My sister Lucy had her fifteen minutes of fame that day, too. She appeared on the front page of the Sarasota Herald Tribune, standing on the porch of the cottage, holding her forehead, and grimacing. The caption read: “Owner Distraught Over Loss of Property.” But, in fact, Lucy was badly hung over. She and her friends had, after a quick stop at the liquor store, made it to the Blue Dolphin. While they listened to the hurri-train roar through the pine trees overhead, they chugged half a dozen bottles of Murphy-Goode pinot noir and chardonnay.
Standing on the porch of the cottage, I surveyed the damage. Broken chairs, bent window screens, and debris perched atop mounds of sand dotted the beach and created a new landscape. Two walls of the cottage were missing. The rooms upstairs, without support, were cantilevered over the porch. Much of the lost timber, nowhere to be seen, had probably rushed away in the flood, along with the chaise lounge and Dad’s one shoe.
Marque stood next to Lucy, wearing the only outfit I’d ever seen him wear—his Speedo. His curls were still tussled but shorter, and he grinned while he sipped a Dos Equis. He looked like a shiny, golden object d’art, something akin to Michelangelo’s David because he seemed to have no hair except on his head. He continued to be one of Lucy’s longstanding joies de vivre.
“You have theez hurricanes. Why?” he said.
“God only knows,” I said.
“Ah, yes, zee gods. They have made quite a mess here, no?”
“Yes.”
Lucy sat down on one of the broken chairs. Ellie and Bruce were out at the water’s edge thirty yards away with a case of beer and enough oil to grease their way back to Chicago. They were asleep, or dead, face down on the towels with their feet in the water. The Gulf had again performed. Yesterday she was a grey demon. Today she was a rare jewel. The day was glorious, a perfect specimen of fall in Florida.
They’d had themselves quite a time at the Blue Dolphin, partying through the storm and ending with a very early morning skinny-dip in the motel pool. They made more noise than Josephine, so they got kicked out of their motel rooms. They decided to end the weekend with a sort of camping arrangement in the remnants of the cottage. It was turning out to be an open-air adventure. Most of the northwest corner of the cottage facing the beach, including the door, had blown away. They dared not use the upstairs for fear of crashing into the living room, although Lucy fearlessly crept up there to one of the side bedrooms for towels. The interior was safe and dry enough to survive, so they were reasonably comfortable, which didn’t seem to matter, since the whole bunch of them were pretty much anesthetized with various types of liquor.
We studied the picture in the newspaper. We were not in danger of having the cottage come down on our heads because the contractor, my savior, hurried over and propped up the second floor with two-by-fours.
“What a mess,” said Lucy. “I hope we don’t have to clean this up.”
I raised an eyebrow. “When have you ever cleaned anything up?”
She tossed the newspaper in the direction of a sand-clotted plastic chair. Marque plopped down next to her on the new, small dune on the porch floor. Lucy still wore her black bathing suit that clung to her like skin. The front of it plunged to her navel with peek-a-boo silver net coverage. She didn’t seem to care what she wore, as long as she could shed it quickly.
“Now, you’re giving me another headache. How about we forget this,” she said. “Want to go to the Sand Bar for margaritas?” She stuck a fingertip in her cheek and looked to the heavens. “Or piña coladas?”
“Now there’s the answer,” I said. “Happy birthday.”
“Ah, my sweet,” said Marque. “I do not try to escape you, but I think I will go have a little nap, down there on the water with those terrible people we came with.” He broke into an incredible grin, already flushed with a sunburn to match his deep brown, bloodshot eyes. He was still the most gorgeous thing this side of Antonio Banderas. “You go with your seester.” He got up and kissed Lucy on the top of her head and dashed off toward the beach, his backside a display of muscles carved from perfection.
“Nice,” I said.
“Yes, nice, and young. I think too young.”
“Really, how mature of you.”
Lucy shot me a look. One thing she avoided at all costs—from imperfect teeth to grey hair—was maturity. She did not wear it well.
“OK, let’s go,” she said. “But first, I have to primp, make myself cute as I can.” She headed off to the bathroom where the sand was piled up all around the toilet bowl—which, surprisingly, still worked. The electricity worked, too, even with most of the porch gone. Lucy and her entourage would content themselves for the duration of their stay with what was left of the cottage—the kitchen, still functional, and still bedecked with its orange Formica bar—surrounded with new sand dunes.
I’d swept up a bit, but it was pretty useless. The boards had popped up and curled like fruit peels. They would eventually retreat to their once level plane after they dried out, like a dozen times before. The cottage had survived one more storm.
And all the previous and glorious bright spots remained. The sunsets, the beach, washed clean and newly reconfigured, the birds that didn’t seem to mind a bit—all reasons why my grandparents chose the island.
“It’s a postcard, sent from God Almighty Himself,” my grandmother said. “If He had written anything on it, it would be to remind you that life is all about change. Just keep going and nothing will ever get you down.”
This was true, even though Josephine tore a hunk off my postcard and took it with her into the Gulf.
“Ready?” Lucy swayed across the porch. She’d wrapped a pareo around her middle in a bow to modesty, but the plunging suit scarcely hid the rest of her. I wore wrinkled shorts and an oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up, ready for action, which involved working on a Cuervo margarita with a tequila floater, and Shrimp Frances, a deliciously famous dish of shrimp served in hot garlic butter.
“I could use a little respite of margarita. Or piña colada,” I said.
We walked off the porch, right through the invisible walls, and across the beach. We checked on Marque, Ellie, and Bruce. They were still passed out and snoring into their towels, so we left them alone. I was glad because I wanted to talk to Lucy alone. I had some things I had to say.
So, we headed to the Sand Bar Restaurant, which, through the years, had turned into a sort of meeting point—a place on the beach where we ate and drank and sat for hours, as if there were not a care in the world, even when there were plenty. Like now.