Stiltsville: A Novel - By Susanna Daniel Page 0,112

at the most, Dr. Auerbach had said. This stunned me. Three years before, Bette had still lived in Miami, Margo hadn’t been married, the stilt house hadn’t been destroyed. In the doctor’s office, when this news had been delivered, Dennis had said, “We’ll shoot for five, then, won’t we, baby?” and when he turned toward me he looked almost eager, like he’d found a great big project he was itching to tackle.

I washed my face and applied lipstick while Margo finished the frosting, and when we went outside, Marse was there with a video camera, recording us as I rolled Dennis onto the porch. “Where did you get that?” I said to her. I’m afraid I sounded a little irritable. I touched my hair. I felt about having video cameras around the way I felt about having strangers around—self-conscious and defensive.

“This?” Marse said, then without answering turned it on Margo and Stuart, who were standing together against the deck’s railing, her in his arms. It was always a little surprising to notice that she was taller than he, though only by a touch. They waved at the camera and Stuart kissed Margo’s cheek.

The food was already set out, so I wheeled Dennis into place and sat next to him. Marse sat on his other side, and Grady and Gloria sat next to her. Stuart sat beside me and passed the sweet potato casserole I’d made early that morning, before sunrise. It had been quiet and still in the kitchen. I’d put the casserole in the oven just as a sliver of sunlight had started to spread across the canal, like a door opening onto a darkened room. I loved living in the big house. I loved the thicket of bougainvillea between us and our neighbors, and the gentle slope of the lawn leading down to the canal, and the ferns along the gravel driveway that Grady and Gloria had never bothered to pave. I loved the memories—ones I had and ones I couldn’t possibly have, of what had come before us, when Grady and Gloria slept in our bedroom. I loved the telephone nook in the den and the breakfast nook in the kitchen and the sun-bleached wooden deck, where Dennis and I spent an hour almost every evening.

Grady was talking about the time he and the family had run across a corpse in Biscayne Bay. It was an old story, but Stuart had never heard it, so Grady was animated and bug-eyed as he spoke. “Mercy!” he was saying. “We thought it was just a bit of detritus, something that had snagged a piece of fabric.”

“It was clearly fabric,” said Gloria. “It had that shine of fabric in water.”

“Exactly,” said Grady. “So we idled up to it and I cut the engine, and when our wake hit it, it turned a bit in the water”—he made a gesture with both hands, like rolling a log—“and there was his eye looking straight up out of the water, this blue face.”

“Blue?” said Stuart.

“Black and blue,” said Gloria. She waved her hand around her face. “Beaten. It was horrible.”

Grady said, “Gloria covered the kids’ eyes, but they saw—we all saw.”

“I lost my cool, you might say,” said Gloria. “Here you are, in your boat, with your family, on a Sunday afternoon—”

“And suddenly—” said Grady.

“And suddenly you’re faced with this gruesome thing, this news story.” She shook her head. “We’re used to it now, but Miami was still just a small town then. The drugs were small potatoes, and the mob was a country away, in New York.”

“Obviously not,” said Stuart.

“No, that’s right, obviously not. It was like the end of innocence, that day. That was the year that both these lots were built up.” She pointed on either side of the house. “And that was the year they built the expressway.”

“My grandparents left Florida,” said Stuart. “Then my parents left.”

“Everyone left,” said Grady.

“You didn’t,” said Stuart.

Grady shook his head. “This is my home. This is where I was raised. This is where I raised my family.”

I didn’t know I was going to speak before I spoke. “Lots of people leave their homes,” I said. “I left mine.” It felt strange to put it that way, strange to recall that there had been a time when Georgia was my home, and Miami had been just another distant city where I’d never been. Over the years, every time my mother had visited, usually in the winter months for a week at a time, she’d