On balmy evenings, they sat in the covered porch swatting mosquitoes and listening to monkey calls. Raccoons left poop valentines on the doorstep every night. At no time did they ever talk about unhappy things. Instead, they ate fruit from Mary-Sue’s trees, drove down to the Keys and, on Kate’s most recent visit, popped over to peek at the giant sinkhole that had appeared in the yard of Mary-Sue’s neighbor, Larry, a short, ruddy man who did some kind of building-contractor work.

“The Lord won’t never let us forget the whole of Florida’s one big swamp.” Larry hawked a loogie past his potbelly and into the void. Simple man, Kate thought.

No longer roommates who took each other for granted, mother and daughter opened up more. They discussed terrorism in big cities, picked hurricane shutters out of a catalog, debated the morality of local restaurants that served turtle fresh from the Everglades. It surprised Kate that Mary-Sue had evolved over the years into a perfectly plausible Southerner. She belonged in Florida. She wore sandals to restaurants whether appropriate or not, stacked unwanted items in the yard, and developed a sweet tooth for any kind of nut roasted in brown sugar. As each visit drew to a close, it always became clear that all Mary-Sue wanted was to assure Kate that she was doing fine on her own, and that her self-transformation was complete. Kate envied—and slightly resented—Mary-Sue’s confidence and adaptability. Most of all, she missed her bustling energy around the house. The German shepherd she’d rescued from the pound was a very poor substitute. She knew it was unreasonable to hope that a pet could replace her mother; still, she never expected to be stuck with such a timid, sickly lump of a dog.

At the end of her last visit to Homestead, after their usual unsappy, pat-on-the-arm goodbyes, Kate felt sorrier than usual when she had to leave—a huge part of her wanted to move into her mother’s tropical paradise and forget all about Alta Vista. As Kate backed down the driveway in her rental Saturn, feeling the queasy separation anxiety she always felt, Mary-Sue ran over and rapped on her window: “Oh, I almost forgot! You wouldn’t guess who I ran into at the Borders on Dixie. I wouldn’t have recognized him if he hadn’t called out to me first.”

“Who was it?”

“Oh, I better not say.” Mary-Sue was coy as a schoolgirl. “He asked me to keep it a secret. I think he’s going to surprise you in California one of these days.”

– 6 –

– 6 –

DOUBLE-DIP