Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County (3 page)

And find out where he got the money to pull off such an idea.

And find a way to stop it. Or at least, keep it from happening right here.

I washed down the cornbread with Coke and was revived enough to start walking back to the Trail. I noticed, as I left, that the mama night heron was using the Home Sweet Home sign for a perch. She stared at me warily as I walked past. I was tempted to say howdy but thought better of it. Poor thing had
been through our ruckus the night before. As Mama used to say, “When it comes to Nature, leave it be.”

The thick smell of the 'Glades made me feel drugged or a little feverish. I wasn't used to the overwhelming clash of plant life anymore, some of it quite stinky in its own right but bunched together, almost nauseating. Mixed in was a vague scent of decay, helped along by humidity that was almost indescribable, though a high-school friend had come close when he said it felt like being caught in a downpour, only it was raining up. On particularly hot days, Jackie, in her wry Northern way, would say, “How refreshing! Essence of Swamp!” which was funny but always made me feel inferior. However, having been away for a year, I could see her point.

As I marched along, I tried to picture my friend Robbie-Lee making this same trek day after day for years, just to get to school or the library or anywhere. And I wondered how in the world he had survived growing up with Dolores as his mother.

After disturbing several snakes along the way, I finally reached the Trail where, mercifully, I got a ride from a truck driver heading south to Everglades City. I guess I was a pathetic sight, walking down the side of the road with a suitcase in my hand. I offered him a dollar when he dropped me off by the Esso station, but he wouldn't take it. Told me I'd better take good care of myself, and that's when I realized that I must've looked like death warmed over in a saucepan. I didn't want anyone else to see me like that. Pride is a sin and so is vanity, but who wants to return to her hometown looking like a wilted orchid?

It was still early, and Naples was not fully stirring. I walked quick as I could, hoping I wouldn't run into anyone. It was already hot as Hades, and I had to catch my breath twice. While I was confident that Judd Hart, Jackie's teenage son, had been
taking good care of my pet turtles, I was eager to see them. I managed to half run the last hundred yards to my little cottage with my little suitcase bumping against my thigh at every step.

I opened the gate and stepped into the yard. Nothing stirred, so I whistled and stayed still. I whistled a second time and heard some rustling. Slowly, they came out from their hiding places, their heads poking out, curious. And then they lumbered toward me, picking up speed, with Norma Jean, always the boss, in the lead. When they got close they stopped short. They didn't have the greatest eyesight in the world but as soon as they heard my voice they knew it was me.

I wanted to spend the next hour right there in the front yard but I had to go inside and pull myself together. Happily, the cottage did not need airing out. Judd had clearly been following my instructions.

I unpacked my suitcase and showered. Only then did I allow myself to settle into Mama's favorite chair. How I missed her. In the year I had spent away I had often imagined sitting in her chair and feeling comforted, and I did. But I also felt a deep stab of sadness.

I was born right here in this little cottage. There wasn't a nickel to spare for a doctor, not that there was usually one available, especially with the Depression going on. Thankfully, Mama had been trained as a nurse and so she birthed me herself.

Mama used to say that at least Daddy left us with a roof over our heads. Not that it was much of a roof. Every time we had a hurricane it leaked in a new and mysterious way, and Mama and I would spend the duration of the storm moving mop buckets from place to place until we were too tired to care. The year I turned fifteen, Mama finally had enough money set aside from her part-time nursing jobs to have it fixed proper.

When I married Darryl, a local boy I'd known since childhood, we set up housekeeping all the way up in Ocala. I wasn't happy about it, but Darryl had landed a good construction job. Before long Mama took sick, and I began spending more time with her in Naples than with Darryl in Ocala.

That's when I found out that Darryl had a mean streak. He didn't like me being away from him, even for a good reason. The sicker Mama got, the more petty and irritated Darryl became. Later, I spent a lot of time trying to decide if he'd changed overnight or if he'd always been that way and I had failed to notice.

