Savannah Breeze (10 page)

Harry Sorrentino's
station wagon was missing from the parking lot at the Breeze Inn. I frowned and fidgeted with the ring of keys in my lap. I had practiced my speech all the way out to Tybee. I would tell Harry in a calm, reasonable way that he would have to vacate the manager's quarters because I needed to move in. Immediately. It was the only way, I would say, that I could protect my property rights from developers who were trying to swoop in and steal the place out from under me. And him. I had decided, in a magnanimous gesture of goodwill, to allow Harry to stay on, rent free, as long as he moved into one of the vacant motel units and stepped up his efforts at renovating the rest of them. If I couldn't sell the motel immediately, as originally planned, I could at least get the Breeze Inn ready to start renting rooms and become a paying proposition.

A seagull skimmed past the windshield of the Lexus and left an ugly greenish-white splatter as a souvenir. I swear, the motley creature laughed as it soared off on a gust of wind and I hit the power-wash button for the windshield wipers.

I knocked hard on the door of the manager's unit, to no avail. I jiggled the key ring some more, then walked around to the back of the log cabin, where I remembered seeing a set of French doors. Maybe Harry was home, but napping. Or maybe he was just being obstinate and refusing to open up, as he had the first night I'd laid eyes on him and the Breeze Inn.

The French doors, salt misted, revealed no sign of my motel man
ager. In the dim light from a single table lamp, I saw that the room looked much the same as it had before, except now the outboard engine was missing from the table, and in its place was a huge cast net, which was draped over the table and three chairs.

I rapped on the glass panes of the door. “Harry!” I called. “It's me. BeBe Loudermilk. Harry, are you home?”

No answer. I sighed and walked around to the front. I glanced at my watch. It was starting to get dark, nearly five-thirty now, and it was getting colder too. I thought longingly of that ugly woodstove inside the log cabin. Then I thought about my favorite winter coat, the soft, camel-colored quilted jacket with the Burberry lining, and the cashmere Burberry scarf I always wore with it. The jacket and the scarf had been in my bedroom closet in the West Jones Street house. My house. My home. Gone, all of it. I shivered and pulled up the collar of the worn red sweater Weezie had donated to my clothing cause.

Damn Harry Sorrentino. Where was the man? I didn't want to just move in and kick him out without giving him the benefit of my speech. But really, enough was enough. I was cold and tired, and come to think of it, hungry too. For a moment, I regretted not sampling one of Marian Foley's weird orange Nehi muffins. But only for a moment.

Suddenly, I remembered the money Granddaddy had given me, and patted the pocket of my jeans just to reassure myself that the money was still there. I could leave this godforsaken place, check into the Holiday Inn down the street, go out and have a nice seafood dinner someplace, then go back and go to sleep on a real bed, without the Weather Channel droning in my ear, without listening to people shuffling to and from the bathroom, without the springs of my grandparents' Hide-A-Bed poking me in the ribs.

I got back behind the wheel of the Lexus, and even started to back out of the parking lot before changing my mind.

No, I thought. Hell no. Sure, I could check into a motel, and the money would last for a few days, but what would I do when the
money ran out? Go sniveling back to my grandparents for another handout? Admit to them that I was homeless and penniless, and worse, that they were probably well on their way to the poor farm too, thanks to my stupidity?

Oh no. For better or worse, I was now the owner and sole proprietor of the Breeze Inn. And Harry Sorrentino could just get used to it. Whenever he showed up again.
If
he ever showed up again.

I made a quick trip to the Tybee Market for dinner supplies. I'd resigned myself to finding only the barest of necessities in the oldtimey grocery store, but was amazed by what I found. A full-service deli, baked goods, even fresh seafood and decent produce. I paused in front of the meat case and drooled over a display of fresh-made crab cakes, and a display of iced-down, fresh-caught shrimp, but steeled myself against such profligate spending and settled instead for dinner makings consisting of a can of tomato soup, a box of crackers, and for a splurge, a bottle of California chardonnay and a chunk of aged cheddar cheese.

When I got back to the Breeze there was still no sign of Harry. Which was a good sign, I told myself. Still, after I unlocked the front door of the log cabin, I stood for a long time before stepping over the threshold.

