Sex in a Sidecar (2 page)

I joined the line of cars loaded down with families and all their possessions waiting for the north bridge to go down over the inland waters while a dozen boats motored past the lift bridge heading for safety. For now traffic was still two-way. If the storm moved closer the bridges would go on lock down and no more boats would be able to leave the inland waters. Traffic would become one-way off the island.

I turned the radio to a weather report and watched a pair of osprey feeding their young in the big sloppy nest of sticks and twigs they'd built on the light standard. It didn't look like it would withstand the slightest of breezes, never mind hurricane-force winds.

When all the boats passed, the two arms forming the center section of the bridge lowered into place and I headed out Tamiami Trail to a rundown strip mall where a coalition of Baptist churches ran a drop-in center and shelter.

The plaza was devoted to poverty. A social service office at the center was bracketed by a thrift shop and the church help center. The builders hadn't wasted any imagination or money on preventing the flat-topped stucco buildings from being ugly. Painted a diluted shade of Pepto-pink, brown rust stains dripped down from leaking overhangs and if you weren't depressed before you came you sure would be when you arrived. I pulled around to the back of the building where the potholes where big enough to jar your fillings loose and parked beside Marley's Neon.

With my hands loaded down with plastic grocery bags, I kicked on the weathered door with the toe of my wooden clog until Marley threw the door open and said, “Beware of strangers bearing gifts. Come in stranger.”

She emptied my right hand and backed into the kitchen with me following. Tall and thin, she was wearing wrinkled shorts, a hot pink tee-shirt and orange flip-flops. Her red curls hadn't seen a comb since she'd lifted them from her pillow. The curls and lack of makeup gave her face a false look of childish innocence, but strong-willed and stubborn cut closer to the truth. If you wanted someone to drum fools into line there was no one better than Marley. She'd make the perfect minister's wife, an event she was already planning. The truth was Marley had re ally come into the woman she was always meant to be. Unlike me, she'd just been marking time and pretending to be a crazy girl, but I missed the mad prankster, the party 'til you puke girl who'd made way for this bossy do-gooder.

I dumped my load on a long metal table in the center of the kitchen.

“I'm delighted to see you're in such a good mood this fine morning,” Marley said.

“Try being celibate as long as I have and see how cheerful you are.”

“I'd love to hear all about your complicated love life,” she told me, already diving into the bags, “but I'm a little short of time and sympathy.”

I flexed my fingers, getting the circulation back. “Where is everybody?” Laughter coming from the dining hall answered my question.

“We pushed the tables together and set up a production line.”

“Mr. Defino threw in all the produce and dairy,” I said, wedging the outside door open with a triangle of wood. “I'll bring it in but then I have to leave. The Sunset is going to open and it seems I'm expected to be behind the bar.”

Marley looked up, a jar of peanut butter in each hand. “Who's going out to the beach for lunch? It's crazy to open.”

“Tell that to Chris.”

“Keep your ass off that island, girl.”

“Everything's in the truck. I'll head for Orlando as soon as we close.”

“Why aren't you going up to Cedar Key with Clay?”

“I thought you didn't have time for my love life.” She planted a fist on her hip and asked, “How long have you two been together?”

“I moved in with him last February, eight months ago.” But she already knew that.

“Right, and how many of those months haven't you been going to move out?”

She didn't wait for my answer but started ticking my complaints off on her fingers. “First you said he was too controlling, and then you never knew how he felt about things, didn't talk enough — didn't stroke your ego enough is more like it, then you went on about how much he worked. Pardon me if I'm getting a little tired of your problems with this perfect man in your life, the man that delivers great sex and never lies. After Jimmy, he's a saint.” She hoisted a couple of bags and sprinted for the next room.

I went back for Mr. Defino's cardboard boxes in the back of the pickup, nasty comebacks piling up in my head. Marley was right about Jimmy, my lying, cheating, scam artist husband, after him anyone would be a saint. Clay was honest and dependable and all those good things Jimmy wasn't. What was I complaining about? What was wrong between Clay Adams and me?

