“City,” he said. “The Sunshine City.”
“We have someone at the bank who handles relocations. Bonnie could sell it for you —”
“No,” he said. “My mom still lives there.”
“She should go into a home.”
You could see him get mad at that, but he swallowed it. “And not have a house there at all? She has help. She’s all right for now.”
“Why do we need a place there? I’m not retiring to Florida. It’s worth money. Much more than she paid for it. Or whoever paid for it. Not your father. Maybe Mr. Fracker,” she said, moving her hands but, glancing over and seeing me, not quite making air quotes around “father.”
“Ha, ha,” he said coldly, letting it show now.
That was a real dig. Dad’s father, a guy named Walter Huff, had supposedly died long before Mom and Dad got married. Dad had never had much to say about him maybe because he didn’t know him, either. But Mom didn’t seem to buy it. From the comments she made, I think she thought he’d actually been in prison or something, and that Dad was ashamed of him. Mr. Fracker was a lawyer who said he knew Grandma and who had met Dad a few times over the years. But the lawyer was old and that was a long time ago, and it seemed sketchy, anyway, so who knows?
The less Dad said, the more Grandma seemed to become strange and shadowy and distant. I felt over and over that there was more to tell, but I didn’t know who would tell it, and it was never told, anyway. It only got worse as Grandma got sicker and fought more alligators. Mom wanted Dad to close off the subject of Florida, to shut it all down, and never talk about it. His mother, his father, Mr. Fracker, the whole thing. More than all that, there was the splitting up to worry about, too, so I gave up trying to understand it.
Dad unlocked the front door, and we stepped in. It was cooler inside, but not much, and it was stale. My first thought was that he was keeping Grandma in there before the funeral. Was that how they did things in Florida?
“You can have the front bedroom,” he said.
While he went through the house opening windows, I looked around. To the left of the front door off the living room were two bedrooms and a tiny bathroom. To the right was a larger room that went from the front to the back of the house.
“That’s called the Florida room,” he said.
The front and back walls of the Florida room were nearly all windows, the kind with slats of glass you crank open and closed. He cranked them open now. In the room were a desk and chair, a couch, and a long, low buffet for dishes, like we had in Boston.
The kitchen was no more than a hallway from the living room to the back door, and the backyard was small. The lawn needed to be cut there, too. There was a shed in the corner. I wondered if Grandma even had a mower and if Dad would ask me to cut the grass like I did at home. I hoped he wouldn’t; it was so unbelievably hot outside.
Cartons were piled in every room of the house, some packed and taped, most empty and waiting to be filled.
“Trying to get it all cleared so we can sell it,” he said as the air moved in and the stale smell began to lessen. “Not getting very far. And there are lots of things to fix up. Except for the kitchen tiles. For some reason, they’re new. She let a lot of things go.”
I nodded. “Well, she was sick.”
He didn’t say anything right away, then: “She was sick. The whole time, she was sick. So that’s why . . .” He set down his keys on a little divider shelf between the living room and kitchen, paused for a second, then said, “Look, Jason.”
Oh, not another serious talk.
“Uh-huh?”
“It’s just that I have to tell you . . .”
Really, you don’t.
“I have to tell you, mainly because somebody might say it while you’re here. Not that we’ll really meet anyone.”
My arms shivered. “Okay . . .”
“My mom, your grandma, was never married.”
I think I frowned, not really understanding. “Wait. What? What about Walter Huff? Your father?”
“There was no Walter Huff,” he said.
I looked at him, shaking my head. What the heck does that mean?
“Grandma’s father, your great-grandfather, made him up, he made the name up. He had some documents filed, there were a few newspaper articles, things like that. But Walter Huff wasn’t really anyone.” Dad said this with a kind of snicker. “Not that I’ve known for all that long. I only found out after the old man died that he created Walter Huff from nothing. Fracker, the lawyer, told me.”
