Waiting for Sunrise (19 page)

She drew her arms up and around his neck before kissing him soundly. “Welcome home, baby,” she muttered against his lips.

The knot in her throat had disappeared.

21

Gainesville, Florida

What was his father doing walking into Alachua County Hospital? Carrying long-stem flowers, no less?

Billy paused long enough to watch until Ira disappeared on the other side of the front doors. He jogged across the street, up the steps, and walked into the foyer to the U-shaped desk he remembered. An older woman with short gray hair and a firm line for lips sat on the other side, working a crossword puzzle with a short pencil. She looked up with a sigh. “May I help you?”

Billy looked beyond the desk and into the foyer. Collections of vinyl couches, chairs, end tables, and coffee tables topped with worn magazines met his gaze. No more than five people were scattered among them. None of them were the man he called “Daddy.”

“Um . . . my father just came in.” Billy raised his hand, keeping his fingers horizontal. “Tall man. Big.” He tried to look as confused as he felt. “He forgot to tell me where to meet him.”

The woman smiled at him as if they were in on a secret. “Fifth floor, hon. The elevators are over that way.” She pointed to the left.

“Thank you, ma’am.” The file was heavy in his hand. He clutched it tighter under his fingertips.

His feet felt like lead. Something was wrong; he knew it. Anyone his father was an acquaintance of, they knew as a family, right? Unless, of course, there was someone here from his father’s job. Well, of course. That was it.

He pushed the top brown button in the brass plating next to the elevators and waited for the doors to slide open. When they did, he stepped into the tiny cubicle, pressed the 5, and waited again.

The elevator was painfully slow in its ascent. There were no stops along the way, and when it finally rocked to a stop at the fifth floor, the doors opened to a small L-shaped desk. Behind it, a thin young woman dressed in a white nurse’s uniform and a dark blue bib apron looked up. Her cap held three blue ribbons at the top of both sides. On the desk was a stack of metal charts, which her hands rested upon, as though attempting to keep them from sliding away. Above her was a sign with bold black lettering.

5th FLOOR
MATERNITY

“May I help you?”

Billy blinked as he read the sign. “Yeah . . . yes, ma’am.” He looked from the sign to the nurse. “My father just came through here. I was supposed to meet him, but I don’t know where.”

Keeping her hands on the charts, she turned her attention to a piece of paper to her right. “Mr. Liddle?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“He’s with his wife in room 512.”

“His wife.”

“Yes,” she answered, beaming. “Congratulations on the birth of your little sister, by the way.”

Billy’s heart hammered so loudly, he couldn’t hear himself respond, “Thank you.”

He just stared at the woman as though he were looking through her. And perhaps he was. At that moment, he couldn’t be sure of anything more than that the floor beneath him had turned to quicksand and the air around him was being sucked from the hallway.

Then the nurse pointed to her right. “It’s that way,” she said.

He started down the hall. Doors with numbers—502, 504, 506—swam before him as though they were riding ocean waves. When he came to 510, he slowed in his pace until he was practically walking heel to toe. At 512 he paused. The door was ajar. He could hear his father speaking, a woman answering back. She sounded young; other than that, he couldn’t make out what they were saying.

He took a step closer, turned his head to see better. Daddy sat on the bed, the flowers, still clutched in his hand, lay on the other side of a woman’s legs. The woman—young like he suspected and very pretty—sat upright in the hospital bed. She wore a pink . . . what did they call that thing? A peignoir, Ronni had called it after they’d seen Doris Day wearing one in a movie. It was made of material so soft and sheer he couldn’t believe she dared wear it in a public building where anyone could see.

Where he could see.

Where his father could see.

“Beautiful today as always, my love,” he heard the familiar baritone voice of the man he no longer recognized.

“Have you seen her?”

“Just did. She’s the most exquisite thing I’ve ever encountered.” And then Ira Liddle leaned over and kissed her, right on the mouth. It was a deep and passionate kiss, full of ardor. “Next to you, of course,” he said when they’d broken apart.

The woman slapped at him playfully. “Oh, you,” she said.

It was all Billy wanted to see. But not everything he wanted to hear. He pressed his back against the wall next to the door so his position was at a maximum for eavesdropping, especially around the dings and calls from the overhead system.

“Have you told her yet?” the woman asked.

“Now, now. What did I tell you, my sweet?”

“Not to worry.”

“Then why are you asking me, pet? Surely it can’t be good for a young mother.”

Billy’s eyes narrowed. His father sounded nothing like the man he knew him to be. The man he’d thought he’d known his whole life.

“But when?”

“Soon.”

“How soon?”

There were kissing sounds. Billy ground his teeth, squeezed his eyes shut as he clutched the file for Mr. Stone against his chest. He couldn’t breathe. Dared not try.

“Soon, I promise. I’ll tell her everything, I’ll file for divorce and I’ll make an honest woman out of you. And I’ll formally adopt the baby.”

