Heart of Palm (40 page)

Elizabeth froze. Did
everybody
already know? Evidently this cat was making its way entirely out of the bag. Today. Poor Sofia. Front-page news, honey, ready or not.

Biaggio took a deep breath, then looked into the rearview mirror.

“I’m marrying her, Dean,” he said.

Elizabeth stared out the window. Marrying her! Her heart was racing. The van was silent for another minute, then two. Oh, God! She didn’t dare turn around. She stole a sidelong glance at Biaggio. He was chewing on his lower lip, and his hands clenched the steering wheel until his knuckles were literally turning white.

“Well, I might could congratulate you, then,” Dean said, finally. Elizabeth turned around and looked at him. He patted his shirt pocket, found a cigarette, and lit it. “But I need to tell you,” he said. “These are not ordinary women you are dealing with. Sofia—she’s got a hell of a lot of her mother in her.”

Biaggio exhaled, then grinned. “So then you know where I’m coming from,” he said.

“Worse than that, son,” Dean said. “I know where you’re headed.”

Elizabeth felt a pricking at the back of her throat. The van bumped into the Winn-Dixie parking lot, and Biaggio maneuvered into a parking space. The smell of cigarette smoke and exhaust was heavy in the van, and the supermarket was a blinding white in the unrelenting sun. Elizabeth felt dizzy. Giddy. She couldn’t stop herself: she let out a little whoop that was born somewhere in a well of confusion and relief and pure, clear delight, which was something she hadn’t felt in a long time.

“All right, boys,” Elizabeth said. “Let’s do this.”

They climbed out of the van and made for the shopping carts.

“Don’t forget the green tea,” Biaggio said.

Dean clapped his hand on Biaggio’s shoulder and leaned heavily on a black metal cart with wonky wheels, and they all crossed the steaming black asphalt toward the solace of the air-conditioned Winn-Dixie.

That night, Bell was asleep beside her and the moon was bright outside her window. Fresh stacks of Little Debbie cartons were arranged neatly on the kitchen counter downstairs, and the refrigerator hummed, full of food. Elizabeth heard Dean coughing in the bathroom, heard Arla slowly making her way up the staircase to go to bed. Sofia turned off the television downstairs. And then all the bedroom doors closed, and Aberdeen was quiet and still.

Carson. She pictured him in their bed at home, his skin warm and tan against the sheets. Or wait—no—it was early yet, not even ten o’clock. He’d still be sitting at the kitchen table, tapping away at the laptop, answering e-mails and working on his new fund and doing God knows what else. He’d stay there until after midnight, then would clop noisily down the hallway to the bathroom, make his way to bed. It was one thing she always noticed about Carson, how he never adjusted his step, never tempered his footfall or tried to quiet his impact on the old wooden floors of their house, no matter if she and Bell were already in bed, no matter if they’d not yet woken in the morning. Carson would shut the bathroom door with a loud click as though it were the middle of the afternoon, would clear his throat noisily as he brushed his teeth, kick his shoes off with a loud thump in the closet before coming to bed, and climbing heavily in beside her. It was just Carson. She’d grown used to it. He didn’t censor himself for anybody. Not even her. He’d been that way forever, always, since they were children.

She remembered a day when she was ten years old. She and her friend Delia had found an abandoned nest of baby rabbits under the back of the trailer, and they cared for the babies for days, sewing little skirts out of paper towels and coffee filters, dressing the bunnies up and putting them to bed in shoe boxes, crafting a bunny schoolhouse out of an old packing carton, squirting drops of milk between their tiny brown lips. They played hide-and-seek, tucking the babies, no bigger than hamsters, in nooks and crevices all over the yard, running around to find them, laughing, collecting them all in a wicker basket, giving them names like Pussy Willow, Tootsie Roll, and Bunky. One afternoon Elizabeth had found Pussy Willow under an azalea bush, and she’d held her to her face, inhaling the sweet baby bunny smell, then she’d run across the yard to show Delia. “I found her, I found her!” she said, and then she felt something soft under her foot. She looked down and saw a strange brown shape, moving, contorting, under her canvas sneaker, and the understanding came to her slow, as she watched the pink entrails bubbling out, the tiny white bones like matchsticks in the dirt, that it was Bunky, the boy bunny, crushed, burst like an overripe peach under her shoe.

