He passed the dive shop on Route 1 where Gordon used to work, recognizing it from the time he’d been in Key West years before, with Sonja. The dive shop was his landmark; Marshall set his odometer and began to look for the other markers Gordon had given him. In five minutes, he’d pulled onto Simonton and found the house: a white frame house with a new roof and rotten boards and broken shutters piled in the front lawn next to a banyan tree whose trunk took up half the front yard. Two long, splintered window boxes sat at curb-side, along with a recycling container loaded with beer cans and upside-down liquor bottles. One window box was empty, an end broken off. The other held one yellowish hemp plant. The brackets were on the back, rust bleeding through white paint. One high-heeled shoe lay on its side in a puddle. The front door was ajar. A rooster, bobbing out from behind water-soaked cardboard boxes thrown under a dead palm, crowed piercingly as Marshall approached the gate, surprising him so he jumped back, grabbed the sunglasses he’d just removed so hard he feared he’d broken the arm. He hadn’t. He blew on his glasses, cleaned them on his shirttail. Back on his nose, they were only slightly less smeared.
People on mopeds sped by. A truck carrying lumber, with a white handkerchief dangling from an end of a board, crept along behind the mopeds. Behind that came an elderly man pedalling a bicycle. He wore blowsy swim trunks, a white Isadora Duncan scarf dangling down his bare chest, and green clogs. A small brown dog hung its head out of the bike basket fastened to the front; behind him, he pulled a slightly larger dog in a basket on wheels. That dog also wore a scarf. A bandanna. What difference did it make? He moved backward to lean against the hood of his car and look at the house. A new window had just been set in beside the front door; plywood covered a hole to the left of the door. A wicker chair and a chair with several broken brown and beige plastic straps sat on the front porch, where a work table was also set up. A palm grew out of a plastic garbage can, pushed up against the plywood window. Above the door was a curved window of etched cranberry glass. From inside, music that sounded like the vocal equivalent of a whirling dervish floated out, though it was nowhere near as loud as the music from the night before. The neighbors, he saw, were a small bodega and, on the other side, a boarded-up house with a rotting boat in the front yard. Several cats watched him from the bow of the boat. A hula hoop was draped over one arm of a lamppost twined with faded red tinsel. A stocky man wearing a leather cap, leather jeans, and leather vest walked by, his chains jingling. Marshall looked back at the house. Three roosters followed their mother out Beth and Gordon’s gate, heading for the next yard. This was the neighborhood Beth preferred to the cluster of contemporary houses on the channel on Duck Key? The singer’s voice soared, repeating the same phrase over and over as he went up the walkway, trying to avoid tripping on scattered bricks and heaved-up cement. The first step was two thicknesses of board; the other steps were cinder block.
“Oh, great!” Beth yelled, as he rang the doorbell and “The Star-Spangled Banner” played. “Great, great, great,” she yelled, rushing to greet him.
As he remembered, she was short and thin, but her hair was now very pale blond, streaked with pink. She was wearing enormous gold earrings and a silver choker. She had on a tightly knotted white halter top that revealed half her rib cage, and striped sultan pants. Her toenails were painted bright pink. She leaped into his arms.
“Don’t say you didn’t get a warm welcome,” she said. The earrings swayed, making a cacophonous noise inside his head.
“Well, I appreciate it,” he said, returning her hug with slightly less strength.
“What is this, are you having some crisis like Gordon says? He’s gone to get briquettes to cook your dinner. You missed the clam pizza with white sauce last night. Best you’ll ever eat, brought all the way from Miami. Come in. I’m a little wired because I just got out of my step class. Come in, Gordon would hate me for holding you in the doorway.”
His first thought was that it was good Sonja wasn’t with him. His second thought was that he was surprised — inside, the house was in very good shape. He followed her through a long pine-panelled hallway with a central ceiling fan. He glanced into several small rooms on the right side of the hallway as he walked past. In the first, where the door was propped open with an iron Scottie dog, he saw a dressing table and mirror on a white shag carpet and several white folding chairs. That was the Mary Kay room, he thought. Next was a dark room with the door almost closed. After that, the bathroom, the track lights glowing, steam on the mirror, a pleasant, fresh, wet smell. The largest area of the house was the main room, a room about twenty by thirty, at the end of which were sliding screen doors, through which he could see a raised hot tub and black iron benches with flowered cushions. She pushed open the screen and motioned for him to follow. In several large terra-cotta pots on wheeled platforms, variously colored bougainvillea bloomed. A seven-foot-high wall surrounded the back deck, hung at intervals with mirrors, in ornate picture frames, that needed to be resilvered. Several orchids hung in pots suspended from a tree limb that stretched from the bodega’s backyard to overhang the deck. Standing beside him, she smiled brightly as he looked around. Beside the steps leading up to the hot tub he saw the mate to the high heel in the puddle outside the house. An aluminum garbage can held discarded liquor bottles and beer cans. On the redwood table, a pitcher held birds-of-paradise.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “A real surprise.”
“We’re going to eat out here tonight,” she said, ducking back into the house and turning down the volume of the boom box that sat on the kitchen counter. “He wants it so picture perfect, he even keeps the grill behind that fence, there.” She pointed to a bamboo screen.
“This is amazing,” he said. “How long did it take you to do this?”
“Helped along by my winning at blackjack,” she said. “No kidding. They might get me later, but that time I had the sense to take the money and run.”
“Well,” he said. “It’s really wonderful. You’d never think this was back here.”
“He wants to keep the front looking like shit so people won’t break in. I’ve got to get you to persuade him that stuff has got to go. There was a bathtub there until the day before yesterday. If people are going to break in, they break in. You can’t spend your life trying to protect yourself.” A little lizard darted from the hot tub to the bamboo screen and disappeared. Above them, the sky was a cloudless, deep blue. “I don’t see any point in fighting obstacles,” she said. “The climate here is perfect, as far as I’m concerned. And in the summer you just go from air-conditioning to air-conditioning. The bedroom’s air-conditioned,” she said. “So are we going to convert you to Key West? If everything goes right, your brother could be retired and a rich man and you could sit around on the back deck with him, shoot the breeze. I’m going to get you a drink. What kind of drink would you like?”
He began to think the parrot pitcher hadn’t been a joke.
“Corona,” she said, before he could answer. She walked to the long narrow kitchen bordering the living room. The floor was tiled a deep green-blue; a counter divided the kitchen from the rest of the room. A big ceiling fan stirred the air.
“Are you upset about Evie’s death?” she said, coming toward him, holding two opened beers. “Is that a subject I should avoid?” she said, before he had time to answer.
“No, not at all,” he said. “I mean, it isn’t a subject you should avoid. We both — I’m glad we found a nursing home that seemed like a good place. Sonja visited her often. I’m afraid I didn’t go as often as I should have.”