Heart of Palm (10 page)

“Some,” he said vaguely. “They’re coming up for fireworks tonight. Why? Is something up?”

Arla sighed. “Oh, I don’t know. He’s so wound up. You can’t talk to Carson. The business—he’s always on about the business,” she said, referring to Carson’s investment management firm in St. Augustine, a venture he alternately ran like a freight train and worried over like a nursemaid. “I’m just wondering if they’re planning on anything for Bell’s birthday,” she said.

“When is that?” Frank said. He made a mental note to look for a gift for his niece, who was truly, despite her father’s genetic influence, an absolute frigging
gem
of a kid. Skinny and tough, a thick blond ponytail hanging down her back, huge glasses almost falling off her face every time she worked up a sweat, the kind of kid who would ask you how you were doing and actually be interested in the answer. An old soul in a tiny, wiry frame. Frank never thought of himself as the kid type. But Bell made herself easy to love. She took after her mother, he often thought.

“A few weeks,” Arla said. She took two mugs out of the cupboard, plopped teabags into each of them. “She’ll be seven.”

He exhaled. “Seven already,” he said. He did a quick calculation. When Bell was born, he remembered holding her, visiting Elizabeth and Carson in the hospital, accepting the little wrapped bundle that his brother placed in his arms, and telling himself not to get too attached, even as the baby stared at him so ingenuously that he felt himself slipping under a goofily paternal spell he’d yet to break. Back then, he’d just started his ten-year plan. Ten years, he’d determined. Five years of saving and planning, and then he’d have enough to buy a lot up in North Carolina, in Cullowhee. Five more years, he’d have enough to start building his cabin. Ten years, total, to the top of the mountain. And now here he was. Bell turning seven. No lot purchased, no cabin in sight.

“I don’t need tea, Mom,” he said again. Biaggio appeared in the hallway, but he stopped on the other side of the piano.

“You want me to go ahead and move this, Miss Arla?” he called.

Upstairs, a door flung open, and Sofia ran to the top of the stairs. “The only place that thing is going to be moved is
out
!” she yelled down.

Biaggio paled, raised his eyebrows, looked at Frank across the piano. Sofia descended the stairway and stood next to Biaggio on one side of the piano. Arla left the kitchen and walked down the hallway to stand on the other side. Frank followed.

“Mother,” Sofia said. Her hair was freshly pulled back and she’d changed into the outfit she wore every day to clean Uncle Henry’s: a pair of faded cut-off jeans, a worn-out Jaguars T-shirt. She was making, Frank could tell, a sincere effort to control the timbre of her voice. “Please,” she said. “It’s absolutely full of termites. We need to get it out of here.”

“It’s not going out,” Arla said. “My Lord, you people. It’s my grandmother’s heirloom Steinway. It was played by Irving Berlin.” Frank met Sofia’s eyes. How many times had they heard this claim? Irving
Berlin
. “He came to my grandmother’s house in Connecticut for a cocktail party and played this piano!” Arla said. She patted the top of the piano, leaving a shiny handprint in a thick layer of dust. “It just needs a little restoration,” she said.

“It’s past restoration,” Sofia said. She opened the fall board. Hundreds of tiny gray wings fluttered to the floor. “Oh, my God. It’s not going back in the living room.”

“I can put it wherever ya’ll ladies want,” Biaggio said. “But it’s dang heavy. I should rent some platforms and move it right.” He looked at Sofia in amazement. “I don’t know how you got it this far,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Biaggio, but you won’t move it at all, unless it’s right back into that living room,” Arla said.

Biaggio looked helplessly across the piano at Frank.

“Then I’ll move it out myself,” Sofia said.

“Aw, now . . . ,” Biaggio said.

“I love this piano,” Arla said. “I still play it.”

“You do not,” Sofia said.

Arla dragged the bench, abandoned in the living room, over to the piano. She sat down and propped her cane against her leg. She brushed the termite wings off the keys, and then she started to play “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.” She affected a raunchy falsetto. The piano sounded like a collision. Several of the strings were broken, so the hammers pounded felt on wood—
plenk. Plenk. Plenk!

“Oh, my God,” Sofia said.

Arla was forgetting words, whole lines, but she improvised. “Bap-bap-ba-da-da-da,” she sang.
Plenk. Plenk. Plenk!

