“It helps.”
“Is this why you haven’t stayed with me?”
“I don’t want you to be afraid of me.”
She let out a breath. “I was starting to think I was tainted.”
“Tainted?”
She shrugged. “Or you didn’t find my lace pajamas attractive.” She pushed the hair out of her face. “Like maybe I’m too old for you. Too wrinkly. Too saggy. And . . .” She glanced next door to Catalina’s cottage.
I laughed, sat on the edge of the bed, and covered myself with the sheet. “Allie . . . the reason I sleep alone has nothing to do with you and everything to do with me. And while I think Catalina is beautiful, she doesn’t hold my heart in her hands.”
“So I’m not too old for you?”
“Um . . . no.”
“And you still find me somewhat attractive?”
“Um . . . yes.”
She smiled and raised an eyebrow. “You telling the truth?”
“Yes.”
“How about you let me lift this sheet off you, and we’ll see if you’re telling the truth.”
I slid my hand beneath hers. “Allie-girl, you were once the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. But who you were then can’t hold a candle to who you are now.”
She blushed. “Been a long time since you called me that.”
“You don’t mind?”
“I don’t mind.” Another raised eyebrow. “Can I borrow your sheet? . . . My car just hit a water buffalo and . . .”
My shorts lay in one corner. My underwear had spilled off the bed. “Not right this minute.”
She stood and walked to the door, allowing me a close-up view of those same enticing short, silky, lacy pajamas. “Your secret’s safe with me. I had to cover you up twice last night.”
I shook my head.
She glanced over her shoulder. “And you’re blushing.”
30
That afternoon found me staring down at Mom’s grave. Arms crossed. A wrinkle between my eyes. Mom had never remarried. Said the first time just hurt too much. After Bobby and I left, she lived alone, doing laundry at night and cleaning rental houses during the day. Then Bobby returned, but he melted down soon after. She and Allie shipped him off to rehab, where he spent the better part of five years off and on. Once he sobered up, they divorced and he ran for state legislature. He made a name for himself and eventually ran for US Senate and moved to Virginia, keeping a condo in West Palm Beach.
I, meanwhile, was trying to outrun my memories and bouncing between a dozen different places. Cape San Blas was not one of them. So Mom lived the last decade of her life in relative isolation. Allie would check on her from time to time, but Allie was a painful reminder. One day Mom had a stroke pumping gas. She was dead before she hit the ground.
Not knowing how to find me, Bobby delayed the funeral a few days. He used the FBI to track me down. I showed up and we buried her, but I never said a single word to Bobby nor he to me. He knew better than to open his mouth, because the second he did I was going to shut it.
Somewhere on planet Earth, if he was still alive, my dad would have been sixty then. I hadn’t seen him since the broken-plate day. But that didn’t mean time had softened my feelings. If I was good at one thing, it was hate. We lowered Mom’s coffin, threw some dirt on top, and I climbed into a rental car to make my way home.
I leaned against Mom’s headstone, peeled open a new roll of antacids, and popped four into my mouth. Strange how I’d grown to like the chalky, minty taste. Since leaving North Carolina, the pain in my chest had become more constant. Sharper.
The breeze pushed the leaves along the grass and tugged at the moss hanging in the scrub oaks above Rosco and me. I scratched behind his ear and he rolled onto his back, paws in the air. Rubbing his tummy, I spoke aloud to the cold, granite memory of my mother.
“Strange how one man’s absence can leave such carnage in its wake.” The dull pain in my chest had graduated toward knifing. And if I’m being honest, even shortness of breath. I massaged the muscle just below my collarbone, then my shoulder, but it didn’t help. As if I needed another reminder, my phone rang. Caller ID registered my doctor’s office, calling to reschedule my missed appointment. I pressed Decline and sent them to voicemail for a third time.
