The Postcard

  Copyright © 2008 by Tony Abbott

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group USA

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.lb-kids.com

  First eBook Edition: April 2008

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  The postcards featured as chapter openers are courtesy of the author’s collection.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-03354-1

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  To my grandmother Mary Banyar 1900–1978

  CHAPTER ONE

  “She died today.”

  It was the first Wednesday night after school let out for the summer. I had just switched on the television and was searching with the remote —reality, reality, news, rerun, reality — when the phone rang, and my mother answered it.

  “Wait, say that again?” I said.

  She pulled the phone away from her face and cupped her hand over it. “She died this afternoon. Your father wants you to come down for a few days. You can get a standby flight in the morning.”

  I hit the mute button on the remote. “Grandma?”

  “He wants you there. There’s a lot to do.”

  I kept watching the screen, but my eyes began to unfocus.

  My grandmother. A hospital had called two weeks ago to say she had been brought in with a stroke and was in a coma, so Dad took the next plane down from Boston and had been there ever since. I’d never met Grandma. We never saw her as a family, and she didn’t travel. Even my father said that when he was young she wasn’t around very much, and he was sometimes brought up by other people, which made her seem odd to me.

  I had no clue then about how she lived or who she was or what was going to happen to me because of her.

  “I just got out of school,” I said, glancing up at my mother. “It hasn’t even been a week. I really don’t want to —”

  “He’ll call you back,” she said into the phone. “Yes . . . I know . . . Ray, I know!” Click. “You’re going.”

  We hadn’t really talked about Grandma much since she had gone “off,” as my mother called it. Dementia-of-the-Alzheimer’s-Type, she told a friend on the phone once. I was three or four when that started. Mom said it was sad when this happened to old people. “It really is,” she said. But she also said that my grandmother insisted she could fly — that she was “vehement” about it. I could tell the idea of a flying old lady really freaked my mother out. Other times, Dad let it slip that Grandma had called claiming she was in danger and had to escape, or was being attacked by alligators.

  “Again?” Mom said. “They really should keep reptiles away from older people.”

  There was something going on between my parents about Grandma, but I never knew exactly what it was. I think all the talk and the silences embarrassed my dad, especially in front of me, so after a while he didn’t talk about her, and neither did we.

  One thing I do remember. My dad once received a letter from St. Petersburg where she lived. In it was a photograph of her sitting in a wheelchair in front of a little green house. She looked like a tiny bird skeleton, fragile, bony. She was as thin as nothing.

  I remember thinking she would probably die soon. In a few weeks at most. Weeks stretched into months and finally into years. She was eighty-two on her last birthday. Her name was Agnes Monroe Huff.

  “What does Dad actually want me there for?” I asked, flipping the sound back on and turning it low. “I don’t know how to do anything. Why not you? I can stay with Becca or Mark.”

  She was already marching upstairs. “I have to fly this weekend for the bank,” she called. “You’re going down there. I’ll get your duffel bag from the attic. Shut that off, Jason. Now.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  So my name is Jason, and I think my family is splitting up.

  When the jet lifted off the runway the next morning, I couldn’t stop thinking about me being in the air and my parents on the ground in two different places, and it seemed so obvious that I was amazed it had taken me so long to see it. Hector knew it for I don’t know how long. The way he finally said it a couple of years ago was as if he thought I knew it, too.

  We were at lunch on Tuesday the first week of sixth grade, comparing notes about who in our homeroom had had the best summer experience (“Paris with my two uncles,” “the doctor said I nearly died,” “rafting, and I even saw a bear!” compared to my “lawn mowing” and Hector’s “hammocking, because,” as he said, “I’m the hammock king!”), when I opened my lunch bag, looked in, and pretended to gag.

  “Jeez, what is that? Sliced dog brain? Who shopped at the morgue this week?”

  Hector peeked into my lunch bag. He wasn’t playing along. “Yeah, what do you expect?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “I mean, I’m always at your house. I see stuff. Can’t you tell your family’s sort of falling apart? School lunches are a real tip-off.”

  “What? You’re nuts.”

  “And not even sort of falling apart. You actually are. But not all over the place like my cousin’s family. What a circus that is, with the probation and the guardian. No, you guys are being pretty neat about it. So I have to say: dude, well done.”

  “Neat? What are you talking about neat? We’re fine. You’re nuts.”

  Hector shrugged and stuffed a baby carrot into his mouth. “Okay. I’m nuts. Mmm. Vegetables. Someone cares for Hecky.”

