas, enjoying the orange sunset while it snowed in Chicago.