White cottony clouds drifted silently above. I spoke again, this time to Rosco, who didn’t care what I said as long as I kept rubbing. “I can’t remember any of my dreams coming true.” He groaned in agreement and closed his eyes. “Now I open up and try to love, and find nothing but dead chunks of flesh and shrapnel where my heart used to be.”
I ran my fingers through the carved letters of Mom’s name. She’d been gone a long time. Trouble was, my heart had never really accepted that. Too many words had been left unsaid. “You and I alone know the truth. If you see a way around all this, I wish you’d let me know.”
31
Life had returned to Cape San Blas. Word spread. Locals appeared daily to witness the progress and ask when we were opening. Gabriella and Diego got in on the action and sold tea, bottled water, and sopapillas to the spectators. Media outlets from Pensacola to Orlando had heard the news about “the coming Tornado” and sent reporters and camera crews. In the space of two weeks Allie had been interviewed a dozen times. From managing what was needed, to running back and forth to pick up supplies, to “Here, hold this board,” I pitched in where I could, making myself useful while trying not to get in the way. To some extent, I was the glue. I was also the checkbook, but I knew that going in.
Allie had secured her suppliers, and then hired and trained servers and dishwashers and line cooks and bartenders. She was in full restaurant-management mode and seemed happy. Controlling food costs, managing employee schedules, planning food presentation. Nothing got past her. With one eye on the completion schedule, we scheduled a “soft opening.”
MANUEL, JAVIER, PETER, AND Victor had cleaned up their mess, arranged for the removal of the Dumpster, and washed and waxed the work truck before I realized they needed something else to do. They couldn’t go back to the migrant world. Couldn’t go back to Mexico. And they didn’t have the paperwork to get hired in the legitimate world. The process to citizenship was too expensive.
That afternoon Allie and I pulled the four of them aside and walked across the street to the vacant property. When Allie’s dad purchased the land some sixty years ago, the original deed included twenty acres across the road. At the time it was considered worthless; they couldn’t have given it away. As the restaurant prospered, they used an acre or two for parking, but the rest remained wild and unusable.
I put my hand on Manuel’s shoulder. “Can you put the carnival here?”
Manuel nodded confidently.
“It will mean disassembling most everything up there and bringing it down here. Including the metal building that covers most of it.”
He nodded. Still confident.
“And when it’s up and running, we’re gonna need some guys to manage it. Maintain the rides. Pop the popcorn. Fix the go-karts.”
Manuel shook my hand. His eyes were glassy. I’ve seldom seen gratitude like that.
I took them to the bank, opened joint checking accounts for each one, and made cash deposits in the form of a work bonus, bringing their opening balance to $7,500 each. Victor teared up and gave me a hug, then turned to Manuel and spoke in rapid-fire Spanish.
Manuel pointed him back to the teller and then explained to me. “He wants to send money to his wife and children in Mexico.”
I didn’t even know he was married. Peter held up one hand with five fingers extended.
“What?” I asked. “He has five kids?”
Peter shook his head. “No, me. I have five kids.”
I looked at Javier.
He held up three fingers.
I walked away, realizing they had worked without complaint, grateful just to be working, never feeling sorry for themselves. I shook my head. “I need to learn to speak
Spanish.”
The following morning, I woke to the sound of a rented bulldozer. Manuel and the three amigos were back at work.
I got out my phone and called my brother. He didn’t answer, so I left him a voicemail. “Bobby, you said if I needed anything . . . Well, I need some help with a citizenship issue. I’ve got some folks down here that aren’t here legally, but if we send them home, they’ll die a painful and violent death, and probably their kids will too. The reason is long and complicated and has a lot to do with me. Just tell me what I need to do to start the process. I’ll pay for it. Point me in the right direction and then cut through all the red tape I’m about to bump into. ”
I STOOD ON THE porch of the restaurant, lured by the enticing smell of fresh coffee. The wafting aroma was akin to Morse code and Allie had tapped out the invitation. Without a word, it whispered, “Come be with me. I want you here with me.” It was as innocent as a love note passed between two kids in grade school and as intentional as a tender hand slid beneath the sheets.