“Harry?” My voice cracked a little, with unaccustomed uncertainty. I gave it one more try. “Harry?”

I set my grocery sack on the kitchen counter, and my Winn-Dixie luggage on the wing chair facing the television set. I had to unload half a case of Heineken just to put my groceries in the small refrigerator. In the kitchen, pots and pans were stacked neatly in a wooden cupboard beside the stove, and I felt a small involuntary twinge of guilt as I dumped a can of soup into a small copper-bottomed saucepan, then put it on the stove to heat.

Another twinge hit me as I went to open what must surely have been the bedroom door. During my first visit here, Harry had been distinctly territorial about his private quarters.

I shrugged and opened the door anyway.
His
quarters were now
mine
. The room was larger than I'd expected, although still only half the size of my bedroom on West Jones Street. An old iron bed with a sagging mattress, covered with a faded, though neatly arranged pink chenille bedspread, took up the wall facing a bank of three windows. Old wooden fruit crates stood on end for nightstands on both sides of the bed. A wooden splat-back chair and cheap Formica-topped dresser were the only other pieces of furniture in the room. The linoleum floor, although bare, was swept clean.

I opened a narrow door and found the closet. It was the size of my broom closet at home, and the single wooden rod held a few cotton dress shirts and some khaki slacks. I checked the shirt labels, feeling guilty again. Polo by Ralph Lauren. What was this beach-bum type doing with dress shirts that retailed for seventy bucks apiece? I wondered. I ran my hand across the rest of the clothes and was surprised to see a navy wool blazer hanging at the end of the clothes rod. The wool was dove soft, good quality, so I felt no compunction at all about checking the label. Hmm. The satin label was from J. Parker's, the nicest men's store in Savannah.

The top shelf of the closet held a single suitcase. Good. I lifted the suitcase down and set it on the bed. I took my time folding the clothes neatly and stacking them in the suitcase. I hesitated as I turned to face the dresser, and caught a glimpse of myself in the wavy glass of the mirror. Who was this person? What was she doing here?

Shirts, trousers, and jackets were one thing. But that dresser probably held everything Harry Sorrentino owned. Personal things. It was one thing to pack up the closet. But it was another thing altogether to delve into a stranger's dresser drawers. I thought about how I'd felt that awful morning I'd peered through the windows of the West Jones Street house and seen the bare floors where my carpets had once lain, the naked walls and windows where my paintings and drapes had once hung. I thought about how I'd felt when I'd discov
ered that everything, absolutely
everything
I owned that was not on my back or in my car had been packed up and hauled off by strangers.

I shivered again as I thought about strange men running their hands through my lingerie, dumping my shirts and dresses and sweaters and shoes into cardboard cartons. I could hear them talking about me, about my things, feel their sweaty hands on the flesh of my neck. I sank down onto the bed and sighed. This I could not do to Harry Sorrentino.

Yes, Harry would have to move out. There was no other way. But I wouldn't take from Harry Sorrentino what Reddy Millbanks—or whatever his name was—had taken from me. I unpacked the suitcase, hung the clothes where I'd found them, and went out to the kitchen to eat my soup and wait for Harry to come home.

I gingerly folded back one corner of the cast net and ate my supper with the television on, nibbling slowly at the cheese and crackers, keeping one ear cocked for the sound of a car in the parking lot. I felt like Goldilocks, waiting for the three bears to return home.

It was cold in the little cabin. I looked around vainly for a thermostat and finally, glumly, conceded that my new home's only heat was that potbellied stove in the main room. Damn. The West Jones Street house had four fireplaces, but I'd long ago had them all retrofitted with gas logs. The closest I ever came to fire building these days was to push the remote-control button that ignited them.

