“HOW DEMORALIZING to live in a terminally quaint village on the confluence of rivers and the Gulf coast of Florida,” Taylor said, swishing his shoulder-length, green-streaked hair. “Especially now, when the national psyche is totally depressed, and we live down the street from the gulf of poison.” My tall bony son could sound like a Gen X film.
He had walked out of his room when he heard the screen door slam. Long blond hair and thin Indian face, eyes black as a quarter-moon night. Too smart for his own good. I wondered if the more intelligent the person, the more unhappy they could become. I hoped he’d outgrow teen gloom. I was learning to bite my tongue when he complained. He was, after all, seventeen. I hugged him and handed him the few staple groceries.
“What’s the matter?” I said. A small, fat, toddler years ago, his eyes now looked down to meet mine.
“You can’t even buy a decent video game at the arcade or video store now,” he said, putting groceries away, talking about his afternoon. “The tourists last year bought up all the good stuff. I’d saved allowance to get good flicks, and inventory’s down. New movies won’t come in until—guess when—next tourist season, if we ever have another one after BP’s bloody bollocks up.” I was about to tell my son to please stop being so profane, even if it was British, but didn’t. “And since the economy is so tied to—”
“Mama, I’m so hungry!” called Daisy, running down the hall to embrace me. Her eyes held the evening’s amber light, and her hair was black as mine, only more orderly, shinier. She had her father’s family’s elegant noble-nosed looks. And at eight, she still loved her mother.
She hugged me, nearly knocking me down. “I got some Oreos.” She jumped up and down, clapping her hands. The age difference in my kids alone kept me exhausted, not to mention their varying emotional needs. She had interrupted her brother’s rant. He wasn’t really talking about video games, but something deeper, closer, more personal. I took out the mac and cheese package, because I am Betty Crocker only on free days, which aren’t many, and set water on the stove to boil pasta. I would drag out Dad’s broccoli and throw that into the mix.
“Hey,” I said to Taylor. “Come see.” I pointed out the window. We lived at the corner of Riverside and Port St. Leon, looking out towards the old Spanish Fort at the confluence of two rivers and the Gulf. From our front balcony on the second story, you could see the few blinking lights from boats and buoys in the now-black winterish night. “This. This is still ours.” I hoped he wouldn’t lecture me on the sugar in Oreos.
“Cool,” he said, hands on the railing, his body leaning out towards the view. Still, his black eyes looked doleful.
“How’s school?”
“Terrible, as usual,” he said. “Stupid, slow, boring. Have you been to high school lately? It sucks. Well-known fact.”
I sighed. He couldn’t make sense of the Trina ordeal, just as his father’s death hadn’t made sense to a young boy. He’d admired Trina’s work with the environment. He knew the planet was in peril, and some teachers at school had warned me that he was way ahead of everyone—including teachers and administration, if you asked him. Still, I thought he needed to learn how to fit in. He’d dyed his hair cobalt blue at thirteen. After that, he’d grown his blond hair out to the middle of his back. People stared at him. A little conformity, I had learned, went a long way. He had sneered at my out-loud thoughts about all this.
“Oh,” he said now, brightening. “I forgot. Madonna called.” He pushed his hip out like Betty Boop and flicked his eyelashes. Even my son recognized that Madonna was a striking combo of Georgia farm girl and exotic African-Hispanic woman. She looked like a pin-up with a Southern accent that would melt tea china. And Madonna had that rare ability to really listen to everyone. It’s why men would confess anything to her.
“Oh, stop it,” I said, but was glad when he grinned and nudged me. We turned from the window, and walked back to the kitchen.
“She wanted you to call her right back. Hey, can I go out tonight? After dinner? After I clear the table?” I nodded and went for the phone. I had quit asking him if he’d done his homework. That always meant a big debate over busy work versus reality.
“Help your sister with Oreos and milk, will you?” I said. He nodded.
“Hook Wreck,” Madonna said, somehow pulling four syllables out of the bar name. I could hear bar murmur in the background, the clink of glasses.
“So you made it to work. That St. Annes waiter didn’t take you off into the sunset?” I said.
“He’s too city for me. College boy. Still a baby, too,” she said, pausing, taking a drag off a cigarette. She indulged while working. Said it alleviated stress. “Glad I only had two beers with oysters, though. Anyway, did you hear about our cop Cooter’s wife, Mary?”