She’d screamed then, and she could have screamed again now, remembering it, but the worst part is that nobody had come. Delia had looked at the mangled bunny and cried and run home, and Elizabeth ran to the trailer, Pussy Willow having been dropped in the grass next to her dead brother, left forever to fend for herself. Elizabeth lay alone then in her bedroom, alone in her horror, her shoes left outside, and still, still nobody came. Her mother never came. She stayed in bed all afternoon and all evening, crying, shaking, sleeping a little, and she remembered waking up the next morning, the thick smell of alcohol in the trailer, the sounds of Wanda and somebody else beginning to stir in the next bedroom. Elizabeth had gotten herself up, gone outside, and hosed off her shoes. She walked to the bus stop alone.

Frank was on the bus, she remembered, ten-year-old Frank, and she sat in the seat in front of him. Carson was in the back, loud and raucous with his fifth-grade friends. Frank had leaned over the seat.

“What’s the matter, Elizabeth?” he’d said.

“Nothing,” she’d said, but he shook his head.

“You look sad,” he said. Then she threw up in the aisle and the bus driver cursed and she could hear Carson and his friends in the back. “Ewwwww!” they said. “Gnarly!!” But Frank didn’t say anything at all, just opened his lunch box and handed her a napkin. His face was open and unafraid.

Bell stirred beside her, and Elizabeth turned her face to the pillow, tried to summon a picture of Carson as an eleven-year-old boy. It wouldn’t come.

F
IFTEEN

Even though Sofia arrived at Uncle Henry’s late, 8:01, to be precise, Frank wasn’t there yet, either; the patch of sand just outside the kitchen door where his blue truck usually sat was vacant. That one minute was irksome. One minute! She didn’t like to be late. But she took a series of deep breaths and shook it off. Breathe. Rebalance. Recalibrate.

She parked her bike on the back deck and unlocked the door to the dining room. Inside, the restaurant was quiet and dim, and the smell of leftover fry grease was nearly overwhelming. She coughed. They must have fried enough shrimp to sink a ship last night. She’d have her work cut out for her today.

“Morgan?” she called. No answer. Huh. Guess she was the only one on the early shift this morning, which was fine with her. She liked to work alone. It gave her time to think. She moved through the dining room, opening all the windows wide, though there was only a paltry morning breeze. She flipped a bank of switches to start the ceiling fans, propped open the front door to encourage a cross-breeze, then moved to the utility closet to retrieve her supplies. Vacuum, check. Mop, check. Paper towels, check. Bucket, check. Pine-Sol, check. Everything there. Everything in order. She liked to have things in order. She liked to know what to expect.

What to expect! Her head spun for a moment. It had been doing that lately, a burst of light and warmth coming at her in a sudden rush, making her disoriented and dizzy for a moment and then receding again, just as quickly, leaving a wake of questions and electricity behind. Because now! Well, she hardly knew what to expect now. Everything was changing these days, everything was different. Her father, back home. This talk of selling Aberdeen. And biggest of all—Biaggio! This last thing—it was almost too much to think about. Almost. But she smiled and pulled the rolling bucket out of the closet.

