SO I DID it. I pulled it off. We stayed in Key West for another week, and every day Daddy softened up a bit more, relaxing into his old self again. I could see it happening. My parents paid more and more attention to each other, less to me. When the maid came to their room in the mornings, she had only one bed to make up. I was free to roam all over town by myself, free to get my ears pierced by the oldest of the Cuban children who lived over the grocery—an act which served to unite Mama and Daddy even more, against me: “Honestly, Jenny, nice girls in Virginia don’t have pierced ears! Only maids have pierced ears, don’t you know anything?” Mama wailed, clutching Daddy’s hand for support. They would be together for twenty more years.

Though this ought to be the end of the story, it’s not. One more thing happened. One more thing is always happening, isn’t it? This is the reason I have found life to be harder than fiction, where you can make it all work out to suit you and put The End wherever you please. But back to the story.

A few days before we left for home, Caroline and Tom flew down to Key West for a weekend visit, bringing their brand-new baby (Thomas Kraft Burlington, Jr.—then called Tom-Tom) with them. I couldn’t wait to see Tom Burlington again, especially now that I had gotten such a nice tan and a new haircut and had my ears pierced and did not have to be good anymore. I had grown up, I felt. I had been tongue-kissed, and lived among stars.

I was ready for him.

But when they arrived, Tom wouldn’t pay a bit of attention to me, no more than Mason ever had. All he would do was wait on Caroline hand and foot, and make goo-goo eyes at his stupid little pointy-headed baby. It made me sick! Tom-Tom had colic, and spit up his milk, and cried all the time. I was dying to show Tom around Key West (I had not specifically invited Caroline), which I couldn’t do until Tom-Tom fell asleep, which took forever. But finally he lay curled on his stomach in a little red ball, oohed and aahed over by Mama, and Tom stood up.

“Come on, honey,” he said to Caroline. “Let’s let Jenny give us this grand tour we’ve been hearing so much about.”

I held my breath, but Caroline shook her head. “No, honey, you go on. I’ll just catch a few winks myself, I think. I’m really tired.”

Tom looked doubtful, but she squeezed his hand. “Go on, silly,” she said, and he did.

I showed him the cemetery first, but he seemed preoccupied, and didn’t even laugh at the funny tombstone that read “I Told You I Was Sick.” Instead he looked sweaty and pale, worried. “I ought to go back,” he said.

“No, don’t!” I was howling. “Come on. You’ve got to come down to the docks for the sunset. I want to show you the sharks and the iguana man.”

Tom looked uncomfortable now. “Maybe tomorrow,” he said, “when Caroline can come, too.”

We stood there awkwardly among the tombs and angels, which I loved, while—for the second time in Tom’s presence—I started crying uncontrollably. I don’t know what I had thought—that he would say a poem to me in the graveyard, perhaps, something about love and death, or undying love … about his undying love for me. Now I knew I was a fool—an idiot.

I turned and took off running through the cemetery without another word.

“Hey!” Tom yelled behind me. “Jenny! Stop!”

But I wouldn’t have stopped for anything. I ran like the wind, straight through the cemetery and out the gate and into the carnival bustle of late afternoon, all the way down Duval Street to the Havana Madrid, where I nearly crashed into Luisa’s billboard. Here I stopped short, panting hard. The door to the bar stood wide open, dark and inviting.

I walked in.

It took a while for my eyes to adjust, but then I could see fine. It was plenty light where the sailors sat with their beers, looking up at a girl who walked the long shiny bar wearing nothing but pasties and a G-string, stopping from time to time to dangle her breasts in their faces. She was a big-legged Cuban girl, nobody I had ever seen before. While I watched, she reached out and grabbed a sailor’s hat and rubbed it between her legs while he turned bright red and started grabbing for it. “Gimme that!” he said. “Give it back!” No older-looking than Harlan Boyd, he was mortified. Everybody was laughing at him when the girl smacked the hat back on his head and swayed off down the long bar and exited. I peered at the girls and men sitting at the tables all around the sawdust floor, looking for Rosa and Luisa, but I didn’t see them. The unimaginable corners of the cavernous room were dark and vast.

