Stiltsville: A Novel - By Susanna Daniel Page 0,97
world was quiet. There were no passing cars, no ringing telephones, no boats humming down the canal.
Dennis leaned against the rake and rubbed his neck. “I’d help,” I said, “but there’s a risk of self-combustion.”
“Stay in the pool.”
“I wish it were just a layer,” I said. “I wish we could just vacuum it all up.” I made a sucking sound, gesturing largely.
“I was thinking of forest fires,” said Dennis. “The way they nourish the soil. By April, we could have plants we didn’t know we had.”
“I want our old plants,” I said.
“No pouting.” He blew his whistle. I saluted.
There was, looming but unspoken, the matter of Stiltsville. Days earlier, when the National Hurricane Center had issued a storm watch for Dade County, I’d imagined the stilt house without its roof, the dock splintered—after all, the house had survived Agnes and Betsy and Hugo. When the watch became a warning, though, people started to gather provisions—batteries and flashlights and bottled water and canned goods—and I pictured the stilt house caved in on itself like a sunken cake. Then the storm arrived, and Dennis and I watched the wind bend our melaleuca trees until their branches brushed the ground, and I knew there would be nothing left.
A marine patrol cruiser made its way through the canal, sending the floating rubble into fits. The boat fenders rubbed against the pier. Dennis raised a hand and the patrolman waved back. There would be more of these good-natured greetings in the coming weeks. Overnight, Miami drivers would become uncharacteristically civilized, waiting patiently at stop signs and even signaling for others to go first. We would learn about a woman, a friend of Gloria’s, who volunteered to direct traffic for hours each day at an intersection near her house. Neighbors we’d never met would call out across the street or canal. We would exchange best wishes with strangers.
When hurricane season was still a distant and nebulous concern, faint breezes in the doldrums, Margo had called to tell us she was engaged to be married. She was twenty-one years old, in her last year at college. I answered the phone; a commotion in the background told me she wasn’t alone. “Mom?” she said. “Don’t cry.”
“You’re engaged to whom?” Beside me, Dennis dropped his newspaper. Margo had mentioned Stuart from time to time, but her references to him had been so casual, so incidental to our conversations—as in “Stuart and I went for barbecue and my car broke down and I changed the tire by myself!” or “I can’t talk long because Stuart is here unclogging my sink”—that I’d formed the idea they were not serious. When I’d visited her at school, we’d gone out to eat with a few of her girlfriends, but no boyfriend had been in evidence.
“Come meet him,” said Margo, her voice ringing with delight. It was this tone of voice that sent a shiver of excitement—joy, even—through my alarm. “Come tonight,” she said.
Dennis took the phone without asking for it. There was no telling how he would react; sometimes he took emergencies in stride, like when Margo was sixteen and woke us in the night to say she’d crashed Dennis’s car into a bridge down the street, and Dennis cleaned blood from her forehead and took her to the hospital. Since then, whenever we’d passed the scene of the accident, Dennis had made the same joke: “I think I see pieces of my headlights in that bush over there. Yep, there’s my back fender in the gutter.” A year later, though, when Margo had talked me into taking her to the gynecologist for birth control, he’d avoided her for two days.
Dennis snapped his fingers at me and covered the mouthpiece. “Do we know this person?” he whispered. I made a gesture with my hand: sort of. Into the phone, he said, “What do you mean?” The insectlike sound of Margo’s voice came through the telephone receiver, and I stood up to pace. “Sweetheart, it’s too late for us to get on the road.” He waited. I knew that my daughter’s voice had taken on a whine, a tone used exclusively with her father, a plea for approval. “Of course we’re happy for you,” said Dennis. “Sometimes it takes us time to digest. Haven’t we always come through?”
We drove to Gainesville the following morning. I watched the orange groves through the window, parting and seaming, and chewed my fingernails. “Stop that,” said Dennis, pulling my hand from my mouth. “This is not some stranger