Stiltsville: A Novel by Susanna Daniel Read Free Book Online Page B

bedroom.”
    “Mother.”
    “It won’t be easy, but you’ll be glad you did.”
    “Mother!”
    She sighed. “Maybe I shouldn’t be giving advice,” she said, and then a whistle sounded, and the white light of my train appeared in the middle distance, as if gunning for me.
    I n the six months since we’d met, Dennis and I had not slept together. When I visited Miami, I stayed with his sister, Bette, who rented a two-room apartment above a shoe store on Main Highway in Coconut Grove. The apartment had a small cement deck that overlooked the street, and a screen door on squeaky hinges, and at night we could hear the traffic and the people on the street below. Bette had a couch with a creaky, shifting bamboo frame and flat square cushions printed with hibiscus blossoms—an uncomfortable place to sleep, made slightly less uncomfortable by layers of mildewy sleeping bags. She was tall like her brother and very thin, with white-blond hair and sharp, tan shoulders. She tended to slouch. She was not beautiful, exactly, but she had memorable, sharp features and lovely skin. She wore huarache sandals—I would wear them, too, after a year or so of being around her—and sleeveless shirts and culottes, and she carried a large crocheted handbag. She walked everywhere; she didn’t have a car. After she’d graduated from high school, Grady and Gloria had offered her their old hatchback if she would go to college and stay in all four years; but she was an indifferent student and the most she’d been able to commit to was a couple of classes per semester. Three times a week after work she walked four miles to the University of Miami, then took the bus home. She took botany and biology and political science and comparative literature. She spoke German—she’d spent a year in Munich during high school, as an exchange student—and she could name every flower, bird, and tree in South Florida. She had never traveled north of North Carolina. She was at that time engaged to her high school sweetheart, Benjamin O’Dell. They’d been engaged for five years, since her senior year of high school, but they had yet to set a date.
    Though Bette never said or did anything to make me feel unwelcome, I could tell by the way she lived that she was a private person, and probably didn’t revel in having a regular houseguest. I had the sense that she could snap shut at any time, that any bridge to her could collapse. To make myself useful while staying with her, I cleaned the apartment and left sandwiches in the refrigerator for when she came home for lunch. The apartment was across the street from Bette’s work. She was the groundskeeper for a private home called the Barnacle, which was owned by the family of the original owner, Commodore Ralph Middleton Monroe. Commodore Monroe had founded the first organization in the area—Biscayne Bay Yacht Club—in 1891, when Miami was little more than a fort. The Barnacle was nestled on the bay among ten acres of tropical hardwood hammock. No one lived there, but the family wanted someone on the property during the day, to make sure vagrants stayed out and the lawn was mowed and—most important—that the Egret , a schooner docked at the Barnacle’s pier, was kept free of growth and rust. The Egret was Bette’s main task, and the only one for which she truly was qualified—she had been sailing competitively since she was ten years old. There was a rumor that the family planned in the future to deed the Barnacle to the state and open the house for tours, and Bette hoped to continue to look after the Egret part-time and spend the rest of her time doing what she loved: scuba diving. Nights, she sometimes went into her room and closed the door, and I could hear music through the wall and the low tones of hushed speech as she talked on the phone. Two or three times, she’d stayed out all night—where, I didn’t yet guess—and had come home at dawn, tiptoeing into the living room where I slept. Once,