Stiltsville: A Novel - By Susanna Daniel Page 0,61

on more hours at the bank. We owed his parents so much money I thought we’d never be able to pay it back.

“You look tired, not older,” I said.

“Same difference,” he said, borrowing an expression from Margo.

He came to bed and laid his head on my thigh. I took off my bifocals. Dennis worried sporadically, in consuming fits, while I worried consistently at a moderate intensity, so it was rare for a new concern to spiral me into full-blown panic. I thought of his advice to Margo about school. “List the things you’re most anxious about,” I said, “and we’ll cross off the last two.”

He paused. “I’m nervous about the possibility of homelessness and poverty.”

“Ours, though? Not generally.”

“Ours, yes.”

“What else?”

“I’m worried that I won’t find a job—”

“You’ll find a job.”

“Assuming I do, there’s no guarantee I’ll like it any better than the last one.” This was true. “And I’m concerned that our daughter doesn’t have any friends.”

Truthfully, in those moments, Dennis did look older. “Anything else?”

“I don’t know.” He didn’t speak for a long moment. “I wonder if maybe Miami isn’t the best place for us.”

I sat up, knocking away his head.

“You’ve never thought about moving?” he said.

“Of course I have.” In fact, I’d thought of it a few times in recent years, as Miami had started to change. I’d noticed that on the bay there were more large flashy powerboats, and on land there were more luxury cars and new houses with security gates and surveillance systems—and I’d heard on the news that there were now more banks per capita in Miami than anywhere else in the country, and more cash in those banks than anywhere else. These seemed signs of something ominous. The summer before, in broad daylight, men in an armored van had pulled up to a liquor store at Dadeland mall and shot up the place, and since then, one could scarcely turn on the the news without hearing about the cocaine cowboys. More than once I’d heard the joke that in Miami one could always find work as a tail gunner on a bread truck. But although we saw the changes happening around us, they barely affected my family. We were insulated by where we lived and the circles we moved in. To this day, I’ve never seen cocaine in real life.

“It’s last on the list,” I said. “Cross it off.”

“Let’s talk about it,” said Dennis.

“We can talk about it, but we’re not going to do it,” I said. “Cross it off. You take the job thing, and I’ll worry about Margo. If you get tired, we can switch.”

Margo and I also negotiated over the next month. It was an unspoken negotiation. She’d taken Dennis’s advice, and Dennis had taken mine, and they seemed to be trudging along with their respective duties—the sixth grade, the job search—without sliding into despair. Meanwhile, I was experiencing a surge of energy: I prepared lavish breakfasts and hemmed old skirts to a more fashionable length. I devoured novels while Dennis made phone calls or Margo studied. I engineered inexpensive weekend activities: the zoo, the science museum, the beach. When I picked Margo up from school, she walked from the gate to my car without speaking to anyone. Weekends, she helped out behind the counter at Bette’s dive shop. We went out on the boat with Grady and Gloria, and Margo sat chewing bubble gum at the stern, flipping through magazines. Marse took her shopping at the outlet mall in Boca Raton, and she came home with a pair of designer sunglasses and sneakers with silver laces. Gloria told her that adjusting to change takes time, and Bette told her that very often other people stink. Soccer season was finished, and Carla’s family had moved away.

Our negotiation was this: if she could avoid becoming terribly unhappy, and she continued talking to Mr. Callahan once a week, then I would not nag her about school and friends and whether her life was improving.

One afternoon, she came to the car after school with Trisha Weintraub in tow. She introduced us and said that Trisha needed a ride, and they climbed into the backseat. I started the car and pulled out of the lot without knowing where I was going. Trisha wore tight blue jeans and a sweatshirt with a wide neck that revealed a flesh-colored bra strap. She usually rode home with her best friend Melanie’s mom, she explained, but that day Melanie had left school early with the flu. Trisha directed