The stainless steel kettle reminds me of Claire: polished to a gleam on the outside, boiling within.
—Ann Mah, Kitchen Chinese
After we had exhausted all our chitchat subjects—the weather, mostly, and my mother-in-law’s flight—Miss Gloria launched into a rundown of the details of my wedding.
“It might have been the most touching ceremony I’ve ever witnessed,” she said. “Perfect clear night and beautiful music and food and flowers. And we were all so relieved that Nathan was alive and out of the hospital—you could feel the love between those two and amongst all our friends and relations. It was like someone threw the coziest, fuzziest blanket in the world over our pier and tucked us in.”
Which I thought was the sweetest description ever, but my mother-in-law barely reacted.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to be there,” Mrs. Bransford said. She took a tiny sip of sparkling water and a nibble of celery. I had recommended that she load it up with either pimento cheese or smoked fish dip, but she’d done neither. “I’d like to hear more about the rescue before the wedding and his recovery from gunshot injuries. He doesn’t tell me much, as he knows I worry.”
“Sounds familiar,” I said, with a grin. At last something we had in common. But before I could begin to report the details of all that, the phone alert I’d set sounded with the warning that we needed to leave for the tour of holiday lights. I collected the dishes and glasses from the porch, carried them to the kitchen, and quickly stowed away the food.
We drove out to the high school on Flagler, Miss Gloria pointing out sites of interest along the way, though not the ones I would have chosen.
“There’s Bobby’s Monkey Bar, voted best karaoke in Key West this year, and that’s Better Than Sex restaurant, which serves only desserts and fancy drinks. They get a lot of traction because of their name.” She giggled. “And here’s the Salvation Army thrift shop. They are loaded with great bargains,” she announced, as if we knew it well, as if we’d shopped for all our household furnishings there. Not that that wouldn’t have been perfectly fine, and even contributed to saving the planet by recycling stuff—but Nathan’s mother didn’t seem like the kind of person to browse in thrift stores.
I parked, and we got out of the car. I locked the doors behind us. The Conch Train, which took passengers on tours of the island, consisted of four bright yellow and red cars outfitted with bench seats pulled by a jeep disguised as the engine of a train. We snagged the last three seats on the last car, the red caboose. Mercifully, we’d be facing out toward the road behind us, which put a tiny amount of space between us and the other train riders.
As the conductor welcomed passengers over a crackly audio system and distributed blankets for our journey in case we felt a chill, I considered how things were going so far. Mrs. Bransford had been pleasant but cool. There was nothing I could put my finger on as evidence that she disliked me on sight, other than the fact that aside from the celery stalk, she’d nibbled on only one piece of the mildest cheese in my display. I knew I needed to give this relationship time. Lots of time.
All the cars were strung with blinking holiday lights, and Christmas music began to pipe out of speakers right above our heads. The rest of the customers, many wearing Santa hats or fuzzy antlers, appeared extremely well lubricated, some already warbling “Grandma got run over by a reindeer” in full voice. The train driver, dressed in an elf hat with a string of lights around his neck, explained that we should all keep our feet and hands inside the ropes strung across the door to each seat. Then a tinny rendition of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” began to blare over the PA system, and the visitors in front of us cheered and sang along.
“You have very enthusiastic tourists in this town,” Mrs. Bransford said.
“You haven’t seen the half of it,” Miss Gloria shouted over the music. “Since you’ll be here for New Year’s, you’ll get the whole picture.”
I flinched at the mention of New Year’s—Nathan hadn’t told me how long his mother was planning to stay, and honestly, three to four days under this kind of strain felt a bit like a life sentence. Not that she was terrible; it was just that I felt so tense in her presence, afraid I’d do or say the exact wrong thing that would alienate her and convince her I was too dizzy to be married to her precious Nathan for life.
“Though you are definitely enduring the worst Christmas songs ever written,” Miss Gloria was saying. “We should have warned you in case you were allergic.”
The train lurched across Flagler Street and into a small New Town neighborhood that tourists seldom saw. We drove by small concrete block houses decked out with lights of all colors, blow-up Christmas figures from The Grinch, Charlie Brown, The Polar Express. We saw fake-snow machines, homeowners having cocktails in lawn chairs and enjoying our enjoyment, and finally the first-place home, which we’d heard through the grapevine belonged to our brand-new mayor. She and her wife had decorated the front of the house as the North Pole, with enough lights to power every home on the Keys all the way up to Miami.
“It’s quite beautiful, isn’t it?” asked Miss Gloria.
“Very enthusiastic,” said Nathan’s mother.
“Wait’ll you see the way the drag queens dress up for Christmas,” Miss Gloria told her. “And if you can stay up that late on New Year’s Eve, you won’t want to miss Sushi the drag queen dropping from the heavens in a giant sparkly red shoe.”