“No, what?” I admired Madonna’s radar for juicy gossip. I poured the pasta into the boiling water as the kids set the table with clinks and whispered sibling disagreements.
“Well, the thought of Cooter leaving her on their date night to go over to Piney Point to do that police report on Trina Lutz just about did her in. She got drunk as a rabid yard dog at that bar up in Cureall Tuesday night, swearing Cooter was having an affair with Laura,” Madonna said. One of the fishermen had told her this.
“Laura?! Our Laura? Knight?” I said. The drunk and early-balding half-cop with my eccentric and brilliant friend, Laura? Impossible. Mary, concocting paranoid stories.
“Our Laura,” Madonna chuckled, and went on. I was fishing around in the refrigerator looking for butter. She went on about how one minute Mary was dancing drunk on one of the tables, threatening to strip. The next, one of the Greek spongers who was off the boat for some days from down Tarpon Springs way was trying to pull her down off the rickety table. Mary started swinging at him. He thought it was funny till she picked up a beer pitcher and nearly took out his left eye.
“Then she broke a glass and came at him. That’s when the bartender called Mac. He was over at the Cureall Cafe by chance. Mac called the county cops and had her hauled off to the county jail, waiting for Cooter to get off work,” Madonna said. Mac was the go-to guy when Cooter was out of pocket, or if it involved Mary. His money and influence gave him cop-clout.
“Mary creates her own bad reality TV, not poetry, like she claims.” My kids sat down in front of the TV watching “The Simpsons.”
“A bartender’s job could go on prime-time reality TV sometimes,” she said. “If it ain’t a shrimper coming in after two weeks on the Gulf without a bath, it’s the oystermen already drunk on some rot gut and just come in to pick a fight.”
I pointed out that Laura lived out near St. Annes Key, not at Piney Point.
“Close enough for Mary,” Madonna said. “I think she sees Laura reporting news while Cooter is doing police reports and puts two plus two together to equal thirteen.”
“Damn, you ain’t saying.” I was falling into my Cracker accent and slang with Madonna. I’d flip from college English teacher talk to my home girl twang quick as the wind picks up on a sailboat without even realizing it. “The county jail?”
“Cooter could have stopped it, you know,” Madonna said.
“Well, it’s not like Mac had to call and have her drug off.” Neither of them was the Mother Teresa, even if Mary was three-quarters crazy, I surmised. “Another day, another St. Annes drama.” I was relieved to be talking about stupidity with my girlfriend. I threw the broccoli into the boiling pasta pot.
“How about giving me a haircut before the funeral?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said. “But I just saw you, and unless somebody threw a bucket of paint in your hair, you don’t need one.”
“Please. I need a change. Then I can tell you the rest,” she said. “Can’t tell you on the phone.”
“Hmm,“ I said.” Okay, then.”
I dumped the pasta water and mixed in the gooey cheese and got off the phone.
We decided to eat in front of the TV. The kids had settled. After our modest dinner, we began dipping Oreos into glasses of milk, even Tay.
Daisy came over to the sofa and cuddled up. “I love you, Mommy.” She squeezed me, warm and soft against my side. We settled into watching old videos of “Dexter’s Laboratory,” our favorite cartoon. Taylor, revved up to go out, sat down across from us and began talking about how he’d learned, from his grandfather, tricks for seeing in the dark. I usually tuned out his explanations for camouflage clothing and stealth tactics. He lectured us on how you have to sit in complete darkness for one hour before your eyes adjust completely.
“Then you can rescue people,” he said. I didn’t like this rescue obsession, which had begun just after the divorce—guarding this, rescuing that, saving the other. He went through a “Dungeons and Dragons” phase that swallowed up his middle school days. Maybe it was a guy thing, as Madonna would say.
“Well, you be careful at the park,” I said.
He let out an impatient breath. “I will,” he said.
“Be home by ten. No later, hear? It’s a school night,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, standing up, hands in his pockets. He looked skinny and fragile to me. I held my arms out, and he gave me a quick hug.
“You doing okay?” I said. He nodded, not looking at me. He went out, shutting the door quietly. I could hear him skipping two steps at a time as he bounded down the steps. I went to the window to see him walk down the street into the vast night.