Billy felt the onslaught of another migraine. He pounded his head against the wall.

“What was that?” he heard his father say.

Without thinking Billy turned toward the door, pushed it with such force it bammed against the wall, and said, “It’s just me, old man.” For a moment, he thought it was Harold’s voice coming from within him.

“Billy!”

His father had stood and now started toward him. The moment’s valiance was gone; Billy jerked at the sound of his name, dropped the file, and ran.

Just like he’d always done.

———

He barreled down the stairwell, taking two sometimes three steps at a time, holding on to the railing to keep himself from falling. When he reached the first floor landing, Billy jerked the heavy metal door open and stumbled into a small passageway. For a moment, he braced his backside against the glossy white wall, pressed his hands against his knees, and panted toward the tiles on the floor. When he’d straightened, he listened for voices, something—anything—to guide him to the front of the hospital, then thought better of it. If his father had taken the elevator, he’d be in wait for him, either in the foyer or the parking lot.

Or worse, at home.

He had to think, he told himself. Think, Billy. Think.

Billy pushed himself away from the wall, pulled the stairwell door toward him, and stepped back in. He took the stairs, this time one at a time, up to the second floor, opened the door, and just started walking, past closed office doors with nameplates that looked like wood with cream-colored lettering. He stopped when he found the one that read HERBERT STONE, ADMINISTRATOR.

Billy tapped on the door, waited for Mr. Stone to tell him to come in. When he did, Billy stepped into a tidy outer office. From beyond a secretarial desk and chair, he peered into a luxurious inner office where his family’s neighbor stood on the opposite side of a large desk. “Oh, there you are,” the older man said. He stepped around the desk, stopped, and said, “Son, are you all right?”

Billy shook his head. “No, sir.”

Mr. Stone continued toward him as Billy rested his hand along the top of an occasional chair for support. His head was pounding. “Did you bring the file?”

Billy looked at both hands. “I must have . . . I think I dropped it.”

Herbert Stone guided him into the chair. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“No, sir.” Billy tried to shake his head from side to side, but the pain made it impossible.

“What then?” Mr. Stone pulled his secretary’s rolling chair to Billy and sat opposite him.

Billy looked up, squinted against the office light, and said, “I just saw my father and his mistress, Mr. Stone. On the fifth floor.”

“The fifth floor?” The words came as part question, part statement.

In spite of every effort he made to the contrary, he started to cry, making himself sound more like a young boy than a young man. He wrapped his head in his arms. “I don’t know what to do, Mr. Stone. I don’t know what to do.”

And then he threw up.

22

Summer 1960

Sikes’s Seafood Restaurant was buzzing with the news.

Senator John F. Kennedy had won the California Democratic Primary. “He’s a shoo-in,” Billy heard one of the afternoon regulars announce. Four men who came in every afternoon for a cup of coffee and a slice of Mrs. Sikes’s homemade key lime pie.

Another said, “He’s too young. What does he know?”

Billy shook his head and smiled as he hauled another bag of ice on the breadth of his shoulder from the truck parked out front to the freezer in the back. Why the iceman wouldn’t just drive the truck around to the alley was anyone’s guess. But if Mr. Sikes hadn’t thought to question him, Billy sure wasn’t going to.

John Sikes sat at a table near the kitchen doors, glass of iced tea sweating onto thick pine, ledger spread out before him. Billy could tell he pretended to work, but what he was really doing was listening. One day, he thought as he dropped the bag of ice into the chest freezer, that would be him.

He headed back through the dining area for the third time when Mr. Sikes stopped him. “What do you think, Billy?”

Billy turned, breathing heavily. “What do I think about what, Mr. Sikes?”

“Kennedy. What do you think?”

Billy looked from the table of coffee-drinking, pie-eating table politicians to his boss. He grinned. “I think I’m only eighteen. I’ve got three more years before I’m old enough to vote.”

“But you have an opinion, right?”

Billy nodded. “Yes, sir, I do.”

“And?”

He smiled. “Well, sir . . . Daddy didn’t teach me much, but what he did teach me was to keep my thoughts on politics to myself.”

John laughed. “All right then, son.” He looked at his watch. “By the way, where’s my daughter?”

Billy took a single step backward before answering, “She said she’d be here as soon as she was finished getting her perm down at the beauty salon. You’ve known her longer than I have, sir. Your guess is as good as any.”

Mr. Sikes took a sip of his watered-down tea, picked up the pencil laying across the open ledger, and said, “I should have told her to take the day off.”

“I’m sure she’ll be here soon, sir.”

“Mmm . . . How have
you
been doing, Billy? No headaches lately?”

“Just one last week, and that was the first one in a month. Doctor says I’m fine though. Says some people just get migraines from time to time.”

Sikes nodded. “Let me know if you need anything.”