That week after the Fourth, after the night he’d sat on the picnic table watching her swim, that was when she really knew. He’d taken her and Arla down to LensCrafters in St. Augustine that week and had sat in the waiting room, flipping through a magazine while Arla had fussed at the optician about tightening the frames on her reading glasses and while Sofia herself had gone in for an eye exam. Glasses. She could scream. She’d never needed glasses before. But after fighting the headaches and the blurry words on the page for so long, she’d been forced to admit that maybe it was time. Forty-three, girl, what are you going to do? Glasses it is. So she’d suffered the exam, the horrid, germy diagnostic equipment she’d had to press her face into to squint through the flipping lenses. And she’d suffered the hairy doctor himself, leaning in far too close—it felt like he was going to kiss her!—to stare into her eyes with his instruments and his garlic breath. Awful. Afterward she’d come back out to the LensCrafters lobby feeling flushed and violated, so she steadied herself with trying on sample frames, though she kept a KleanWipe in her hand and gave each pair of frames a swipe before parking them on her face and regarding her reflection in the mirror skeptically. The last frames were ridiculous, gigantic purple orbs, and she was about to remove them when she saw Biaggio in the mirror, watching her from across the room with those soft eyes of his, and that was when she knew. She held his gaze through the silly purple frames. A beat. Another beat. Another. She held his gaze. And it was funny, because even though there were no lenses in the purple frames, she could suddenly see more clearly than she had for years.

That night, she swam again in the Intracoastal. And that night he swam with her. When their bodies met in the darkness of the current, she turned her back to Aberdeen and opened her arms, and he whispered again and again,
I love you, I love you, I love you. Sofia.

And, of course, he did.

She moved through the dining room in record time, wiping down the tables with Pine-Sol and running the vacuum and polishing the windows with Windex until they sparkled. Then she dragged the bucket and the mop to the bar area and worked on methodically, sweeping and mopping and wiping and scouring until Frank would have been hard-pressed to find a single trace of what was clearly a sloppy night’s business the evening before. Neither he nor Morgan had yet arrived at the restaurant, though it was well after nine now, but she couldn’t say she blamed them. After all, what did it matter anymore? It was looking, more and more, like the restaurant’s days were numbered. If they all ended up agreeing to this deal with Vista, in fact, it was looking like Frank was done slinging booze, Morgan was done frying fish. And she herself was done mopping up after them. So what did it matter if any of them got here on time? Whether they kept the lunch crowd waiting? Whether the infernal fritters were ready on time? What did it matter?

IF they all agreed.
IF
. And had anyone even asked her opinion about selling the house and the restaurant? No, they had not. Had anyone even for one second thought to consider how
she
might have felt about this landslide of change that seemed to be descending from on high even as she stood here this morning with a gosh-darned yarn mop in her hand? No, they had not. It occurred to her that she should have been furious. And she would have been, too, if she hadn’t been just a bit distracted lately. But
still
. She squinted at the bar. A flattened maraschino cherry was stuck to the resin surface, up against the cash register. She regarded it for a moment more, then turned and left it there. Huh.

She tugged the vacuum down the hallway to Frank’s office and banged open the door. The grease smell in the restaurant was still cloying, and she was annoyed. How much Pine-Sol did it take to clean this place up, anyway? She plugged in the vacuum and ran it around the carpet, then pulled off the attachments to suck the dust bunnies out from under her brother’s desk. She sat in Frank’s chair for a moment to recoil the cord on the vacuum, and her eye fell on the file folder sitting on his blotter.
VISTA PROPERTIES
it said. But she didn’t even open it. She didn’t want to know.

It was going to happen. She knew it. It wasn’t a matter of
if
, it was a matter of
when
. She’d watched Carson and Frank in the yard the other day, had watched her brothers squaring off against the options—Sell? Stay? Sell? Stay?—but she knew, just as Frank did, most likely, that it was all but inevitable. Dean was back. Carson was adamant. The properties were worth too much. They couldn’t let the opportunity pass them by.

Her throat clenched. A wave of terror approached, crested, but then receded. She took a deep breath.

Marry me. Marry me, Sofia.

Biaggio had told her last night that he had talked to Dean. Talked to Dean! Oh, Lord, the lunacy of it. It wasn’t like she needed
Dean’s
permission, of all the fool people. Forty-three years old! And Dean hardly the doting patriarch. But still, she was charmed by the earnestness of Biaggio’s effort, astonished by the sincerity. “I want to do it right, Sofia,” he said. “I want to do everything right.” But the details: When? How? Where would they live? And oh, my God—what about
Arla
? He didn’t answer, but he took her hands in his and had held them until the quaking stopped.