Mama and I both thought she had glade fever and it would pass once the weather turned. But even when the rains ended, she was still feeling puny. I knew things were bad when she gave up all her part-time nursing jobs, one by one, including her favorite, her twice-daily visit to check on Miss Maude Mobley, who was ninety-three and lived alone. Miss Mobley had outlived all her friends and kin. She didn't need to be in a state home; she just needed someone like Mama to make sure she was taking her liver pills and eating proper. Mama wouldn't rest easy until I went to Miss Mobley's church and asked the preacher to find someone to take Mama's place.

Not that anyone could take Mama's place. I always knew that was the case, but imagining and living it are two different things. Her final decline happened sooner than I expected. Without telling me, Mama slipped out one morning while I was shopping at the Winn-Dixie. She took the bus to Fort Myers, where she saw a blood doctor. When she came home, she told me she had cancer and they couldn't fix it. Two weeks after Mama saw the doctor in Fort Myers, she crossed over to the Spirit World in her sleep.

After the burial, I went up to Ocala, packed up my things,
and came home. Now it was just me at the little cottage on the Gulf. Me and my turtles.

Returning home to Naples as a divorced woman was even harder than I thought it would be. People I'd known my whole life—even old pals from school—avoided me. I got a job at the post office and was thankful for it, but on the days I was assigned to counter duty I found myself having to make small talk with people who looked down on me. If not for Jackie Hart and her book club, I'd have remained friendless.

These memories were exhausting, and I was tempted to let myself fall asleep in Mama's chair. The deep, soft cushions still smelled of her.

But my mind was too restless. Part of me wanted to handle Darryl on my own to show everyone that little Dora Witherspoon was more independent and confident than she used to be. This was plain foolishness, however, and I could practically feel Mama glaring down at me from the Other Side. Mama would have said there was no shame in asking for help, in which case I had only one place to turn: my old book club. If anyone could stop Darryl, it was the members of the Collier County Women's Literary Society. Especially, an outspoken woman from Boston named Jackie Hart.

D
olores Simpson sat on the dock that led to her fishing shack and wondered how she'd ended up here, alone, on the edge of the 'Glades with no one to talk to except a nervous night heron. Nothing in her life had gone right. She wasn't even sure who she was anymore. Truth be told, she wasn't even Dolores Simpson.

Her real name was Bunny Ann McIntyre. She always wondered what her mama had been thinking when she wrote those words in the family Bible. Of course, when she became a grown girl and was working as a stripper (she preferred “fan dancer”) in Tampa, Bunny was a perfectly suitable name. At least she didn't have to come up with something new and catchy like all the other girls. The funny thing was, girls named Mary, Elizabeth, and Susan who became Safire, Sugar, or Bubbles were annoyed that she was, in fact, an actual Bunny. Why this bothered them was a mystery to her, but then women in general had always seemed more complicated than men.

When she fled from that life and moved back to the Everglades,
she wanted a new name to go with a new life. On the bus heading south from Hillsborough County, a lady in a tailored navy suit left a magazine on the seat next to her. Dolores picked it up and flipped to a random page where she began reading about a woman named Dolores Simpson who owned a six-bedroom home, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a maid, and even a Lincoln Continental. And she hadn't done it by marrying some man. No, according to the story, she had started her own business. She was even quoted as saying she
didn't need
a man in her life. Incredible! How she wished she could be that woman, and if she couldn't, well, at least she could borrow her name.

Good-bye, “Bunny.” Hello, “Dolores.”

But a lot of good it had done her.

She spat a stream of tobacco juice, taking care not to hit the pink bougainvillea that Robbie-Lee had planted at the foot of the dock. Dolores had learned the hard way that bougainvillea, which was generally quite hardy, would shrivel up and die if it had an unlucky encounter with tobacco spit. While she wasn't partial to flowers, Dolores couldn't see the sense in ruining a perfectly good plant. Besides, Robbie-Lee was fond of it, and she wanted it to be here looking purty when he came back.

If he came back.

“
Oooh
, my son is gone. Gone to see the world,” she moaned softly. Adding, “Fool. Dang fool.”