“Dad!” I said, shocked. “So who’s your father?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” he said, turning away and moving things nervously. “There was no Walter Huff, that’s all I know. Having a child, like that, outside of marriage like my mother did, wasn’t done. We’re talking the early sixties. To be not married and have a child? Uh-uh. When I finally got up the nerve to tell your mother, she thought it was completely fantastic. Not about Grandma not being married, but that this man who I thought was my father was a . . . fiction. Unbelievable, really. From then on, she didn’t like it when Mr. Fracker came to see me. She thought he was some kind of sketchy guy, criminal or something. She was never convinced he was even a lawyer, or just a lawyer. I finally told him to leave me alone. It got to be too much for me, too.”
“Well, yeah,” I said.
“Right. But that’s it. That’s the story. Your grandma didn’t have a husband. I never knew who my father was. There was a made-up name, but nothing else.”
“But how can you even do that?” I asked. “Make someone up? How could you not know? Couldn’t anybody tell that this guy, Walter Huff, was never around?”
He shrugged. “He didn’t have to be for very long. When I was still a baby, he was supposed to have been away on business when he had an accident. So my mother became a widow. It’s nutty, but the old man was like that. So they say. He could do that and make it stick. I never met him. He never acknowledged that I was his grandson, of course.”
“Make someone up,” I said. “That is so bizarre. So that’s why Mom always said stuff.”
He glanced at the floor, nodding. “It was just one more crazy thing about my mother.”
You’re telling me! Grandma suddenly seemed stranger than I ever thought she was. What kind of life had she had, anyway? And Dad ? What was his life like?
Dad seemed tired all of a sudden. “So there you are. No murders or mysteries or anything like that. We’re talking Florida when I was young. There had to be a husband, and her father made one up. For a little while.”
He was talking so much! He never talked like this at home.
So Dad was illegitimate. His mother wasn’t married when she had him. I guess I felt a little like Mom did about Grandma flying. Grandma having a baby and not being married is one thing. But that her husband was a . . . phantom? And after so long for some guy to tell you that your father is not your father and is really no one? So nobody knew who my grandfather was? Is?
There were too many questions for me to deal with. Maybe Mom had the right idea. It was too unbelievable. Too strange. Shut it down. Close it off.
“All right, Dad. Thanks for telling me. I’ll keep it in mind. Thanks.”
He opened his hands and gave me a look as if he expected more. “Do you . . . have any questions or anything?”
My mind was a complete jumble. “I don’t think so. I’m good.”
I wasn’t good. I didn’t want to be there. It was so hot. I didn’t want to know about anything. So I had a made-up grandfather. So what? I hated the place. I wanted to be back in Boston with the house all to myself.
CHAPTER FIVE
While my dad moved boxes noisily around, annoyed at me for not asking to know more, I went into the kitchen, checked the refrigerator, and found store-made potato salad, jelly, eggs, and one beer.
It was nice and cool holding the door of the fridge open, until he snapped at me — “Get inside or shut the door!” — and I
finally had to close it.
Looking out the screen door, I studied the backyard again. It was a small square, butting up against the backyard of the house on the next street (31st Avenue North? 29th Avenue South?) and alongside two other backyards. A hedge of flowering bushes and a couple of thick, dense, low palm trees shielded it all around from the neighbors, except on the right side, where the hedge was low and looked into the yard next door.
I jerked back from the screen. There was a tiny white-haired woman in the next yard, leaning in over the hedge, staring at a big open flower on our side. She was about a foot away from it and not moving an inch.
“Is she a statue or something?” I whispered over my shoulder.
“Who, the lady?” said my dad, stopping his work.
“She’s gawking into our yard and not moving. Like a garden ornament.”
He snickered and said her name was “something like Mrs. Keep or Mrs. Keefe.” She had been a friend of my grandmother for a long time. “She takes photographs,” he said. “She used to work for the city or something.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Which is it? Keep or Keefe?”
