She said, “You celebrating something?”
“Nope, just feel like bacon.”
“I thought maybe you and that hunky detective had finally done the deed and you were rewarding yourself.”
I rolled my eyes to show I thought she was too silly to even answer. She grinned and sashayed away with her coffeepot, every line of her saying she thought she was clever to say she thought I’d finally decided to lose my self-imposed second virginity.
She wasn’t, and I hadn’t, and I didn’t want to talk about it.
While I waited for her to come back with my breakfast, I scanned the front page of the paper, skimming over the usual boring stuff. Some Washington senator had been caught soliciting sex from a kid on the internet, a lobbyist had been caught paying a huge bribe to another senator in exchange for preferential treatment to his employer, and a local man had caught a pregnant shark and all its babies had died. The fisherman was photographed standing proudly beside the hanging shark. He missed his calling. He should have been in Washington.
Judy plopped down my breakfast plates and splashed more coffee in my mug.
She said, “You hear that?”
I raised my head. “What?”
“The quiet. They’ve almost all gone.”
I nodded. “I’ve been seeing car transports.”
We both got almost misty-eyed at the thought. We year-rounders on the key mark our lives by the arrival and departure of the seasonal residents. In the fall, when we see auto transports hauling snowbirds’ cars into town, sandhill cranes returning from Canada, and an occasional magnificent frigatebird soaring high overhead, we know the seasonals are on their way and we brace ourselves. In the spring, when all the migratory signs are reversed, we let out a big sigh of relief. Not that we don’t like our seasonals, or that we don’t appreciate what they do for our economy. But having them descend on us every year is like having beloved relatives come for long annual visits—we count them as blessings, but we’re still glad to see them go.
Judy left, and I turned my full attention to breakfast. If I were on death row facing execution, I would ask for breakfast as my last meal. Of course, I’d want it prepared by Tanisha, with eggs cooked so the whites were firm and the yolk quivery, with a rasher of bacon laid out like little crisp brown slats without a trace of icky white bubbles, and a puffed-up flaky biscuit served so hot that butter melted into it at the touch. And coffee. Lots of hot black coffee.
While I ate, I looked at the Sudoku puzzle in the paper, but it made my brain ache a little bit, so I finally pushed the paper aside. I had been up since four o’clock, and I needed a shower and a nap and some time to myself. When I’d scarfed down every last crumb, I put down money for Judy, waved goodbye to Tanisha, and dragged my weary self out to the Bronco.
Parakeets and songbirds fluttered up like smoke signals as I eased the Bronco between pines, oaks, palms, and sea grape lining my meandering Gulf-side driveway. On the shore, the day’s first high tide was rolling in, and a crowd of seabirds was loudly arguing over its catered delicacies.
Rounding the last curve in the drive, I saw Michael and Paco beside the carport washing out paintbrushes. They usually take Michael’s boat out on their days off, but they’d decided to paint their house and my apartment before the weather got too hot. Both of them wore brief cutoffs that revealed acres of firm sun-tanned flesh. They were sweat-shimmery topless, with folded bandannas tied around their foreheads as sweatbands. Half the women on Siesta Key would have paid big bucks for front-row tickets to see them like that—the same women who pray every night that a miracle actually can happen to convert a gay man to straight.
A firefighter like our father, Michael is big and blond and broad, with a piercing blue gaze that turns women into blithering idiots. Like me, Michael has our inherited Nordic coloring. Paco, on the other hand, can pass for almost every dark-haired, dark-eyed nationality under the sun, which comes in handy since he’s with the Special Investigative Bureau—better known as SIB—of the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department. He’s actually fourth-generation Greek-American, with the surname Pakodopoulos—too much of a mouthful for the kids he grew up with in Chicago so they nicknamed him Paco, and it stuck. He’s slim and deeply tanned, so handsome it makes your toes curl and so smart it’s sometimes unnerving. He mostly does undercover stuff, mostly in disguise, and mostly so dangerous that Michael and I don’t even want to think about it. They’ve been a couple for almost thirteen years now, so Paco is my brother-in-love. He’s also my second-best friend in all the world.
When I drove into the four-slot carport, they both looked up and watched me park. It made me itchy to see them looking at me with such studied speculation. I knew that look.
I got out of the Bronco and glared at them. “Don’t even think about it!”
Michael said, “Come on, Dixie, it’s good exercise.”
Paco said, “Yeah, climbing up and down a ladder would firm your butt.”
I said, “My butt is firm enough, and I get plenty of exercise walking dogs. Which I’ve been doing since four o’clock, and I’m beat.”
I shaded my eyes and looked at the half-painted house. If we’d had our druthers, the house would have been built of cypress and left unpainted to weather pale gray, but cypress hadn’t been an option when our grandparents ordered the house from the Sears, Roebuck catalog. The new color was the same as it has been since our grandfather put the first coat of paint on it, the cerulean blue of the water in the Gulf on a clear sunshiny day. It takes about six months for salt breezes to scour it pale, so painting is an annual job.
But not mine.
I am firmly of the conviction that house painting is man’s work, like assembly-line drilling or sperm donation—things that require rote repetitious movements.
I said, “Looks good!” which made Michael and Paco beam like little kids getting a gold star on their paper. Men are like puppies, they’re easily distracted by compliments.
3
My apartment rides above a four-slot carport next to the frame house where my brother and I went to live with our grandparents when Michael was eleven and I was nine. Our firefighter father had been killed a couple of years before while saving somebody else’s children, and our mother had just up and left one day.
We didn’t see her again until we were grown and she came to our grandfather’s funeral. Oddly, she had her suitcase with her. She left it in the chapel vestibule before she came down the aisle and took a seat on the front row. Michael and I were across the aisle, and until the minister looked pointedly at her, we didn’t notice her. I turned my head to see what he was so taken with and met my mother’s gaze. Her face was awash with tears, but otherwise she looked exactly as I remembered her when she’d left seventeen years before.
I squeezed Michael’s hand and he leaned around me to see her. We all smiled automatically and uncertainly, as if it were the socially acceptable thing to do but we weren’t sure it was the honest thing to do. My mother pursed her lips in a mimed kiss across the aisle, the way she had always done as she left our bedroom after tucking us in, and I was suddenly shaken with sobs for all the kisses lost, all the love withdrawn, all the pain that could never be forgotten.
After the funeral service, we were all awkward with one another. Our grandmother had died the year before, and it didn’t take long to figure out that our mother had returned not out of grief at her father’s passing but out of a greedy hope that she had inherited the beachfront property he’d bought when he was a young man and land on the key was cheap. As soon as Michael set her straight about who now owned the place, she took her suitcase and left again.