I sighed and got up to fetch wood, but shrank back when I opened the front door and a gust of wind blew it back in my face. I went into the bedroom, opened the closet doors, and helped myself to a heavy wool-plaid shirt I'd seen there. It was Pendleton. Whoever had bought it the first time around had paid a lot for this shirt. The sleeves hung down to my knees, but I rolled them to my wrists, turned up the collar, and went out to face the elements again in my borrowed finery. At least there was wood. I'd seen it on the porch of the cabin earlier, a tall stack of it, the edge peeking out from a blue
tarp. I fetched an armload of logs, topped it with a handful of kindling from an old iron kettle near the door, and went back inside to try and remember my Girl Scout training. Crouching in front of the iron stove, I arranged the wood as our scout leader, Miss Betsy, had instructed all those years ago, in a sort of tepee affair, with the kindling at the bottom, and then crumpled and twisted a sheet of newspaper to act as a torch, holding my breath as I watched the little orange flames lick at the edges of the kindling.

“Come on, baby,” I whispered, unable to take my eyes from my creation. “Burn, baby, burn.”

When the sticks of kindling flared up, I clapped my hands in delight. “Merit badge!” To celebrate my new survival prowess, I opened the bottle of chardonnay, and sat cross-legged on the floor, sipping wine and watching my fire catch and burn. I found the television's remote control wedged into the arm of the recliner, but there was nothing on except reality shows and bad sitcoms. Annoyed, I shut the television off and went roaming around the room looking for something to read to kill the time.

Harry's taste in reading was definitely different. I found what looked to be a complete set of first-edition P. G. Wodehouse, as well as what was probably the definitive body of John D. MacDonald's life's work, not to mention at least two dozen books about the history of Cuba, one whole shelf of law-school textbooks, and a new-looking autographed copy of
The Perfect Storm
. Odd. I picked up one of the law books, a torts case study, and found it dog-eared and heavily underlined with green highlighter.

I picked out a Travis McGee paperback with a particularly garish illustration of a raven-haired woman staring down the barrel of a snub-nosed pistol, sat down in the recliner, and slowly immersed myself in the world of the Bahia Mar marina, a place where the gin was cold, the women hot, the steaks rare, and valor even rarer. Now that I thought about it, I remembered that my father had a collection of ratty paperback books like these, which he kept behind closed doors
in his den. Boy books. I'd never read a single one, but maybe tonight was the night to give old John D. a try.

The language was so archaic, so politically incorrect, I had to laugh. Travis McGee's various women were described as cookies, bunnies, beach kittens, hotsies, or broads. He'd never get away with that crap today. Still, there was something to the storytelling, to the honest, unapologetic, yet incredibly evocative way McGee captured pre-Disney Florida, that reminded me of Savannah, way back when. I found myself turning pages eagerly, immersing myself in the world of the
Busted Flush.
I could taste the humidity of a cypress swamp, hear the buzz of gnats, see the golden sunlight filtering through a curtain of Spanish moss.

Finally, between the heat from the fire and the chardonnay, I started to feel warmth seeping into my body. I leaned the recliner back a little and closed my eyes, suddenly, unavoidably drowsy. At some point, I heard the book fall to the floor. I should pick it up, I thought. Wash out my dinner dishes. Brush my teeth. Floss. Moisturize. Ah, the hell with it. That was my last conscious thought.

Now I was in dreamland, a bikini-clad beach kitten, snuggled up in the stateroom of the
Busted Flush,
admiring the bronzed brute that was Travis McGee, who'd just saved me from a vicious pack of greedy real estate developers. I tossed my long mane of platinum hair and demurely began to unfasten my bikini top, letting my sun-ripened breasts spill—

“Hey!”

The voice was loud, obnoxious, right in my ear. “What the hell? What the hell do you think you're doing here?”

“Trav?”

“What the hell?”

It was Harry Sorrentino, not Travis McGee, standing there, eyes blazing with righteous indignation, glaring daggers at me. I sat upright, confused, disoriented. Where was I? Who was I?

I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, trying to make sense of things.
Ah yes, now it came to me. I was BeBe Loudermilk. Failed deb, failed divorcée, penniless, homeless. And about to disenfranchise the wild-eyed maniac standing before me.

“So you're back,” I said, struggling for my dignity.

“Obviously,” he said. “I live here, remember?”

“Yes,” I said. “I'm aware of that.”

“So. What the hell are you doing here, at midnight, wearing my shirt, asleep in my chair? And more to the point, what the hell did you do with my beer?”

“Beer?” I said, blinking rapidly, trying to think back. “I didn't drink any beer.”