He snorted a chuckle. “I never heard it right to begin with. Maybe it’s Mrs. Keese. Or even Quiche. She helped me a bit, but she can’t lift anything, of course. She did go through Grandma’s closet and found some important papers.” He pointed to a white carton in the living room. “I haven’t gotten to them yet.”
“So what do you call her?”
“Ma’am,” he said.
The lady moved slightly and lifted a small black box up to her face. That’s when I saw that what she had been staring at was not the big flower, but a tiny bird. A hummingbird. It had been hovering inside the flower and now emerged, its wings blurring. The lady tensed. I didn’t hear the click of the camera, but the next moment she pulled away, and the hummingbird jerked up and off into some other yard. She then stepped backward across her own yard and disappeared into her house.
“You could check the phone book,” I said.
“She’s unlisted.”
“There’s gotta be a way to find out what her name actually is.”
“Well, it’s too late to ask her,” he said. “I’ve been talking to her every day for two weeks. Each time she calls on the phone and says her name, it sounds different. I think it has something to do with whether she has her teeth in or not.”
I laughed. “You could look at her mail when she’s out.”
“You think I didn’t try that?” he said, coming up next to me and peering through the screen at her house. “It’s not like she gets a lot of mail to begin with, but the moment it comes, she snatches it in. Besides that, she’s almost never out. She lives alone and hardly goes anywhere. Meals on Wheels brings her stuff to eat. I tell you, she never leaves.”
“That’s so bizarre,” I said.
He was almost laughing now. “That’s St. Petersburg.”
CHAPTER SIX
After having jelly sandwiches, we started on the buffet, emptying the drawers of silverware and plates, wrapping whatever was worth saving in newspapers. We did this for an hour or so, not making much of a dent, when he looked up.
“Hey, Jason. I just remembered the obituary is supposed to appear today. Grandma’s obituary. Can you run to the store on the corner and get a paper? St. Petersburg Times. I stopped delivery last week.”
I nodded. “Sure. Any chance to go out in the heat.”
He dug in his wallet for a dollar. “It’s nothing much. The funeral home helped me write it up. We should have a copy.”
I went out into the sun, wilted down the sidewalk, crossed at the corner to the store, pulled a paper from the twirly rack, and paid for it. When I left the store, a long funeral procession was going by. Nice. Was this to prepare me for tomorrow? I saw headlights and black cars far away into the distance, so I couldn’t cross the street. I decided to walk back on the far side.
I had just started up toward the corner and was flipping to the obituary page when I felt something hit my shoulder from behind.
“Off.”
I turned around. Standing there was a girl around my age in a bright orange T-shirt and cut-offs. She had light brown skin and long black hair. She was holding her rake like a weapon. She had tapped my shoulder with it.
“Off,” she repeated.
“Off what?” I asked.
She nodded toward my feet.
I looked down. The toe of my left sneaker was touching the edge of the lawn. “Oh, sorry —”
When I looked up, she had already turned down the side of the house toward its backyard.
“Insane much?” I said to myself. I crossed the street after the last funeral car had passed and was home in less than a minute.
Dad opened the paper to the obituaries, and we read it together.
AGNES MONROE HUFF, 82, of 30th Ave. N., died Wednesday in a St. Petersburg hospital after a long illness. The only daughter of Quincy Monroe, she was a resident of Pinellas County since birth. Her adventurous spirit has flown; her passing will be mourned. Survivors include a son, Raymond, his wife Jennifer, and three grandchildren of Boston. The Brent Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements. Burial is scheduled Friday, noon, at Bay Pines Cemetery.
“Nice,” I said.
“Nice? What is that?” he snarled, flapping the paper. “‘Her adventurous spirit has flown’? God, enough with the flying. Who the heck wrote that? I didn’t. Where did it come from?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What’s wrong with it?”