  I hadn’t looked. I hadn’t seen. But after Hector said that, it was all I could see. And I saw it in hundreds of little things. A comment at dinner one night. My dad having an edge in his voice that I had never noticed before. My mother going out and him coming in and calling her name, not knowing she was already gone.

  “I was going to go, too,” Dad said to me, as if asking me to take sides. “I can stand her parents, you know.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I know.”

  “I can st
and them for a few hours,” he said.

  “I know.”

  And her always redoing things he had just done. Restacking the dishes in the dishwasher. Reordering the cake he had already ordered for my birthday because she assumed he didn’t remember to do it but didn’t check with him to see if he did.

  “I thought you forgot” was her explanation.

  It made him seem like a loser — she made him seem like a loser sometimes. I hated it, but I wasn’t sure what to think.

  Was she right?

  One thing I did know was that Hector was right. We were neat. No yelling. No big scenes. Sometimes my father would drink with supper. Not a lot, a beer or two, but he never used to do that. It made him quieter.

  It didn’t help that he kept sliding from one job to the next while Mom kept getting promoted. She worked in a big Boston bank and a couple of years ago had gotten a huge promotion. While Dad was still figuring out what he wanted to be, my mother had known for a long time, and she was doing it in a big way, especially now that I was going into high school. Mark and Becca were teenagers when I was born. She had waited a long time.

  When I went upstairs to her room after Dad’s phone call last night, she was ironing a white shirt for me. “It might be fun,” she said. “Florida. After the business with your grandmother is over, I mean. Your friends would love to spend a few days or a week there. And kids make friends fast. It’s a resort city, you know, St. Petersburg.”

  “You always say that,” I said. “And a week? Who said a week?”

  She turned to me. “I can’t go right now. It’s a busy season coming up. And the St. Louis meeting —”

  “St. Louis? I thought you were going to Chicago.”

  “St. Louis is after Chicago,” she said. “That’s a lot of nights away from home. But if you’re down there, I won’t worry about you. Either of you.”

  “I’ll be okay. I have cable, my computer. Becca’s only in Brookline if I need somebody.”

  “Jason, you’re thirteen. I can’t leave you here alone for that long.”

  “So I can stay with Hector,” I said. “Besides, Florida in the summer? In two minutes I’ll be a puddle on the sidewalk. Or do they not have sidewalks yet? Is Florida even a state? Isn’t it all submerged, anyway? You know, just, no. I don’t want to. No way.”

  “No way? No way?” she said, slamming down the iron and stepping toward me, looking tired, but her face set hard. “Who do you think you are to say ‘no way’ to me? Who do you think I do all this for?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You?”

  She raised her hand as if to slap me, then dropped it. “Shine your loafers, smartmouth, you’re going.”

  She was right. I was a smartmouth. And I had the paperwork to prove it. I was actually named student of the month twice in fifth grade. It all went downhill after Hector crunched his baby carrot.

  “So guess what,” I told him on the phone from my room. “I’m going to stupid Florida tomorrow. My grandmother died. My dad’s there already. My mom’s got a business trip to China or somewhere.”

  “Wow, your mother traveling. That is so new,” he said. “Here’s some advice. Don’t make eye contact with the old folks, okay? Florida is filled with them, and they’re always looking for new blood. You know, like vampires.”

  “But don’t they all have false teeth?”

  “Ah, my son,” he said, “you are learning the ways.”

  “Yeah. Look. I gotta shine my shoes. Call you from hell.”

  Looking out the small window, watching the ground pull farther and farther away below me, I wondered if it would actually be that bad, or if it would be worse.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Three hours later the jet landed in Tampa. It was only noon, though it seemed as if I’d been traveling for days. The heat hit me in the face when the terminal doors opened on the parking lot. The air was thick, white, and wet. I was completely sticky inside a minute and a half. Even my eyes began to sweat.

  Summer in Florida. Yay.

  Blinking away the persperation, I looked around and saw Dad hurrying across the sidewalk to me. He seemed shorter than I remembered. More rumpled. Blurry at the edges. Even pale. How could he get pale with so much sun? Had he made eye contact with the old folks?

  “Sorry, traffic,” he said. “Thanks for coming.” He took my backpack and duffel, walked with me for a bit, then dropped them on the ground behind a bright lime-green rental car. He beeped it open.

  “Nice,” I said. “What is this, the Hyundai Inchworm?”

  He tossed the bags into the trunk and snapped down the lid with a laugh. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah. Me, too.”

  He kept his smile. “You’ll like St. Pete.”