“Sounds quaint in a truly bizarre sort of way,” Nathan’s mother said.
The driver announced that we would be making one last visit for his personal favorite display, known for its comic relief, and then take a spin across Duval Street and finally return to the high school.
“Only in Key West,” the driver sang out as he navigated down a small one-way street near the cemetery. “Santa may be a little late this year,” he announced, pointing to a blow-up Santa Claus splayed out on the front porch of a small home. Santa had an empty bottle of booze clutched in his right hand. “I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus” thrumming in the background completed the tacky picture.
We drove slowly past the display. “It’s all good fun,” I said, “but my favorite decorations are the most classic—the local palm trees with trunks wrapped in white lights and fronds strung with green lights.
“How do they decorate in your neighborhood?” I asked my mother-in-law, who at this point seemed a little stunned by the breadth of our island’s holiday cheer.
“Fortunately, there are rules in our condominium complex,” she said. “White lights only, green wreaths, preferably fake so they don’t shed, and nothing too religious or flashy.” She grinned, and I had no clue whether she was teasing or dead serious. I was beginning to suspect that Nathan had suggested this train ride rather than his mother requesting it.
We finished the swing across Duval Street, and as predicted, the drag queens, masquerading as Santa’s elves, were in full form: dressed in very short red skirts and high heels and big hair topped with striped elf hats. The sidewalks were jammed with pre–New Year’s revelers. It would be a bit of a relief to get back to the houseboat.
When the train had returned us to the high school and we loaded back into Miss Gloria’s car, I asked Nathan’s mother, “How did you like it? The only thing you didn’t really get to experience was the boats dressed for the holiday on the Key West Bight. Maybe we can do that tomorrow. Snag a beer and some steamed shrimp for happy hour?”
I did a mental forehead thunk. Did she look like the kind of woman who’d want to snag a beer?
Before Mrs. Bransford could respond to that suggestion, Miss Gloria tapped me on the shoulder. “Would you mind terribly taking us down Olivia Street again? The house with the Santa drinking display. He drove too fast as we went by.”
“Of course not,” I said firing up the motor of the old Buick. Though it struck me as odd that she would select that home as the one set of decorations she wanted our guest to see again. And I was a little worried about my shrimp stew. But it wasn’t far out of the way, and for now, I wasn’t going to argue with any request from my passengers. No matter how peculiar.
“This is such a sweet neighborhood,” Miss Gloria explained. “It’s very close to the cemetery, so the neighbors aren’t rowdy.” She giggled. No matter how many times she told that joke, she always thought it was funny. “If Hayley and I didn’t live on Houseboat Row, we’d probably choose something here instead. Maybe a sweet little two-family or a conch house with a guest cottage in back where an old lady could live out her golden years?”
“If that’s what you want, you know Nathan and I will do it,” I said, glancing at her grinning face in the rearview mirror. Though I was pretty sure she’d leave the houseboat only under the direst circumstances.
I parked the car in a residential spot a block from the Santa house, as Miss Gloria said she wanted to get out in order to see the details of the display up close this time. We made our way along the narrow sidewalk to the house in question. My foot slipped a little, and I noticed I’d stepped on a necklace made of blue beads. We were a little bead-crazy in this town, especially around Fantasy Fest and the holiday parades. I reached down to pick the necklace up so no one else would slide on the glass beads and stuffed it into my pocket.
As Mrs. Bransford approached the porch ahead of me, the tinny music pouring out of a boom box on the porch got louder. “I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus”—over and over and over. The neighbors must be ready to wring someone’s neck.
“There’s a lot more drinking on this island than is good for anybody,” Miss Gloria said. “Everyone makes jokes about it, and we have barhopping crawls where the object is to get stinking drunk, and too many establishments are open until four AM. I went on a ride-along with a police officer last year, and trust me, all the worst behavior happens after midnight. But it isn’t healthy, and we know it. Hayley and I are careful about how much we drink, especially with a police officer living in our home.”
I snickered.
She waved at the palmettos separating this property from its next-door neighbor. “While you admire the lights, I’m going to take a quick look around,” she said as she veered into the brush.
Nathan’s mother forged ahead of us, stopping only feet from the steps leading to the porch. She crouched down as though examining the display more clearly.
“This may seem strange to you,” my mother-in-law said, pausing to look over her shoulder, “but I’ve got a bad sense that something is very wrong on that porch. And I’ve learned to pay attention when that little voice speaks.”
I studied her profile with renewed interest. Finally something else we had in common aside from adoring Nathan: premonitions.
“I don’t think that’s a fake Santa,” she said in a voice tight with tension and fear. “I think it’s a body.”