Rebecca was one of the most well adjusted children you’d ever meet, which meant she was weird. Her parents were semiprofessional folk musicians, playing in bars and coffeehouses in the Tampa Bay area, taking Rebecca along since she was five.
The nightclub experience made her a bit precocious, and life in the sandbox was never quite as exciting after that. She spoke a different language from the other children, refusing to play dodge ball because it was “too much like Vietnam.” But she was able to duck the menu of neuroses that afflicted her peers, mainly because her parents were so well adjusted and weird, too.
Her friends’ bedrooms were covered with the usual teeny-bopper pinups, but they didn’t recognize any of the posters on Rebecca’s walls: Dylan, the Mamas and the Papas, Donovan, Joan Baez. “Who are all those old people?”
It was a stress-free life, and Rebecca was content to just lie in a field and watch the clouds. That was Rebecca all over, ephemeral and surreal, like some kind of unicorn.
Not quite of this world, catch it while you can because it won’t be here for long, and it definitely can’t be possessed.
“Daddy, how come poor people are poor?”
“I don’t know, dear.”
“But that’s not fair.”
“Life’s not fair.”
“It should be.”
“I know, dear.”
Her parents were remarkably youthful and good-looking, and you could tell that she was going to be beautiful, too. Rebecca was one of the few individuals who actually deserved to be pretty, because it wasn’t going to make her full of shit. She took after her parents that way.
People generally hated the whole family.
12
A de Havilland twin-engine turboprop banked at four thousand feet over the turquoise water of Florida Bay and lined up its approach. Samantha Bridges pressed her face to the window and looked down at the A1A traffic, moving only slightly slower than the plane.
Samantha felt a Bogart sensation of intrigue as her plane landed on the single, short runway with faded markings, bleached and hot, carved into the salt flats and coconut palms. The terminal was smaller than some houses in her neighborhood and needed paint.
Key West International Airport. International — they used to fly to Havana once upon a time. Propeller plane was the only way in now; local ordinance prevented jet noise from disturbing residents and wildlife.
Stairs flopped down from the side of the plane, and Samantha appeared in the hatch. Two women waited on the edge of the runway outside the Conch Flyer Lounge, grinning, hoisting fruity drinks in toast. Sam almost didn’t recognize Teresa in the lavender dress. She was thin. And blond. Maria looked great, too, despite the fashion error of matching vertical stripes with gila monsters.
A pair of Beechcraft B 100s landed in quick succession, Paige and Rebecca, and suddenly they were all there, piling in an airport shuttle van.
It started two months earlier, a chance occurrence. Samantha Bridges was now an assistant state attorney in Miami, and her youngest daughter had just left for Florida State. She turned the extra bedroom into a home office with a new computer and AOL account.
Sam began fooling around with search engines one Sunday evening. Midnight came and went. She still couldn’t believe her screen. She had plugged in the names as a lark, and it had become a chain reaction of long-distance phone calls. Then they all hung up and hopped back on their computers, five women typing nonstop in the new Books, Booze and Broads chat room. Layoffs, surgeries, relocations to Boston and Belgium, a total of four new marriages that had gone south. Then, full circle, all back in Florida and single again. With one big difference. Empty nests.
“Let’s revive the book club.”
“Have a reunion.”
“What do you want to read?”
“Where?”
“What?”
“The reunion.”
“Slow down!”
“Let’s pick a book and visit where it’s set.”
“Or pick a place and find a book that’s set there.”
“I like the first idea better.”
“They’re the same.”
“No they’re not.”
“Whatever.”
First stop: Key West, Cayo Hueso, The Rock, Island of Bones. Rebecca had recommended the book, passed along by her parents. It was about a bunch of Jimmy Buffett fans on a pilgrimage to the Keys, and they spend the whole trip wasted on frozen drinks until they’re mysteriously murdered one by one. Parrot Droppings, by Ralph Krunkleton. The women liked it so much they had torn through four other Krunkletons before boarding their planes.
The courtesy van pulled up in front of the Heron House on Simonton Street. The women wheeled luggage through the orchid garden and past the mosaic of a big wading bird tiled into the bottom of the swimming pool. They entered their suite through the sundeck, and there was no doubt where they were. Watercolors everywhere. Paintings of tropical plants, bedspreads with tropical fish. Rattan, marble, French doors, stained transoms. They crossed “the fulcrum” — that long-anticipated turning point when you’re traveling to a party town and finally get in your room and drop the suitcases, and it all lifts off your shoulders with a sudden buoyancy. This called for a meeting of the book club. They headed out the door to find one of the taverns in their Krunkleton paperbacks.
The five started north on Duval Street, past the Lost Weekend Liquor Store, into the drinking district. Freaks on the street, squares in the bars. Bars with plastic bulls crashing through walls, parrots and flamingos on the counters, sailfish over the taps, pinball machines in back and pitchmen out front barking about double-jointed strippers upstairs. People who should never limbo doing so, reggae bands joined onstage by bald drunks from Cincinnati, derelicts riding bicycles with iguanas in the baskets and big snakes around their necks, drunk couples necking, transvestites on stilts, dogs wearing sunglasses, college students falling off mopeds and vomiting all over their SEE THE KEYS ON YOUR HANDS AND KNEES T-shirts.
The women came to the end of Duval and headed up a twisting garden path behind the Pier House, through schefflera and hibiscus, onto a boardwalk next to a lagoon where hotel guests were throwing Chicklets to a school of feeding tarpon, then winding back to the patio until they finally stood near a hall tucked under the hotel by the supply rooms and the mops.
“This can’t be it,” said Teresa.
Sam pulled a paperback from her purse and opened to a bookmarked passage. “That must be the door.” She grabbed the handle.
A row of faces along the bar squinted at the silhouettes of five women backlit by bright sunlight. The BBB stood still in the doorway a few seconds — that awkward, territorial moment when newcomers first set foot in a regulars’ bar. They started moving again toward a table in a corner of the tiny room, hanging purses over the backs of chairs.
“So this is the Chart Room,” said Maria, shifting in her seat, straightening panties. She looked around for a waitress.
“I think this is the kind of place where you have to go to the bar,” said Sam, getting up.
Teresa turned her paperback over, scanning blurbs on the back — “…Stunning…” “…Dazzling…” “…Important…” — the kind of terse praise surgically lifted from the bodies of damning reviews. Sam returned with a pitcher of Michelob. They poured, clinked glasses and checked out the interior, mostly bare, except for a pair of nautical charts and a black-and-white photo of an early Key West street scene. But there was all kinds of stuff on the wall behind the bar, overlapping Polaroids of bent patrons making faces and hugging, business cards, newspaper clippings, scribbled-on dollar bills and a handmade sign: TIP BIG.
Maria reached out and touched the plain cinder-block wall. “So this is where Buffett got his start?”