She wished she could direct that nasty stream of tobacco juice right at the feet of the folks who had created her problems. First was Jackie Hart, that trouble-making redhead from Boston. Robbie-Lee had been doing just fine until Jackie came along. The boy had a promising future which he now had thrown away. He'd managed to get hisself the rarest kind of job, one in which he didn't get his hands dirty. As the sole employee
for Sears, Roebuck & Company in Collier County, he'd helped folks place their orders from the catalog. It didn't matter that the Sears Center where he worked was the size of an ice cream stand. He wore nice clothes to work and he wasn't going to age overnight the way most of the menfolk in Collier did, either from the fishing industry or farming melons and sugarcane.

But then all of a sudden he left for New York City. Just like that. New York City! Inspired by that awful woman, Jackie Hart, who put it in his head that he was missing something. Well, dagnabbit, if he wanted to go north so badly he could have gone to Fort Myers, or Sarasota, or maybe even Apalachicola. At least he would have still been in Florida. He'd have still been squarely on Confederate turf. But why New York City? It wasn't even part of the United States, as far as Dolores was concerned.

She looked over at the night heron. “Oh, just you wait and see,” Dolores said mournfully. “Being a mother is hard. When they grow up, they gonna do what they gonna do. Your young'uns will do the same to you that my boy did to me.

“But he'll be back one day,” she added, this time to herself. “I know he will.”

The second person who had messed up her life was Darryl Norwood, ex-husband of that little gal, Dora Witherspoon. She hoped she'd gotten through to Dora. The telegram had worked to bring her back here. Maybe there was some hope that the river could be saved.

If not, she would have nowhere to go. “Things won't be so peachy for you, either,” she called over to the bird. “You're going to be the last night heron in Collier County. What we have here is a mighty bad situation. At least you can fly away. You can start over. I can't. I'm good for nothin'. I'm stuck.”

Dolores examined her hands. Twenty-five years working
in the 'Glades, and they looked like the skin of the alligators she caught. But that was the least of her worries. Back when she'd been a dancer, the owner of the club had complained that her breasts were too small. Unless she allowed liquid filler to be injected into her breasts, she would lose her job. She'd gone along with it. Now they were lumpy, and hard, and hurt in ways she didn't think possible. How stupid she'd been when she was young. Some mistakes you pay for, forever.

Her first mistake was thinking she was in love. She was fifteen and had just finished eighth grade. When her belly started swelling, she thought maybe she had worms, or possibly a hernia. But her mama and daddy knew otherwise. They threw her out.

She'd hitchhiked to Tampa on the back of a tomato truck in pouring rain. She still didn't know what was wrong with her or why her parents made her leave, but a stranger on the streets of Tampa took one look at her and walked her to a hospital emergency room. Three hours later she had her baby. The nuns convinced her she was racked by sin and not worthy to be a mother. She never had a chance to hold the baby. She wasn't even sure if the baby was alive or healthy, and there were times when she wondered if she had dreamed the whole thing.

She left that hospital four days later on her own two feet, alone. She hitchhiked to the beach in St. Pete and survived by stealing picnics from tourists. Being so young, her body bounced back quickly, and soon she got herself a job at a nightclub. It was only after she showed up on her first day of work that she found out she was to be a dancer, not a waitress. She went along with it, thinking she'd do it just for a while, but “a while” turned into seven years. And that's when she got pregnant again.

The owner of the nightclub suggested an option that would,
as he said, “fix” the situation but Dolores was too scared to consider it. One of the other dancers—a sweet-faced girl from Alabama—had gone to an underground clinic and died.

Surrendering another baby to the State of Florida was out of the question, as far as Dolores was concerned. This baby was a keeper, come what may. She had him at the same hospital as the first one, only this time she was prepared. She scooped him up and took off out of there before somebody could thrust papers in her face and hand her a pen. She named him Robbie-Lee after a crop reporter she liked to listen to on the radio. A man who sounded nice, day in and day out, whether he was discussing the worrisome possibility of a January freeze in the orange groves or warning listeners about a fierce storm that had popped up over the Gulf on a summer day. Sometimes the friendly voice asked questions which he quickly answered himself. For example:
Did you know that Tampa is the lightning capital of the United States?
(Well, it is!) Or:
Did you know that many historians believe our city gets its name from the Calusa Indians, or the Shell People, because “Tampa” means “sticks of fire” in their ancient language?
(Well, it does!) So her radio announcer was smart as well as nice, a quality which Dolores admired.