Billy returned to the truck. It was only four-thirty in the afternoon and already he was bone weary.

After his parents’ divorce, when there was only him and his mother left, he’d taken as much work as he could get to help them survive. Mama had gotten the house in the legal settlement, her car, and enough cash to get them by for a while. She’d been more of a bulldog than he’d ever expected, no doubt because of her friendship with Nadine Stone. Many was the time he heard the two women at the kitchen table; Mama crying and Mrs. Stone practically holding a pep rally.

Her first order of business was to sell the house. “It belongs more to the bank than to us,” she told him. “We’ll sell, move into someplace smaller, and save what little bit of money we’ll have left over.”

Mama never once talked in terms of “I.” It was always “we.” Her and Billy. Them against the world. Somehow they’d make it, she told him. They had each other, they had some money, enough good sense, and the good Lord to guide them.

Billy had never felt such a burden in his life.

Her second order of business was changing her last name to the name she’d shared with her first husband. She asked Billy to understand; he complied. What else was he to do?

Shortly after finding his father in a hospital bed with another woman, he’d gone to the prison where Harold resided, to tell his brother of their father’s indiscretion and the half sister it had produced. Harold seemed neither shocked nor upset.

“Sounds like something the old man would do,” he said.

“That it?” Billy asked from the round table with the chipped paint amongst a noisy roomful of the same. “That’s all you got to say?”

“What do you want from me, Billy? You wanna hear me cry or something? Well, boo-hoo.” Harold’s face was as cold as his heart. “Come on the inside with me for about fifteen minutes and then tell me all your sorrows. This place makes your problems sound like a cakewalk.”

The difference being, he and Mama hadn’t asked for this and Harold had gotten what he deserved. “Aren’t you going to ask about Mama, Harold?”

Harold leaned back in the metal chair and crossed his arms. “Sure. How is she?”

“She’s hurting. She’s embarrassed.” Billy shrugged. “Scared a little. Mrs. Stone has been a big help to her.”

Harold chewed on his lower lip before answering. “You know, Bill, Mama knew the kind of man she was marrying when she married dear old Dad. She can’t tell me she didn’t. When you grow up and get wise to the ways of the world, you’ll see what I mean.”

Billy just shook his head, the irony of his brother’s words not lost on him. There wasn’t anything more to say. Not really. So he stood and said, “I’ll come back to see ya soon, Harold,” and then walked out of the prison’s social hall, knowing it would be awhile.

Since then, he and Mama had moved into the guesthouse of one of Billy’s Clinton Street customers. Mama had gotten a job at the hospital in admissions, working from seven in the morning to three in the afternoon. She said she was happy, but Billy only saw evidences of stress and the hardships of life etched across her face.

Billy continued with his lawn service until Mr. Sikes increased his hours and he was forced to choose.

The smell of sweat and grass or of fish with the scent of Ronni’s perfume. The choice was easy.

Somehow he’d made it through the remainder of his junior year and had kept senior year to all it was supposed to be. He and Ronni continued in their unofficial nondating capacity. No kissing and minimal hand-holding. Church functions or movies and burgers with their friends. He loved her more with every passing day, but he had nothing to offer her by way of a future. Certainly not working for her father at his current salary. Even full-time now that he’d graduated.

Even with his good grades and a number of scholarships offered, college was out. He wanted a future with Ronni but felt the need to be a financial help, not a hindrance, to Mama. What he needed was a plan, but try hard as he could to come up with one, nothing surfaced.

Until the day he went to the barbershop to get his hair trimmed and everything changed.

———

Billy liked wearing his hair a little long but not like the beatniks. He kept it slicked up, combed back, and short over his ears. To keep it from falling into his face, he headed over to Costlow’s Barbershop, which was only five storefronts away from Sikes’s.

He always went a half hour before his appointment; it meant having an opportunity to listen to the older men talk about their youth, the wars they’d fought, and what pleasures they found in life now. It gave Billy something to hold on to, knowing that every life has its problems and that somehow by the grace of God, people managed to rise above them.

On a particularly hot day in July 1960, with the thrill of Independence Day celebrations dancing over Gainesville, Billy listened to five men and two barbers as they spoke of “the way we used to do it back in the forties.”

Billy sat in one of the chairs pushed against the storefront window and to the right side of the spinning barber’s pole. Sunlight skipped across it, sending reflected shafts along the walls of the shop.

“The wife wants us to head over to Cedar Key,” Larry Jones said.

“Cedar Key?” Old Mr. Bailey barked from a chair across the room. The elderly gentleman sat, legs crossed, newspaper folded in his lap as though he were reading it, which he was not. “I thought that place got wiped off the map back in . . . when was it now? . . . ’50?”

“What are you talking about, Marcus?” Ben Costlow’s trimming scissors stopped midsnip over Larry Jones’s head as he shot a glance over his right shoulder.