As a girl, Allie had always been beautiful. In our teens, my eyes opened as I’d watched straight lines develop into curves. In my time away, she’d become a woman, knowing hardship, accomplishment, and confidence. But now she was a woman in full bloom. A presence to be reckoned with. And neither high-school Allie nor curved Allie nor powerful Allie could hold a candle to Allie now.
When we walked the beach alone, her arm locked in mine, she continued to ask me questions about my life. I answered as best I could. Sometimes when I didn’t have the words, we walked in the quiet, and she was okay with that.
Despite age and time and whiskey and fights and businesses and success and money and isolation, the touch and smell of Allie brought back images of my early life that I’d tried for years not to see.
One afternoon she wrapped her arms around my waist and pressed her chest to mine, her sandy toes on top of mine. “Is this difficult?” she asked.
“Which part?”
“The looking back part.”
“It’s a reminder.”
“Of?”
“When I was over there and we had a break, a few days in the rear, dusk would fall and the only sound was the gentle roll of waves on seashell. I would sit up on the dunes beneath the palm trees with my head in my hands and try to remember what your face looked like. How your hair smelled. The taste of you. Then I would look at my hands and ask myself the simple and unanswerable question, ‘How do I get back to good?’”
Sometimes it was hard for Allie to listen. Sometimes she would sob and cling to me. Often she would just stop me and kiss me. Trying to make up for all the years apart.
Then there were the nights. She’d told Catalina to give up her vigil on the porch and get some sleep, and then she crawled in bed with me. You might think it was sexual. It was not. Sure, I wanted it to be, but when I closed my eyes, sleep fell and my body remembered what my mind had forgotten.
Allie held me night after night, while I sweated and shook and screamed in my sleep. I woke sometimes, surprised to see her face and the fear she was trying to hide. I also saw that those nights convinced her that something I’d encountered had tormented me a long time. Night after night, she clung to me, pulled me to her, wrapped around me like a vine. I began to know sleep like I’d not known in a long, long time.
WITH THE SOFT OPENING less than two weeks away, Allie found me late one afternoon in the restaurant bathroom, painting one of the stalls.
She leaned against the wall, a sneaky smile on her face. “You got a minute?”
I rinsed my brush and met her outside. As we walked to my truck, she held out her hand. “Keys, please.”
I hesitated. “I’m a little picky about who I let drive my truck.”
“Give me the blasted keys, Joseph. You can’t always be in charge.”
I handed her the keys and she drove us the long way to Apalachicola. When we reached town, she wound her way around to a small, dilapidated house for which the only hope was some gasoline and a match. Behind the house stood a small and slightly leaning garage. She parked in front of the garage and said, “It’s not in the best of shape, as I haven’t really had the money to keep it up. I thought about taking out a loan to do the work, but I imagine you’d want to do that yourself.” She rested her hand on the garage door handle. “I’m sorry it’s not in better condition, but that’s the thing about horses frozen in time . . .”
She lifted the door.
Inside, covered with a tan tarp, sat a car. Despite the fact that all four tires were flat and dry-rotted, I knew the body shape. I just couldn’t believe that what sat beneath the tarp might actually be what I thought it was. “Is that . . . ?”
She smiled that sneaky smile again and began pulling back the tarp.
I stood there. Jaw hanging. My ’67 Corvette. The one I’d given to Allie before I left. Now fifty years old. I didn’t know what to say. She reached in her pocket and slid the very same keys into my hand that I’d given her on the day I left. She looked at the car, then at me. “If you could ask these 550 horses what they’d prefer, they’d say, ‘Old man, turn on the juice and let us take you for a ride.’”
I stared at the keys. Nodding. The swell of emotion was more than I could hold back. She held my face in both her hands, leaned up on her toes, and kissed my cheek. Then my lips. Then again. If I thought I had loved her at one time, I had another thing coming. I looked down at her and wrapped my arms around her waist. “Allie-girl, you need to know something.”