“She was in pain, that’s what’s wrong with it. Her whole life Mom was in pain. There was no adventure. There was no spirit. There was a wheelchair. Who would write that? Gosh, the number of times I was kicked out when the doctors came to work on her. Mom was sick. She was sick and in a chair and then she was sick in her mind.”
This came out all at once. He made a kind of grunting sound and tossed the paper to the floor, his hands shaking. He started back for the boxes when he glanced at his watch and said, “Never mind. We’re already late. We can pack up later. We have to see the agent who’ll be selling the house. He called me this morning before you came. Come on. In the car.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
I couldn’t see what the big deal about the obituary was, but obviously Dad was angry and had things to say about Grandma, and now after his first bombshell about her he was starting to say them. Maybe because Mom wasn’t there to stop him.
He seemed okay by the time we got downtown and even joked about the air conditioning in the real estate agent’s office. It was roaring full blast when we opened the door, and he pretended to stagger back out to the sidewalk.
I said I was cool for the first time since the airport.
“Not counting when you opened the refrigerator door!” he laughed.
Good one, Dad.
Randy Halbert was a puffy-faced guy about my father’s age, but with a very brown, young-looking mustache. Weirdly, his eyes never met you. No eye contact at all. Dad and I were there for almost an hour, but his gaze kept flicking around the desk between us, out the front window, at his secretary’s phone, his shoes, anywhere but at us. Maybe he had a lazy eye and couldn’t focus. It was just plain odd.
His hands were fidgeting all over the place, too, checking the position of his pencils, aligning them at right angles to his coffee cup, shifting a little plastic alligator, his stapler, and all the while chuckling under his breath as if he knew some private joke.
That was not only odd, it was annoying.
“I think we’ll be able to do a good job for you, and quickly. There’s quite a demand for quality little houses like yours,” he said, still amused at something. “For people to retire to, own as a vacation home, an investment, for a rental property, to die in, what have you.”
Maybe he was right to laugh. To die in. That was funny.
“St. Petersburg is called the City of the Unburied Dead. Did you know that?” he said to no one in particu
lar. Now he was just being creepy.
Lying open on his desk was a copy of the real estate section of the same paper I had bought. While he was blabbing on to my father and checking and rechecking his computer, I looked at the picture on the front page of the section. It was of an old, fairly low structure towered over by tall office buildings.
“I thought you’d like to see that,” Randy said unexpectedly, smiling at my throat.
“Sorry, what?” I said.
“The Hotel DeSoto,” he said. “It’s one of the oldest hotels in St. Petersburg.”
“Okay,” I said, putting the paper down.
He looked confused and almost hurt. “Your great-grandfather. You know about him, right? Quincy Monroe? He used to own that hotel. A long time ago, of course.”
“What?”
“You know,” he said, “the railroad tycoon? Quincy Monroe. They’re knocking the place down next week. Luxury mall. Which, by the by, I have a small investment in. Which also, by the by, is only a bus ride from your grandmother’s house, no transfers. Another selling point. It’s been vacant for years. The old hotel, I mean. It’s been tied up in court since, well, since your great-grandfather died. It’s coming down now, though. Wanna invest? Ha, just kidding. And no, you don’t own any of it. We all checked. Ha.”
I stared at the guy. Was he an idiot, or what? That was a lot of random information to just spout out.
“You’re saying my great-grandfather owned a hotel?”
He raised his eyebrows high and made a noise in his throat. “Several! And of course Gulf Railroad, for a while. That’s what made his fortune.” He laid two fat highlighters next to each other, then a third on top, which slipped through and sent the two bottom ones rolling sideways.
“His fortune?” I said. “Dad —”
“Mr. Halbert!” My father snapped. He shook his head quickly, then cut his hand across the air at me. “Never mind all that,” he said coldly.
“Dad, wait, a hotel —”
But Randy and Dad shared an intense look. It was the first time the agent’s eyes met any of ours. He stopped short and switched gears.