Stiltsville: A Novel - By Susanna Daniel Page 0,100

things had been picking up. They took long walks in the dry heat with their dog. I scrutinized each conversation for some hint that she might move back but didn’t find one. She did not seem overjoyed with her new life, but she did seem settled.

“Do you miss home?” I said to her.

She squinted, as if considering the question. “You know what I don’t miss? Dating.”

“I can imagine,” said Marse.

“Do you miss us?” I said.

“What a silly question,” Bette said. For a moment no one spoke and I wondered, ever so briefly, if it was silly at all. Then she said, “It’s like I moved away from my heart,” and I had to turn away.

When I’d composed myself, I stood up and started toward the door—it was time to lend Margo a hand—but then I turned back. My two friends looked at me, Bette in her suit and Marse in her low-cut dress. Their faces were as familiar to me as my own. I said, “Maybe it will be just fine.”

“It just might be,” said Bette.

“She has good role models,” said Marse. “It makes a difference.”

“Thank you for saying that,” I said.

That evening, I accepted the good wishes of our friends with a bright smile, and was surprised to feel a swell of optimism as Margo said her vows. Of course I hoped for her sake that the marriage would last, but I also hoped something more personal—more selfish, I should say: that Margo would come, through marriage, to understand Dennis and me in ways she never had before. I hoped Margo would learn that the cement of a marriage never really dries, and she would apply that understanding to her parents, and value the work we’d done to survive.

The city of Coral Gables had closed the canal to private traffic—we’d found neon notices stuck to the front door and the boat console—so we’d resigned ourselves to not knowing the fate of Stiltsville until the canal cleared or the telephones worked. Several times a day, helicopters beat overhead and a marine patrol boat cruised by the house, dragging a net glutted with debris.

“They’re looking for something,” said Dennis about the marine patrol. We were in the backyard, taking an ax to Mr. Costakis’s royal palm. Dennis was clumsy with the ax; he had a hard time hitting the same spot twice.

“They’re cleaning up,” I said.

The cruiser puttered away. “No,” he said. “They’re searching.”

“For what?”

“What else?” said Dennis. “A person.”

This seemed unlikely to me. I took the ax from Dennis and hoisted it over my shoulder. “Here comes that dark side of yours,” I said. I brought down the ax.

“I’m tired,” said Dennis. His shoulders sagged and his face was red. He sat down suddenly—or did he fall? I replay it in my mind, the slow bend of his knees, the arm reaching out.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“Nothing. Just the heat.”

I crouched beside him, surrounded by a dozen chunks of royal palm. “This is not our job,” I said, meaning Mr. Costakis’s tree.

“That doesn’t matter.” He stared at his shoes, then looked up at the canal. “If the stilt house is gone, I don’t want to rebuild.”

“Why not?”

“All that work, just for a few more years—doesn’t it make you tired?”

“Are we getting old?”

“No way.” He stood. “Spring chicks.” But his steps toward the swimming pool were sluggish and wooden.

Businesses were closed, including Dennis’s firm. Grady and Gloria had fled to Vero Beach to stay with friends. There had been looting—we saw footage on the portable television—and a curfew was in effect for all of Dade County. We stayed home, playing cards and taking walks and living off food we’d stockpiled: deli meat and eggs and fruit and bottled water, all nestled in squat white coolers. Every day, the National Guard passed through our neighborhood, heading south. We raised hands to them as they passed. Down in Homestead, the Red Cross built a tent city for the newly homeless. Our neighborhood felt to me like an island refuge—like Stiltsville, in a way—isolated from a continent of disaster and disaster relief. Our block buzzed with people working in their yards, grateful that their troubles were limited to landscaping, broken windows, a few irksome leaks. Marse stopped by once or twice when she could manage it. She lived in a condo on Biscayne Boulevard downtown, and in her neighborhood the phones were working and the roads had been cleared, but the lobby of her building had been transformed into a command station for the National