“I’ve got to go,” Frank said. He looked at Sofia. “You want to ride to the restaurant with me?” he said, though he knew this was a stupid question. She would ride her bike, just as she’d always ridden her bike to Uncle Henry’s. To ask Sofia to consider changing her routine would be like asking the pope to consider taking up Islam.

Arla stopped suddenly, furrowing her brow. “Of course, that’s not what Irving Berlin would have played.” She looked up at them, but when she saw first Sofia’s, and then Frank’s face, she turned and directed her comment to Biaggio. “He would have played something much more elegant at my grandmother’s house,” she said. She rested her fingers on the keys again, played a soft intro to something that sounded like Irving Berlin.
Plenky. Plenky. Plenkety-plenkety-plenk.

“This is ‘What’ll I Do,’” she said. She began to sing. She closed her eyes. Her voice filled the narrow hallway, and Frank had suddenly had enough. He turned to head through the kitchen and exit out the back door.

“You all can keep climbing over that piano until you learn how to deal with each other,” he called back through the house. Though even as he said it, he realized that could be a very, very long time.

He called Gooch, got into his truck, and drove down the long driveway to Monroe Road, toward Uncle Henry’s and the fryer and away from the sounds of Arla’s voice and her heirloom Steinway piano cutting through the bright hot morning like a requiem. He glanced at his rearview mirror one last time to see Sofia behind him, pedaling like a triathlete on a fat-wheeled cruiser down the soft sandy driveway, on her way to Uncle Henry’s, and he thought, how stupid, that she won’t just ride with me, when after all, we’re headed the exact same place.

T
HREE

The restaurant was still standing. And it didn’t appear to be on fire. Still, Frank wasn’t feeling any better when he pulled into the parking lot at Uncle Henry’s Bar & Grill, though the sight of the dappled morning sunlight on the clapboard siding of his mother’s restaurant was momentarily cheering. Love/hate. No other way to describe his relationship with this place, where he’d worked as manager, bartender, accountant, and head cook since he was nineteen years old.

Uncle Henry’s was built half on land, half on water, supported in the second case by barnacled pilings that stretched out thirty feet over the sandy edge of the Intracoastal Waterway. There were many people in Utina, and once in a while Frank was one of them, who believed that the back deck of Uncle Henry’s on a July night at sunset was the prettiest place on the face of Earth, with the light shining off the current and the fiddler crabs doing their tango down by the waterline.

Years ago Uncle Henry’s had been forced to compete with Morgan’s Fish Camp and Fry House next door, but when a fire claimed Morgan’s and left nothing but a collapsing dock and a family of feral cats, Frank offered Morgan Moore a job in Uncle Henry’s kitchen. Morgan accepted, had simply cut his losses, and redirected his commute by fifty feet southward, and none of the clientele of either restaurant was any the worse, knowing they could still get Morgan’s fried catfish and Menorcan chowder and enjoy the deck at Uncle Henry’s at the same time. And the fire, in truth, was a boon for Uncle Henry’s business. On the old Morgan’s property, the palmettos now grew thick and wild. Frank had hinted more than once that the lot could be cleared and used to solve a parking problem at Uncle Henry’s, but Morgan, who still held the deed on the land, resisted. “Gonna rebuild it one day, you wait,” he said. “Then I’ll be back to give you a run for your money.”

Inside Uncle Henry’s, a bay of rectangular tables and vinyl chairs filled the main dining room, which had as its best feature a long row of windows fronting the Intracoastal and had as its worst feature a surly seventy-something waitress named Irma who’d been working the tables so long nobody could remember the place without her, not even Frank, who’d lost track of how or when he’d ever hired her and had given up on ever getting rid of her. She was a lesson in patience. “Uglier than homemade soup,” Morgan often said, a grin spreading across his wide brown face. “But she can work them tables all right.”

On the back deck, a collection of picnic tables echoed the arrangement inside, with each table both inside and out adorned with a small basket of condiments—ketchup, tartar, pepper sauce (Crazy Mother Pucker’s Fire Roasted Fusion being, as a general rule, the brand of choice)—and a thick roll of paper towels on a wooden dowel.

The restaurant had earned its name from its founder, Henry Bravo, Frank’s great-uncle, who’d been known throughout Utina both for his crawfish slum goulash and for his wife, Bubbles, a former burlesque dancer from New York City who found God and Henry on the same day at a tent revival down in Manatee County. Bubbles returned to Utina with Henry and committed herself to using her considerable physical charms to lure the unchaste, the undisciplined, and the unsaved into the metaphorical bosom of the Lord. It was, by and large, a successful venture.