“Back in ’50 . . . Hurricane Easy, I think it was.” Billy watched as the man pondered, eyes cast toward the ceiling, chin bobbing up and down as his mind clicked off the hurricane seasons. “Yeah, that was it. Hurricane Easy.” Watered-down eyes returned to look at Mr. Jones. “Tore that little island up. Had an old army buddy who lived there. He was a fisherman. The entire fleet of fishing boats was destroyed.” The man’s jaw went back to bobbing. “That was their primary source of livelihood over there, don’t you know.”

Mr. Costlow returned to his concentrated efforts over Larry Jones’s cut. “So, anyway . . . what in the world does Dee want to go over to Cedar Key for?”

Billy watched as Mr. Jones’s shoulders shifted. “First of all . . .
Marcus
 . . .” He shot the man on the other side of the room a know-it-all look. “The island may have suffered in nineteen hundred and fifty, but this is nineteen hundred and
sixty
—”

“I know what year it is!”

Every man in the shop guffawed. Billy looked at his knees and bit his lip to keep from laughing, afraid he would come across as disrespectful.

“That’s ten years, mind you.”

“And I know my math too.”

The laughter continued.

“Ten years is a long time and did you ever stop to think that maybe, just maybe, they’ve rebuilt? Why, Dee tells me that they’ve even got a police force now and Ma Bell has added a phone system.”

“All I know is . . . my friend told me that near ’bout ever’ house was destroyed. Ever’ one.”

Billy cleared his throat. “Uh . . . Mr. Jones?” In the mirror, Billy watched as Larry Jones’s eyes shifted to him. “What is Mrs. Jones hoping to do there, if you don’t mind my asking, sir?”

“What she always does,” Aaron Bennett, the second barber who’d been relaxing in his chair throughout the exchange, said. “Fish! That woman would rather hold fishing gear than ole Larry sitting there.”

This time, Billy laughed with the others. But when the merriment had subsided, it got him to thinking.

Fish . . .

———

The local library told him everything he needed to know about Cedar Key. It had, indeed, been rendered nearly nonexistent by Hurricane Easy, but it wasn’t the first time the cluster of islands off the west coast of Florida had taken a beating.

“Eighteen-forty-two,” he told Ronni the following evening. They fought off insects and heat by gliding in the swing hanging at the right end of the porch. Ronni held a funeral home fan; her constant and almost violent waving of it kept both of them in the way of a breeze. “Depot Key—one of the Cedar Keys, which is now called Atsena Otie—was hit by a hurricane that raised the water level twenty-seven feet.”

“Twenty-seven? Should that have destroyed it?”

“It nearly did.” Billy felt himself growing as excited as he’d been when his idea first came to him. “After Florida was admitted into the Union, Cedar Key was used as a shipping port. In the mid-1800s, the town started to grow. A hotel, a general store, but then everything kinda shut down because of the war.”

Ronni smiled at him. “Billy, school is
over.
Why are you giving me a history lesson?”

Billy shifted in the swing to better face her. He slapped at a mosquito lighting on his arm and killed it, then wiped away the evidence with his fingers. “Just listen. History is what brings us to where we are now, Ronni, and helps us to know where we’re going. Or where we
should
go.”

Ronni tilted her face toward the waving fan. “It’s wicked hot out here. But if we go inside, it’ll be to Travis and Mama staring at us.” She grinned at him in that way she had that made him want to throw all “no kissing” rules to the wind.

He looked down at his hands and flexed his fingers. “Can I finish?”

“Please do.” She giggled, he knew, at the seriousness of his tone.

“Okay . . . eighteen hundred and ninety-six. Are you with me?”

She pressed her lips together to keep from laughing further. “Yes,” she finally said with a nod of her head, “eighteen hundred and ninety-six.”

“Another hurricane, this one with a ten-foot tidal wave. Ten foot.”

At that, Ronni sobered. “My gracious,” she said. “Wonder what that would look like.”

“Personally, I don’t ever want to know.” He took a deep breath and sighed. “Stay with me, here. There were two mills on the island of Atsena Otie. One was the Faber Pencil Factory and the other Nutters Mill.”

“Nutters Mill?”

“They produced cedar slats. Both did.”

“Oh. Do they still?”

“No. Both were destroyed by the hurricane in 1896. It tore apart the island and they were never rebuilt.”

“So, why are we talking about it?”

“Because, what is
now
Cedar Key—just across from Atsena Otie—has become a fishing village. They have an airstrip. They have history and apparently the most amazing will to survive.
And
they’ve opened up their first restaurant.”

Ronni narrowed her eyes. “Meaning?”

Billy wiggled in the swing again. “Meaning that I think Cedar Key is going to resurrect itself as a place for tourists to come. Fishermen. Bird-watchers. There’s a wildlife refuge there, you see.”