“You could stop her,” said Marse to me.
“I could not,” I said.
“Well, I could,” she said.
“No one’s stopping her,” said Bette.
Marse studied my brow. “You’re done,” she said. She handed me a tube of lipstick and turned to Bette. “How’s life in the desert?”
“It’s just fine,” said Bette. “Come for a visit. We have a very nice guest room.” She topped off her own glass, then Marse’s and mine. In the time since she’d moved, this was as much as she’d revealed to any of us: Santa Fe was fine, the house was fine, Suzanne was fine. It had been rough for Suzanne to break into the real estate business, but things had been picking up. They took long walks in the dry heat with their dog. I scrutinized each conversation for some hint that she might move back but didn’t find one. She did not seem overjoyed with her new life, but she did seem settled.
“Do you miss home?” I said to her.
She squinted, as if considering the question. “You know what I don’t miss? Dating.”
“I can imagine,” said Marse.
“Do you miss us?” I said.
“What a silly question,” Bette said. For a moment no one spoke and I wondered, ever so briefly, if it was silly at all. Then she said, “It’s like I moved away from my heart,” and I had to turn away.
When I’d composed myself, I stood up and started toward the door—it was time to lend Margo a hand—but then I turned back. My two friends looked at me, Bette in her suit and Marse in her low-cut dress. Their faces were as familiar to me as my own. I said, “Maybe it will be just fine.”
“It just might be,” said Bette.
“She has good role models,” said Marse. “It makes a difference.”
“Thank you for saying that,” I said.
That evening, I accepted the good wishes of our friends with a bright smile, and was surprised to feel a swell of optimism as Margo said her vows. Of course I hoped for her sake that the marriage would last, but I also hoped something more personal—more selfish, I should say: that Margo would come, through marriage, to understand Dennis and me in ways she never had before. I hoped Margo would learn that the cement of a marriage never really dries, and she would apply that understanding to her parents, and value the work we’d done to survive.
The city of Coral Gables had closed the canal to private traffic—we’d found neon notices stuck to the front door and the boat console—so we’d resigned ourselves to not knowing the fate of Stiltsville until the canal cleared or the telephones worked. Several times a day, helicopters beat overhead and a marine patrol boat cruised by the house, dragging a net glutted with debris.
“They’re looking for something,” said Dennis about the marine patrol. We were in the backyard, taking an ax to Mr. Costakis’s royal palm. Dennis was clumsy with the ax; he had a hard time hitting the same spot twice.
“They’re cleaning up,” I said.
The cruiser puttered away. “No,” he said. “They’re searching.”
“For what?”
“What else?” said Dennis. “A person.”
This seemed unlikely to me. I took the ax from Dennis and hoisted it over my shoulder. “Here comes that dark side of yours,” I said. I brought down the ax.
“I’m tired,” said Dennis. His shoulders sagged and his face was red. He sat down suddenly—or did he fall? I replay it in my mind, the slow bend of his knees, the arm reaching out.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Nothing. Just the heat.”
I crouched beside him, surrounded by a dozen chunks of royal palm. “This is not our job,” I said, meaning Mr. Costakis’s tree.
“That doesn’t matter.” He stared at his shoes, then looked up at the canal. “If the stilt house is gone, I don’t want to rebuild.”
“Why not?”
“All that work, just for a few more years—doesn’t it make you tired?”
“Are we getting old?”
“No way.” He stood. “Spring chicks.” But his steps toward the swimming pool were sluggish and wooden.
Businesses were closed, including Dennis’s firm. Grady and Gloria had fled to Vero Beach to stay with friends. There had been looting—we saw footage on the portable television—and a curfew was in effect for all of Dade County. We stayed home, playing cards and taking walks and living off food we’d stockpiled: deli meat and eggs and fruit and bottled water, all nestled in squat white coolers. Every day, the National Guard passed through our neighborhood, heading south. We raised hands to them as they passed. Down in Homestead, the Red Cross built a tent city for the newly homeless. Our neighborhood felt to me like an island refuge—like Stiltsville, in a way—isolated from a continent of disaster and disaster relief. Our block buzzed with people working in their yards, grateful that their troubles were limited to landscaping, broken windows, a few irksome leaks. Marse stopped by once or twice when she could manage it. She lived in a condo on Biscayne Boulevard downtown, and in her neighborhood the phones were working and the roads had been cleared, but the lobby of her building had been transformed into a command station for the National Guard. Every morning, she spent an hour helping them field calls.
A marine patrolman knocked on the back door a week after the hurricane. It was early, and Margo and Stuart were asleep. The patrolman apologized for disturbing us and said he was opening the canal to traffic. Dennis invited him in. “Did you find anything?” he said.
“Still looking,” said the man.
I could tell by the way they spoke that they’d met. Probably out back, when Dennis was working in the yard. They shook hands and Dennis closed the door.
“What was that about?” I said.
Dennis looked at me.
“What?” I said.
“Let’s take the boat out now. Let’s get it over with.”
“Is that what you want?” I said.
Dennis stared out the window, then nodded. “I’ll get the kids,” he said.
I stood in the hallway as Dennis knocked on Margo’s bedroom door. “Rise and shine,” he said loudly. In the kitchen, with the patrolman, I hadn’t been shy about my prebreakfast ensemble—one of Dennis’s old button-downs and slippers—but in the hallway, I felt exposed. Around Margo alone, I’d always been casual. Too casual, perhaps—she was constantly telling me to button the next higher button or tighten the cord on my bathrobe. I wanted to dash to my dresser and pull on a pair of shorts, but Margo’s bed creaked and feet slapped the floor, and the door opened. There stood Stuart, rubbing his face. “Morning,” he said, a throaty croak.
Behind him, Margo shifted under the bedsheets, revealing the pale underside of her upper arm. Dennis faced away from the doorway. “Swimsuits,” he said.
“Pardon?” said Stuart.
It was a game Dennis and Margo played: she had to guess a destination from a list of clues. Margo usually resisted playing, but it was the kind of game in which one automatically participates; even as she declined to answer aloud, her mind took guesses. In a sleepy voice, she said, “Where are we going?”
“Swimsuits and towels,” said Dennis.
Stuart went to a duffel bag and pulled out a pair of blue swim trunks. “Swimsuit, check,” he said to Dennis. To me, he said, “Towels?”
“In the laundry room,” I said.
“Towels in the laundry room,” said Stuart. “Check.”
Margo stirred until we could see her face. “Just tell us where we’re going,” she said.
We looked at her—me over Dennis’s shoulder and Dennis over Stuart’s and Stuart over his own. I felt a chill pass through my husband as he realized she was naked beneath the sheets. It is one thing to hide from one’s child the indignities of middle age, the sagging and emissions and diminished libido and hot flashes. But for a parent to witness a grown child’s sexuality—how were we meant to respond? Dennis kept his eyes on Stuart. “Sunscreen,” he said.