“What’s that?”
“I have fallen for you. Totally.”
She kissed me. Tenderly. “Good.”
“Can you kiss me again?”
When she finished, she said, “You know, the whole kissing thing is great, but it gets better. Right? I mean, you do know that?”
I shook my head and opened the car door.
With four flat tires, we couldn’t push it. So we wiped off the seats, put the top down, and sat in the front seat. She propped her feet on the dash and we sang “Fortunate Son” and “American Pie,” and we held our imaginary glasses high toasting whiskey and rye.
A once-dead part of my heart came alive in that moment. It was pumping again. Feeling again. Listening to her sing, and watching her toe tap the dash, I felt my cold, gray heart turn warm and red.
That was both good and bad. Feeling something that good was a welcome emotion. But as I sat there singing with Allie, I felt the hair standing up on the back of my neck. A shadow over my shoulder.
If the good had returned, the bad wasn’t far behind.
32
With Allie’s encouragement, I took a break from the restaurant and got my hands greasy, spending a week with the Corvette. Between Port St. Joe, Tallahassee, and Apalachicola, I got the parts I needed to get her running. From day one, I had a helper. Diego. He was curious and possessed an innate understanding of how mechanical things worked. He helped me pull the engine, where we soaked her in an acid bath and started over. New rings. Gaskets. Plugs. Wires. Cables. Hoses.
Allie said she used to drive it once a month to keep it running, but that ended years ago. A decade maybe. So anything that could rot, had. Diego and I drained all the fluids; replaced the bearings, U-joints, and brake pads; turned the rotors; and bought a new set of Goodyears. If I needed a wrench, pan, rag, anything, Diego hopped up and got it for me. I explained everything I was doing to him, and pretty soon I was letting him do a few things himself.
After a day of elbow grease and buffing, the exterior color returned. Some of the chrome had rusted and bubbled slightly around the edges, but I couldn’t bring myself to replace it. The rag top was dingy and maybe on the verge of dry rot, but I looked at the canvas the same way I looked at the chrome. I just couldn’t bring myself to throw out something because it was old and no longer shiny.
With the soft opening less than a week away, I let Diego install the battery, and then we sat in the seats. I pushed in the clutch and let him turn the ignition.
Cut from her cage, she roared to life. I revved the engine and sat there listening to the sound of my youth. Diego’s smile spread from ear to ear. I toweled the grease off my hands, pulled down my sunglasses, put the top down, and we eased out of the garage and cruised through town. On the outskirts I turned onto 30E, downshifted into second, revved it to 6,000 rpms, dropped the clutch, and burned rubber for an entire block.
I pulled up in front of the restaurant and sat there, engine idling. Allie came running out. She handed her apron to Diego. “Honey, tell your mom I’ll be back later.” She was a picture of the teenager I once knew. We put three hundred miles on the odometer before dark. With the sun falling west over the Gulf, we drove the coastline. Allie laid her head against the headrest, closed her eyes, and let the wind tug at her hair. I drove with my right hand and surfed the wind with my left. Dark found us parked facing the beach, moon above us, stars shining down, Allie leaning against me. Neither of us saying a word. Soaking in what had long since drained out.
After an hour of sitting in each other’s quiet, she turned and looked up at me. “How long have we been back in each other’s lives?”
“Couple of months.”
She shook her head. “Four months. Seven days. Two hours.”
I smiled. Not sure where this was going. “Okay.”
She placed her hand on my chest. “And in all that time, why haven’t you made a pass at me?”
That was a good question. The answer was not. I was about to say something when she said, “I mean, I’ve made like a hundred passes at you, which have done me little good, so I’m just wondering if you’ve lost your mojo.”
“My mojo?”
She laughed. “Yes. Mojo.”
I stammered, “I was thinking we’d get there when we got there. You just lost one husband and I thought . . .”
“You ’bout done?”