Haley looked at the balcony, at Mary Alice waving down to Fairchild Weatherby. “I guess you’re right.” She grinned.

Sister gave a last wave, turned, and came in. “Y’all come on,” she said. “Fairchild’s going to help us unload the car.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Haley said, getting up from the sofa.

“Because you take after me. Nothing surprises me.” Sister headed for the door, stopping before the mirror in the hall to check her makeup. “Not even cappuccino machines being carted to the beach.”

“You just wait,” Haley said. “You’ll be glad I brought it.”

Fairchild Weatherby lives in the condo next to Sister with his wife, Millicent. Fairchild is from Toronto and arrived in the Panhandle to spend the winter eleven years ago with his first wife, Margaret, who managed to plow their Lincoln Continental into a utility pole on Highway 98 on New Year’s Day, thereby knocking out all the electricity to Holiday Isle, where most of the condos are located, during a Sugar Bowl game between Alabama and Florida State. I believe the national title may have been at stake. The intenseness of everyone’s sorrow over the accident touched Fairchild; total strangers wept. When Margaret died from her injuries (as did Florida State’s unbeaten record), Fairchild took her home to Toronto, had her cremated, and came back to Destin where the rent was paid through March, which, he had been led to understand, was the best golf month on the Panhandle.

“Brave soul,” the condo ladies said of the then sixty-year-old Fairchild. “Holding his head up through all his troubles.” It also happened to be a handsome head with a lot of white hair. And they comforted him with casseroles and invitations to dinner. Millicent Abernathy, the recently widowed resident manager ten years his junior, was the most help, though. When he informed her he was thinking of moving to Florida, she advised him to do it immediately while he could still see well enough to get a driver’s license. Once he had the license, she assured him, he would never be retested.

It was practical advice like this, plus the fact that Millicent was a sharp, nice-looking woman who owned a plush three-bedroom condo, that paved the path to true love. Fairchild and Millicent have been married ten years. The only flies in the ointment seem harmless: Fairchild’s mad crush on Mary Alice and his tendency to call Millicent “Margaret.” Millicent is still the resident manager, and Fairchild plays a lot of golf, having discovered that March is only one of the great months.

“How come Fairchild has a British accent?” Haley asked. We were sitting on the deck of The Redneck Riviera restaurant an hour later eating boiled shrimp. Quite a stack of shells lay on the newspaper between us.

“He’s Canadian,” Sister explained.

“Canadians don’t have British accents,” Haley said. “They talk just like we do.”