2
Most people, when they hear about any key in Florida, think Florida Keys, but the Florida Keys are about six hours south of us, damn near to Cuba. They’re just a string of barrier islands too, so I don’t know why they get to be called the Florida Keys, as if they’re the state’s licensed keys, but that’s how it is. Life’s like that. Half the things people take for granted don’t make a lick of sense.
To get technical about it, we’re roughly fifty-five miles south of Tampa and two hundred fifty-five miles northwest of Miami. We have around seven thousand full-time residents, but during “season” from November to April, our numbers swell to around twenty-four thousand. We lose some of our laid-back panache then, but anybody who manages to be a grouch while living on Siesta Key really has to work at it.
Siesta Key has one main street, Midnight Pass Road, which runs eight miles from the key’s southern tip to the northern end. We have two other sort-of-major streets, one arcing around Siesta Beach, one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, and the other running through the Village, which loosely passes as our business district. We’re connected to Sarasota by two drawbridges, and a favorite topic of conversation is the amount of time lost waiting for a drawbridge to come down after it rises to let a boat go through. We like to talk about lost time; it makes us feel as if we’re as rushed and busy as New Yorkers or Chicagoans. The truth is that most of us don’t really need to rush anywhere, we just like the high of pretending to.
Wild rabbits play tag on the cool white sands of our beaches. Gulls, terns, plovers, pelicans, egrets, herons, ibis, spoonbills, storks, and cranes busily search for food along the shore, and dolphins and manatees play in the warm waters of the Intracoastal Waterway, Sarasota Bay, Roberts Bay, and the Gulf of Mexico. Inside the key itself, there are almost fifty miles of canals and waterways lined with palms, mossy oaks, cedars, mangroves, and sea grapes. We also have balmy days, white crystalline sand beaches, brilliant flowers, and every tropical plant and bird and butterfly you can imagine. I’ve lived here all my life, and I wouldn’t dream of living anywhere else.
Some days, if I’m lucky, I don’t run into a single human being until at least nine o’clock, when I stop at the Village Diner for breakfast. It isn’t that I don’t like people or need them. It’s just that I sometimes go a little nuts over certain behaviors in certain people, and then I’m not responsible for what I do. I don’t have that problem with animals. Animals always have sensible reasons for whatever they do. People, on the other hand, do stupid things that cause other people to die.
Since it was April, a faint scent of cocoa butter hung in the air from late spring break kids splayed out on the beach. Most schools take spring break in March, but no matter when they come, the kids mostly stay on or around the beach, broiling during the day and partying at night. Unless they get too loud at night, the locals take a live-and-let-live attitude toward them.
The day being Sunday, traffic was light on worker trucks and delivery vans but heavy on churchgoing cars. Personally, I feel a lot closer to God when I’m at the beach watching a sunset than I’ve ever felt inside a church. When I was little, I got the Sunday school God mixed up with the grandfather in Heidi, so for a long time I imagined God surrounded by long-eared goats and greeting people in heaven with hunks of goat cheese he’d toasted over an open fire. I liked that about him.
When I got older, my best friends were Hillary Danes and Rebecca Stein, and they made God seem a lot less friendly. Hillary was Catholic, and God made it his personal business to forbid her to see certain movies. My grandmother forbade me to see most of the same movies, but that didn’t seem as awesome as God doing it. Then, when we all started our periods, God declared Rebecca a woman responsible for her own actions. That really steamed me. My grandmother sort of did the same thing, but Rebecca got to do a Bat Mitzvah and all I got was lunch at an expensive restaurant on the bay.
While we ate crab salads, my grandmother said, “Is there anything you want to ask me about periods?”
I shook my head. “Not really. They showed the girls a movie at school.”
“What about how women get pregnant? You know how that works?”
“The sperm hits the egg and it divides and turns into a baby.”
“And you know how the sperm gets to the egg? The man-and-woman business?”
“I think so.”
“Well, that’s good. I guess if your mother were here she would explain it in more detail, but my generation didn’t talk about those things much. The main thing is that boys would have sex with a snake if it laid still, so don’t think it means they love you if they want to have sex with you, not even if they say they do. And don’t get any romantic notions about what fun it would be to have a cute little baby, either. It’s not like playing with dolls.”
I said, “Hillary said the priest told her mom she’d go to hell if she took pills not to have another baby, but she does anyway.”
“Huh! If priests were the ones having babies, they’d be guzzling those pills by the handful.”
We’d had strawberry sundaes for dessert, and that had been the end of my Presbyterian Bat Mitzvah. Since then, God and I have given each other respectful space.
That morning, I headed for breakfast at the Village Diner where I’m such a regular that the minute she sees me, Tanisha, the cook, automatically starts making two eggs over easy with extra-crisp home fries and a biscuit. Tanisha’s a friend I only see at the diner. She and I half solved a crime one time by putting two and two together. Judy, the waitress who knows me almost as well as my brother does, grabs a coffeepot and has a full mug ready for me by the time I sit down.
Before I headed for the ladies’ room to wash off dog spit and cat hair, I grabbed a Herald-Tribune from a stack by the door and dropped it at my usual booth, sort of marking my territory. Not that I’m particular about where I sit. It’s just that I don’t like to mess up our routine by sitting at a different booth. It’s an efficiency thing.
Sure enough, the coffee was ready and waiting when I came out, and I gulped half of it before I was good and settled. Judy was a couple of booths down taking somebody’s order, but she had her coffeepot with her. When she headed toward the kitchen, she paused long enough to top off my coffee with the calm air of an old friend who knows exactly what you like.
Judy’s tall and sharp-boned, with golden-brown hair, caramel-colored eyes, and a scattering of topaz freckles over a thin pointed nose. If she had long flapping ears, she would look a lot like a beagle. She’s loyal like a beagle too. If she likes you, it’s because she’s decided you’re worth her trouble even though you’re probably going to royally screw up your life. We have never met anyplace except the diner, but I know every detail about all the no-good men who have broken her heart, and she knows about Todd and Christy.
Both our lives had been fairly calm lately. I’d had a bad patch around Christmas, not only because it was Christmas and my third year without Todd and Christy, but because there’d been a murder involving one of my clients and I’d ended up being involved in the investigation. Around the same time, Judy had been about to let a loser move in with her lock, stock, and gun rack, but she’d had an attack of clear judgment and dumped him. We both had a new flinty glint in our eyes, because by God we were survivors. Like loggerhead turtles that drag themselves onto our beaches every year to dig nests and lay eggs that may be destroyed by morning, Judy and I keep going on.
I said, “Tell Tanisha to give me some bacon too.”
She waggled her eyebrows because I rarely allow myself bacon even though I love it beyond reason.