  Right. This was his place, after all, his hometown. He had grown up here with Grandma or whoever, which was the whole reason I was down here. I tried to remember her face from the photograph of her in the wheelchair. When I couldn’t, I found myself thinking of any old dead skinny woman lying in a coffin. That just scared me.

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  After getting out of the airport (in a completely roundabout way, it seemed to me), we drove toward the water. The roads were flat. The buildings were low. Everything was hot, flat, white, and flat. Soon we were on a long (mostly flat) bridge with a hump in the middle like an arching caterpillar.

  “This is the Gandy Bridge. That’s the second Gandy down there, from the fifties,” he said, pointing to a low strip of concrete running alongside the bridge we were on. It stood a few feet above the water on concrete posts. It had old-fashioned street lamps curling over it. “The original Gandy from the twenties was the first bridge between Tampa and St. Petersburg. Six miles long. What we’re on now is the latest Gandy.”

  Gandy, Gandy, Gandy. Maybe it was the latest, but it was jammed. I saw other bridges in the distance with faster-moving traffic.

  “Why did we go this way?” I asked him. “It’s so slow.”

  “This is how I always go,” he said. Then he added, “Went. When I was in high school.”

  Looking at him then brought back the business with Mom at the airport that morning. After the ticketing and check-in, I was heading for the security line, when she suddenly took my arm and said “Jason” in a way that made make me stop and look at her.

  “Yeah. Mom.”

  “Your father has . . . oh, this is going to sound . . . uck . . .”

  “What?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Ups and downs. In his life, I mean.”

  I swallowed and began to feel hot.

  “Lots of things that he really doesn’t talk about.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I mean, it’s hard for him. Really hard. And it’s easy for the rest of us — for me — to not know what to do about it. We’re so busy, you know, with things, for that . . .”

  “I sort of have to get in line,” I said.

  She kept holding my arm. “I’m sorry, but . . .” She was looking intently at me. “Jason, I just don’t know what to do sometimes. Or what to say to make it better. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “He keeps stuff inside him. About Grandma. About everything.”

  She sort of jerked back at that. “Yes. He does.”

  There was an announcement over the system then, and we were back in the airport from wherever we had just been.

  “Okay,” I said. “I get it. Really.”

  When I thought all that was over with and we got to the security area, she said, “Jason, make sure he doesn’t drink too much, okay?”

  I turned. “What? Mom! How am I supposed to —”

  I happened to catch the eye of the girl behind me who was suddenly all paying attention.

  “Never mind,” Mom said.

  “Gosh, Mom!”

  “Never mind. He won’t drink. I’m sorry. This is too serious.”

  Too serious.

  I turned away from th
e flat road and looked out the car’s side window. The sun stood straight up in the sky, a burning ball of heat.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Dad said when we neared the end of “the Gandy” and drove onto real land again. The area on either side was thick with scrubby trees and white sand. Here and there brown palm leaves lay scattered, curled and stiff like body parts.

  “It’s super hot for sure. And flat.”

  “But this is nothing,” he went on, smiling right and left like a tour guide. “What we just drove over is only Tampa Bay. Soon, you’ll see real water. Maybe the day after tomorrow we’ll go. After the funeral. The Gulf of Mexico. It’s something to see. It’s huge.”

  I hadn’t noticed it at the airport with all the diesel exhaust from the buses, and even now it was pretty faint because we had the windows open, but I could smell beer on him. Not a lot, not a heavy smell; he wasn’t drunk or anything, but I was pretty sure he’d had something.

  “You’re supposed to like water when you live in Florida,” he said when we stopped at a light. “And sun.”

  “I don’t live here,” I said, turning to him. “Do you?”

  The light changed, and he drove on without saying anything for a time, then: “No, Jason. No. Just until I sell Grandma’s house. Then I’ll be back up to Boston.”

  So that was it. Our family really was splitting up.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  My grandmother’s house was on a street called 30th Avenue North. All the streets were numbered like that in a huge grid, going both up and down the whole peninsula; kind of boring and confusing.

  The house was a one-floor shoe box made of stucco and painted pastel green. It had old flaking windows and a tile roof and a square block of a garage. The hedge next to the driveway was neat on the top, but not on our side, so I guessed it was the neighbor’s. The grass in the yard was long.

  We pulled into the driveway and got out. While my dad took my stuff from the trunk, I looked up and down at the other houses, then at Grandma’s. It seemed like a normal house, but small, and I was reminded of the last time my parents had talked about it.

  “You should sell that place,” Mom had said. “It’s not far from the water. St. Petersburg is a resort, after all. Don’t they call it the ‘Sunshine Resort’?”