It was as if we had shuffled out on a high diving board and were standing, looking down, afraid to jump and afraid to shuffle back to safety. We were terrified of forever but what we had was too good to give up. Only one thing was clear…we couldn't stay where we were. That was no place to live, hovering on the edge of trust, pulling away at any sign of commitment or promise.

We had a few other problems. Clay was older, richer and smarter than me. Coming from a prominent Florida family, he belonged to the best private golf club on the coast and was a member of everything that counted while I was none of those things. Low class, no class, trailer scum was how Jimmy's mom described me.

Clay's social calendar emptied when he took up with me. The good people of Jacaranda were waiting for him to come to his senses. Actually, I was expecting him to come to his senses too. Perhaps that's why I wasn't making any plans, just hanging in to see what came next. But then again that's pretty much what I always do, planning ahead being one of many life skills I don't have. Inertia always had worked for me in the past so I was pretty loyal to it.

Jimmy and I had been separated for a year when he was murdered. Clay had helped me through that bad time and I'd move din with Clay within a month of Jimmy's death. And while we were still living together, he'd taken on a development project in the panhandle. He'd asked me more than once to join him there but I'd stayed in Jacaranda.

Marley told me, over and over, that I'd moved in with Clay too soon, told me I wasn't over Jimmy yet. She also told me the problem wasn't with Clay but with my head. Marley was never one to hold back in case she hurt your feelings or ruffled your feathers.

I slid the last box onto the counter. “I'll talk to you later,”

I said, and headed for the door.

“Sherri.” Marley's voice had changed. It was softer and less bossy.

I looked over my shoulder at her, still annoyed. “Stay safe,” she said and smiled.

My anger melted. During the last evacuation we took refuge with some other fools in a bar a hundred miles inland and partied for two days. Those days were gone and I missed them already. “You too, Marley.”

“And for heaven's sake, just this once, try and stay out of trouble.”

Well, it was almost a tender moment.

Black storm clouds tumbled and rolled over each other, scurrying north ahead of the storm as I crossed back to the island. It's always worse out on the island than it is on the mainland but the force of the wind still surprised me when I reached the top of the bridge, buffeting the pickup and bouncing it sideways.

The wind grew worse as I crossed to the gulf side of the island and turned south onto Beach Road. Out in the mountainous waves the odd surfer still challenged nature. Some guys live for this kind of surf and the hotdoggers would be the last to leave the sand, risking their very lives to catch crazy-big waves.

I clenched the wheel, struggling to keep to my side of the road while the wind raged and blew and danced the pickup around, making it more like tacking than driving. Sand and sea spray covered the windows. Wind bent the palms in half and set the light standards trembling. What was happening here? We should have had hours before the storm got this strong. I told myself it was only because there was no protection. Things would be better on other parts of the island.

I parked beside the three cars huddled together as close as they could get to the white historic building that housed the Sunset. “Shit, this is a really stupid idea,” I said. Only forty feet of sand separates the road from the Gulf of Mexico. There's no barrier of land, no trees, no tall buildings between the breaking waters on the beach and the Sunset. There's only sand, some beach grasses and light standards and a flat strip of road, letting the wind get a real good run at the building. Now that I was there, I hated to leave the shelter of the cab. The sand was going to sting like the devil, like someone taking a rotary sander to your skin.

I checked my cell phone for missed calls. None. “Don't call. See if I care.” I tossed it back in my purse and leaned forward to look up at the Sunset Bar and Grill on the second floor of the building.

Metal storm shutters had been lowered over the floor-to-ceiling windows. The old building no longer looked gracious and elegant but blind and fortress-like. The Sunset's dining room runs along the front, facing west and overlooking the beach, which gives diners an unobstructed view of the sun setting out towards Texas. Originally, back in the early twenties when the building housed a hotel, a balcony ran along the front of the second story. Later the balcony was closed in with Palladian windows, and in the early nineties the wall between the two rooms was removed. The new space was two steps lower than the old dining room, giving the room a theatrical feel, enhanced by the nightly round of applause as the sun set out over the Gulf of Mexico. For a few seconds each evening everyone paused to watch the sun dip below the rim of the world, setting the sky on fire with reflected glory.

