Heart of Palm by Laura Lee Smith Read Free Book Online

graduate Utina High with Frank’s older brother, Carson. Frank had often noted with displeasure that, given the unfortunate fact that the Lil’ Champ had always been the only place in downtown Utina to buy a few simple groceries and a cold six-pack, he’d been subjected to Tip’s questionable etiquette advice for pretty much half his life. When stopping in for a cup of coffee and a doughnut from the Plexiglas case next to the lottery tickets, Frank should have known that this morning would be no different.
    “What are you doing, avoiding that fine piece-a-ass?” Tip asked, with characteristic grace. He was an enormous man, fat in the thighs and hips like a woman, eyes red-rimmed and wet, a strangely boyish thatch of straw-colored hair protruding from beneath a soiled ball cap. In school he’d been a moose, thick necked and powerful, but his physique had melted southward over the years, leaving him lumpy and pear shaped, rolls of belly barely concealed beneath dingy T-shirts and elastic-waist shorts. It was terrible. Tip grinned, showing off the gaping space where he’d had an incisor knocked out back in 1989 when, fully loaded at 2:00 A.M . on a Sunday morning, furious over last call, he’d tried to gain entry to the Cue & Brew through a roof vent and had instead become intimately acquainted with the asphalt pavement of Seminary Street.
    “I’m not avoiding anybody, Tip,” Frank said. “If I was, believe me, you’d be first on the list.”
    “Awww,” Tip said. “Sweet. Somebody got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.”
    Frank filled a Styrofoam cup with weak-looking coffee. He fished two Krispy Kremes out of the case, slipped them into a waxed paper bag, and approached Tip at the register.
    “Why don’t you talk to her?” Tip said, staring out the window again at Susan Holm’s receding backside, which was now running east up Seminary Street. Tip made no move to ring up Frank’s purchases. “Tell her to quit selling Utina to the damn yuppies. She wants to sell your properties, you know. And I guess you would make a fucking mint.”
    “I have talked to her,” Frank said. “I’ve talked to her plenty.”
    Tip shook his head, pulled his gaze back from the store window. “I’ll bet you have,” he said. Then he changed direction. “When’s Carson coming up here?” he demanded. “Me and him, we gotta go fishing or something.” Frank raised an eyebrow but did not reply. He was quite sure that his brother had no intention of going fishing with Tip Breen anytime in the immediate or distant future. He couldn’t even remember the last time he himself had gone fishing with Carson. But Tip had already forgotten he’d asked the question.
    “You hear who’s running for sheriff?” he said abruptly.
    “Don’t tell me,” Frank said, raising his eyebrows.
    Tip jerked a fat thumb toward a pile of campaign signs propped against a rack of porn magazines behind him. The signs were designed in a bold red-white-and-blue star motif, and in the middle of the largest star read the candidate’s slogan: DONALD KEITH! FOR SHERIFF!
    “Jesus,” Frank said. It was hard not to laugh.
    For nearly as long as Frank could remember, Officer Donald Keith had harbored a personal vendetta against the Bravo boys of Utina and their associates, namely Mac and George Weeden and occasionally, when they could tolerate his company, Tip Breen. Donald Keith was ten years older than Frank, which meant that just when Keith was eking out a career in law enforcement as a rookie cop on the City of St. Augustine police force, before he made the switch to the county beat, Frank, Carson, and their younger brother Will were beginning to act upon their birthright in the areas of reckless endangerment, criminal mischief, and brilliantly wrought misconduct. They were their father’s sons, after all. But these were issues of lineage and fierce, if questionable, familial pride that held no water with Donald Keith. Do-Key , they called