Stiltsville: A Novel - By Susanna Daniel Page 0,15

said Dennis. “He’ll wait on the fish for hours. I don’t have the heart for it.” He said his father would come home from a day of fishing with small, exciting stories: He’d seen a barracuda jump across the surface of the water, its scales flashing in the sunlight. He’d felt a bump against the side of the boat, and looked down to see the domed back of a manatee. He’d seen a family of dolphins, the smallest no larger than his forearm. “My mother thinks he’s a bit simple, I think,” said Dennis, and I said, “He is simple.” I knew very little of Grady other than what I’d been told. Dennis knew I meant it kindly.

Dennis told me that his sister, Bette, younger by three years, used to sleep in the backyard in the summer. He’d come downstairs in the morning and find his sister and mother sitting outside on Bette’s sleeping bag in their pajamas, eating pancakes off Chinet.

“My favorite thing about you?” I said, thinking: You call me every day! You don’t worry about what it costs. You kissed me mere hours after meeting me. “You’re kind,” I said.

“That’s it?”

“I don’t know you all that well.”

“Yes, you do.”

“You have great legs.”

“I’m going to marry you.”

I’d known a few men pretty well, and something I’d noticed about many of them was that for some reason they didn’t like to give you what you want, whatever it happened to be—reassurance or approval or attention. This seemingly was not because they couldn’t spare it, but because they wanted to teach you not to want it. But in my mind, people weren’t needy or independent—they were a swirl of both. I wondered if these men thought they never needed. I knew they did, but then their needs were sated so fully and with such generosity by the women in their lives that they didn’t recognize needing something in the first place. As I grew to know Dennis, it struck me that he was not one of these men. From the beginning, he did not withhold. This, ultimately, was the answer to his question, though I could not have formulated it at the time.

It would be disingenuous to say, however, that I had no doubts about Dennis. Once he’d snapped at me when we’d been driving for hours and I’d taken too long to choose a radio station, and one night he’d bagged a dozen fireflies in the woods behind my apartment house and let them go in my darkened living room, as if this would charm rather than irritate me. More important, I wasn’t certain I had the mettle to live in Miami, with its flash and heat and vanity. But still, Dennis seemed, from the start, inevitable. It hadn’t taken long for me to succumb, but I’d faked it for a while. Sometimes I’d hemmed and hawed about taking time off work for another visit. But from the beginning, the sight of him yawning in the television’s blue light, or running a fingertip across his eyebrow, or blowing on his coffee to cool it off, made me shiver with want for him.

Once when we were on the road, I woke up in the passenger seat and sat watching him while he drove, and it dawned on me that I could watch him for minutes before he noticed, because he was a man who lived inside his own head. I snapped my fingers and he looked over at me. “Awake?” he said. He reached into the backseat and rooted around. “Have an apple,” he said. I ate what he gave me, and fell back to sleep.

After I lost my job, my mother drove me to the train station, drumming her short, strong fingernails on the steering wheel. Since I had nothing to return for, this particular visit to Miami would have no scheduled end date. I’d packed two large suitcases. “I’m going to play it by ear,” I told her, and she raised her eyebrows at me. “I’d prefer you had a plan,” she said, but she offered to drive me anyway. Her muddied canvas gardening gloves lay on the seat between us. When we arrived, she loaded me down with pimiento cheese sandwiches and a brown bag of peaches for Dennis’s family. My mother was a tall, strong-backed woman with wide hips and a handsome face, and she spoke quietly and not often. She had been somewhat old-fashioned throughout my childhood and teenage years, but when my father moved