Today the lowered shutters would turn the dining room into a dark and dreary cavern. That alone would scare away customers even if they hadn't started to leave the island like a line of ants going to a picnic.

Tucked behind the restaurant was the bar. This elegant space functioned like a private club for the elite of the island and more million-dollar deals were sealed over a drink in the Sunset than in any office in town. Every day I watched and listened to movers and shakers from up and down the coast changing the lives of ordinary people. Unfortunately, I never figured out how to make a dime out of any of it. Still, I lived in anticipation.

I gave up contemplating the building and admitted why I'd come to the Sunset. “He's not coming,” I told myself. “No knight on a white horse for you. Get your ass gone.” But hope dies last…and hard. And sometimes hope is all you have to get you through the night. I'd been so sure that Clay would give in and come back to evacuate with me.

“Shit,” I said and pushed open the door. Gusting wind stole my breath and then shoved air, too much air, down my throat making it impossible to breathe out. My lungs were under attack.

I fought my way to the building, hands cupped over my face to protect my eyes from the biting grit while my hair whipped around my head, lashing and tangling around my fingers.

Ignoring the elevator beside the stairs, I struggled up the broad steps, blown in tight to the railing by the force of the blast.

Chris Cooper, the obnoxious rookie manager of the Sunset, held the etched-glass door open. “This is just awful,” he said as he wrestled it closed. Chris had turned tropical shirts and dark trousers into a uniform. Today's shirt was in shades of gray and black, as if he'd dressed for the weather. Thin-faced, with sharp pointed features, Chris had a perpetually worried air about him. “Just awful,” he repeated. A harsh nerve-jarring screech filled the foyer.

“It's a palm scraping against the shutters,” he reassured me as though he were the hurricane veteran. “It keeps happening.”

“Well, that should entertain the customers.” I fingercombed my hair back from my face. “The only people likely to show up are the ones coming to experience a hurricane close up and personal, fools who head south as soon as an eye starts forming. They'll like the noise.” I stuck my head into the dining room. Gwen Morrison was setting up tables. I gave her a wave and turned back to Chris. “Is it worth opening?” “I don't know,” he wailed. New to Florida, he had only taken over managing the Sunset in May. Not much happens here in the summer months, except storms. “This is worse than anything we've had so far. I just don't know.” Visibly shaken, nearly bouncing with anxiety and shifting from one foot to the other, he said, “I don't know what to do.”

“As Grandma Jenkins would say, ‘Piss or get off the pot' — better make up your mind pretty quick.”

“Maybe it will blow by. Maybe this is the worst we'll get.”

“And maybe I'll be Miss America,” I replied, heading to a second set of glass doors leading off the foyer to the bar. I stopped with my hand on the frame. “Have there been any calls for me, any messages?”

“No,” Chris said, too upset to even go into his normal song and dance about personal calls.

I paused inside the door and took a deep breath. If rich had an odor it would smell like the bar of the Sunset: like expensive perfume, old leather chairs and smoky single malt scotch, the essence of power. And power was what the Sunset was all about.

The lights were on but I switched on the giant fans. Twelve feet across and still operated by huge pulleys, they'd come from North Carolina, along with the twenty-foot mahogany bar, back in the thirties when a private lumber barons' club went bankrupt. Now the fans creaked and groaned before settling into stately circles, spreading a soft breeze through the room. They gave the room the feeling of an era long gone by.

Normally, soft jazz floated on that gentle zephyr of the fans, but that day the only music was the creaking of the leather pulleys and the low growling of the wind, demanding to be let in. I set my cell phone on the counter and took a small radio out of my leather bag, fiddling with the dial until I got the Coastal Weather Station at the
House of Refuge on Hutchinson Island
.

The calm voice of the announcer gave wind speeds and direction. I lowered the volume.