Henry had parlayed his newfound marital bliss and his famed culinary skills into the opening of the restaurant, originally named The Heaven on Earth Kitchen of Eternal Salvation and Famous Hoppin’ John, but which over the years had come to be known as “Uncle Henry’s” by the Bravos and their Utina neighbors. Eventually Bubbles died of emphysema, and then Henry seized up with an aneurism, not a month after Dean Bravo deserted his family and took with him his spotty but more or less adequate paper mill salary. That’s when Arla saw an opportunity. She bought the restaurant for a song from Henry’s daughter, a vacant thing named Charleen who had not one skinny idea what to do with a thriving fish restaurant on a busy Florida waterway, God love her.

Arla herself had run the restaurant for a couple of years and had nearly run it into the ground, in fact, before Frank took over and Arla retreated gratefully to the seclusion of Aberdeen, to the escape of her linens and her ironing. He’d tried, for a time, to combine running the restaurant with taking classes at St. Johns River Community College to become a certified builder, but the balance proved lopsided, unworkable, so he gave up college to pop beer bottles, devein shrimp, and count cash. The certifications and the unbuilt cabin faded into the distance. He was nineteen when he started here. He wondered if he’d be ninety before he saw the last of it.

Frank pulled the truck around to the side of the restaurant, near the kitchen entrance. Morgan had already arrived and had opened all the windows and doors to let the thick atmosphere of last night’s cooking dissipate. Across the back deck, the breeze from the Intracoastal was sweet and warm. Gooch padded into the kitchen, where Morgan stood at a long metal prep table, cleaning shrimp. Gooch slapped his tail three times against Morgan’s leg, then wandered out to the deck for a nap.

“Mornin’ darling,” Morgan said, nodding at Frank.

“Sweetheart,” Frank replied.

“You look like shit,” Morgan said.

“Thanks. Good to know.”

“My pleasure.”

“Did I leave the fryer on last night?” Frank said. He walked across the kitchen. The fryer’s cord lay unplugged across the tile. He put his hand on the closed surface of the machine, and the metal was cool.

Morgan looked calmly at Frank, then at the fryer.

“No,” he said. “You wouldn’t do that, Frank.”

Frank stood still for a moment, looking from Morgan to the fryer. How could Morgan be so sure? He was annoyed, suddenly. Did everyone think he was so fucking reliable, so wretchedly responsible? He could have burned the entire restaurant down. He could have ruined everything, could have ruined every
one
.

“I just know you wouldn’t,” Morgan said, as though reading his mind. He turned back to his shrimp. Morgan worked from a large cardboard flat at his left elbow, dropping the cleaned shrimp into a deep plastic bucket filled with ice water near his right knee, and he moved quickly, removing the shells, splaying open the fleshy backs, running a sharp knife along the spine. Eight hundred shrimp a day. Repeated evisceration, every single morning, but Morgan never complained. His rhythm was heroic, his precision near perfect, notwithstanding the thick web of scars climbing along his thumbs and the heels of his brown hands. He’d been working in a seafood kitchen for forty-five of his sixty years, marinating his life in the sluice and brine of raw fish and crustaceans, singeing his regrets in the unforgiving cauldron of the deep fryer. It was a fine life, he often said, even if it did stink.

Frank was grateful this morning that Morgan was a quiet man. He settled into a simple, silent rhythm with Morgan, filling brushed metal tubs with prep: diced tomatoes, bell peppers, Vidalia onions, lemons, scallops. Through the open kitchen door, the wide channel of the Intracoastal beckoned, an intermittent parade of sport boats and trawlers on its back. When Sofia arrived, she parked her bike on the back deck, gathered her cleaning supplies from the utility closet, and set to work without speaking to Frank or Morgan. Frank could hear her in the restaurant’s dining room, noisily moving the tables and chairs and then running the vacuum around the room like some sort of Tasmanian devil. My God, she could clean. He knew she’d hit the bar area next, and then the bathrooms, clattering her buckets and mops and cleaners all around the restaurant, and by the time she finished the whole place would be gleaming, immaculate, smelling of Pine-Sol and bleach and with not so much as a single rogue hush puppy left to molder behind a booth, not a single drop of grenadine left gelling on a jigger behind the bar. In three hours, she’d take Uncle Henry’s apart and put it back together. And tomorrow she’d do the whole thing again.