“Are you lost, Miss?” a tall black man at my elbow asked.

“I just came in for a drink,” I said, and went over to the bar and climbed up on a wooden stool before he could stop me. Two men sitting to my left elbowed each other, grinning at me. They were old and fat. I grinned back. “Well, hello there, honey,” one of them said. A skinny redhead sashayed down the bar in a top-hat-and-tails outfit, then came back without the tails.

I knew exactly what Jesus would think of this place, but since he didn’t exist anyway, I ordered a coke from the flat-chested blonde bartender, who was wearing a sort of corset.

“Make that a rum and Coke for the little lady,” the man said, and the bartender raised an eyebrow at him but brought it. I took a big drink. The man scooted his stool closer to mine. He touched my knee lightly, with one finger.

“Thank you, this is a delicious cocktail,” I said.

“It is, huh!” And suddenly Red is there, too, the other bartender, hands on substantial hips, fiery Medusa hair standing out all around her head, bosom heaving furiously. “Jenny, you get your ass out of here right now!” she yells, and I run out the door, straight into Tom Burlington. He grabs my shoulders and shakes me until my teeth rattle, then hugs me, then shakes me again.

“You little bitch!” he says.

What a relief! I have been recognized at last. I am a little bitch, and I will never be an angel, and it’s okay. I start laughing, and Tom starts laughing, too.

This is the moment when the street photographer snapped our picture, and Tom paid him for it, and gave it to me, and I have it still. I blew it up. I tend to move around a lot, but I always take this picture with me, and keep it right here on my desk.

In the picture, Tom Burlington and I cling together in the jostling crowd, our arms wound tightly around each other. We look like lovers, which we never were. Behind us is the Havana Madrid sign with the winking lady’s face on it. There is something she knows that I don’t know yet. But I will learn. And I will get my period, and some breasts. I will also do it plenty, thereby falling into numerous messy situations too awful to mention here. I will never be really good again. I am not good. I am as ornery and difficult and inconsolable as Carroll Byrd.

I don’t know whatever happened to her, or to Tom Burlington, who left my sister for another woman, an English teacher at his school, when Tom-Tom was still small. Caroline is happily remarried now, to a lawyer in Charleston, South Carolina, where she has raised four children and is the head of the Historical Society. Our lives are very different, Caroline’s and mine, and I regret that I don’t see much of her now, except for her children’s graduations and weddings. My oldest sister Beth is still married and still living out west; I don’t see much of her, either. Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh are long divorced. He’s an artist now. Cary Grant is dead. Grandmother and Aunt Chloë and Aunt Judy are dead. Mama is dead, too, of ovarian cancer in 1979. After she died, Daddy turned the mill into a co-op and gave it to his employees; Mr. Kinney’s son is running it today. Then Daddy surprised everybody by moving to Boca Raton, Florida, where he “up and married” (as Mama would have said) the real estate woman who sold him his condo. This woman has a black spiky hairdo, and everybody calls her “The Shark.” Daddy takes Elderhostel courses and seems very happy; his current personality bears no relation, that I can see, to his former self, to the person who is in this story. Cousin Glenda ran a rest home for many years after Raymond’s death; now she is in the rest home, and Rayette and her husband are running it. Rayette sends me a long chatty Christmas letter every year, even though I never did get a grip. I don’t know what happened to Harlan Boyd. Jinx is still my friend, and we keep in touch by phone, and meet at a spa in Sedona once a year.

For some reason, I can’t quit writing this story, or looking at this picture, in which the sun is so bright, and Tom Burlington and I are smiling like crazy. I guess it reminds me of Mama and Daddy in love, of the day when Mama and Daddy and I walked down to the docks to be in the movie, and cheered when the pink submarine came in, and waved hello.