I started a pot of coffee and then got the two small coolers out from under the counter. When special customers call for meals to go, the coolers are used to deliver them. I took the coolers into the kitchen and told Miguel, the luncheon chef, what I wanted before I helped myself to some fruit. “Time to have a little fun,” I told Miguel. “I'll bring you a taste.” I backed out of the kitchen with the loaded tray.

I'd just cut into the first melon when the whine of the wind increased in the foyer as someone opened the outside door. Another fool had arrived. I heard voices and then the glass doors to the bar were flung open. Gina Ross paused dramatically in the opening, “Oh my god, I thought my hair was going to blow off.”

I laughed. “What are you still doing here?”

Smoothing her hair, she came to the bar. “That coffee smells great,” she said and hoisted herself up on a stool. “You should be in Georgia by now,” I told her.

Gina was a high school English teacher from Pittsburgh. I couldn't figure out what brought Gina to Florida at this time of the year because she hated heat and humidity, and that's pretty much all there is in October. She'd come on down sometime in September and found the Sunset right away. Around forty, at least ten years older than me, we'd become friends in a casual sort of way, playing a couple of games of golf and talking over her nightly drink. I reached for the coffee carafe. “If not Georgia, at least go to Jacksonville, anywhere away from here.”

“And miss the fun?” Gina smiled easily. She wasn't the usual unattached female who came into the Sunset, not one of the human barracudas. Hungry and dangerous and circling the bar for prey, they come to Jacaranda for sun, sex and surgery. Not Gina. Not only did she hate doing nothing in the sun, she took no interest in how she looked. Gina's washed-out blue denim dress hung straight down from her breasts to her ankles while the sandals on her feet were sensible flat black canvas, screaming practical and cheap. Her thick salt and pepper hair, her best feature, was cut in a severe bob and parted in the middle. Small plastic butterflies held her hair back from her round face. Not one thing about her said, “Hello, sailor,” so it was a pretty safe bet it wasn't sex that brought her here.

“Haven't you heard that Myrna is heading back towards Florida?” I asked her.

“Yup.” With her hands planted on the bar, she swiveled the stool back and forth. “ Sounds exciting.”

I shook my head at her. “Too much excitement.” This woman needed to be shocked into good sense. “The temperature will hit the high nineties or more and the humidity will be off the gauge. If the storm takes out the electricity there'll be no refrigeration and no air conditioning. And that's only if we get extremely lucky. Real bad luck will bring a tidal surge of ten to twenty feet. In a hurricane more people die from drowning than ever die from the wind.”

She went perfectly still. Her eyes grew wide before her face froze in panic.

I relented and softened my words. “Don't worry,” I assured her. “We aren't going to get anything like that unless Myrna turns east towards us. But you should still go.”

“What about all those hurricane parties we read about back home?”

“For idiots only and you're no idiot.” I poured myself a coffee. “And they don't happen on the beach. Really, Gina, I'm not kidding. Cypress Island is no place to be in a hurricane.”

“But you're here.”

“Did you see that red pickup in the parking lot?” She nodded.

“Well, it's mine and it's packed with all my worldly possessions. If Myrna comes any further east I'm out of here, up to Orlando to hang out in a motel until she's long gone.”

“But…” She got no further. The voice of the announcer changed, catching my attention. I put fingers to my lips to quiet her as I turned up the volume.

“It's confirmed now, Hurricane Myrna has changed direction. The eye of the hurricane is moving north towards the Florida Panhandle. People living in coastal areas from Tallahassee to Tampa should be prepared to leave for higher ground.” I turned the volume down.

Gina asked, “Where do you go in Florida to find higher ground?”

“North Carolina,” I said and opened the fridge to get out a bowl of creamers. “You should get the hell out of here. The roads will be crammed and they'll only get worse.” I set a bowl with packets of sugar by her mug. “Finding a motel will be hell if you haven't booked.”

She frowned, as if giving the suggestion serious thought, and then shook her head in denial. “Not yet.” “Why? What are you waiting for?”