Stiltsville: A Novel - By Susanna Daniel Page 0,16

out—I’d been in college at the time—she’d seemed to reorder her notions. She’d stopped going to church and started gardening. She’d let go of most of her old friends, one by one, and took up with a few single women, divorcees who drank and told bawdy jokes. I would stop by her house, the house where I’d grown up, to find a group of them sitting in lawn chairs in the backyard, drinking Bloody Marys at noon. She’d stopped wearing makeup altogether—this might have meant something or nothing; I never understood it. The changes she made seemed to me like the ones a widow would make. She wasn’t happy about the new arrangement, I would say, but she was willing to squeeze some advantages from it.

The girl who came to share my father’s downtown apartment was named Luanne. Although she was young—twenty-seven years old when they met, compared with his forty-five—she had a child from a previous relationship who lived with Luanne’s mother. When I called their apartment, she gave me a polite hello and handed the telephone to my father, and it seemed to me that she was keeping him close at her side at all times, though maybe the situation was reversed. When Dennis met them, he said he thought Luanne looked like a doll, and I shushed him. He said, “There’s appeal, to some men, with that kind of woman.” He swatted me playfully on the rear end. “But it’s not for me.” As a child I’d loved my father very much—he spoke enthusiastically about the physics of space flight and roller coasters, he liked to read about places he’d never been, he called in sick to work when I was five so he could finish building my tree house—but I never grew accustomed to thinking of him as the spoils in a battle between women.

My mother and I had more or less avoided the topic of what exactly I thought I was doing, disposing of my job and disrupting my life to visit a boy in Miami, of all places. But while we waited together on the train platform, she pursed her lips and turned to me. “Miami seems so . . . ” she said, “I don’t know. Far.” She wasn’t one to hold tight, but moving a plane ride away was another story. “It seems decadent.”

“I guess maybe it is.” I thought of the elaborate wedding I’d been to when I first visited, the giant water fountain a few blocks from the cathedral, the sprawling banyan trees lining the streets. I thought of the young girls I’d seen posing for photographs at the Spanish-style arches in Coral Gables, all gussied up for their quinceañeras in hoop skirts and capes. Atlanta was lovely—there were lacy white dogwood and redbud trees and dirt roads and orchards, and in the autumn the leaves turned and fell and were raked into colorful piles—but Atlanta was not decadent. “You’ll like Dennis,” I said.

“What will I like about him?”

“I don’t know. Everything.”

“Does he remind you of your father?”

I thought about this. “No.”

“That’s better,” she said. She smoothed her chambray skirt and looked around, as if she’d forgotten something. My mother wore a ponytail every day of her life, even into her seventies. “Be nice to his mom, no matter what.”

“I will be.”

“Stay out of his 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.

In 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