“You wanna go?” Bastien sipped orange Gatorade out of a plastic UCF tumbler. He’d attended a single semester, dropping out after racking up hundreds of dollars in credit card debt.
“I’m trying to clean up in here.” I hadn’t done much, just swept a dust ball the size of my own head into the middle of the linoleum. There’d been one customer in all day and they’d bought only a LOVE MY BEAGLE magnet. It had been a hard sale for a buck fifty.
“I could do it. Stay and watch the shop.”
He poked at a stack of trade magazines, half turning to show he wasn’t interested either way.
Lolee hung from the door, dragging back and forth so the bell chimed every few seconds. “We can take out the float.” The sunglasses fell low on her pug nose and she mashed them back up with her palm. “You can pull me around, like when I was little.”
“You’re still little.” Brynn and I had taken Lolee out a lot on the float the summer Brynn ran off. We’d take turns sluicing it through the reeds, muck and algae coating our legs up to our knees. Brynn bemoaned the heat as she wiped runny mascara from beneath her eyes, told me over and over again that she couldn’t wait to live somewhere with weather that occasionally dropped below eighty degrees. Two months later she took off for someplace even hotter than Florida with a stranger she’d met at the dry cleaner. I found his picture once online. A guy who was short, muscular, and balding. He looked nothing like the Morton family. I didn’t show that picture to Milo. As bad as it made me feel, I wasn’t sure what it would do to my brother. His self-esteem seemed like a fragile thing; a hollowed-out bird egg.
“Where’s your father?” I asked. “Isn’t he supposed to be raising you?”
Milo was never around. No parent-teacher conferences, no report card signings, no trips to the springs or Disney World. Did he avoid his daughter because she looked too much like Brynn? I saw her mother in the wide set of Lolee’s eyes, the dimple in her chin. Looking at my niece sometimes felt like pressing on a bruise. The pain was there but still pleasurable, a reminder Brynn had existed and loved us.
“Please, you never do anything with me.” Lolee pouted, long hair nearly scraping the linoleum. The bell over the door jangled and shrieked. “Please, please.”
“Fine. Just . . . stop doing that.”
I showed Bastien the old yellow key box behind the counter. Told him the phones routed to the back of the shop unless you picked up by the second ring. There was a customer expected at three and they’d paid in advance. The mount was stored in the back beneath a tarp to ward off dust.
Its black eyes gleamed in the fluorescent light as I flipped back the plastic sheeting. Bastien nodded as I pointed out the torque of the buck’s neck and the opened mouth—a request from the customer. Its tongue sat behind a row of teeth I’d scrubbed with denture cleanser. The deer had been shot in the jaw and I’d had to partially reconstruct the bone, padding out half of it with wiring and felt. Some of the teeth I’d borrowed from another mount, still stuffed away in freezer storage. I’d nicked myself with the blade digging at the wiring, and some of my blood had wept into the fur. Occasionally when I sent out a piece like that, with little bits of me in it, I felt as if a part of me were leaving for a better life somewhere else.
Lolee and I left Bastien there in the shop and walked down the street to the lakefront a few blocks away. She trotted ahead in her neon-yellow bikini top with the black piping, T-shirt already pulled off and slung over her arm. I held her towel for her, listening to her flip-flops slap obnoxiously against the asphalt. It was blisteringly hot. Sweat itched down my neck before we’d even made it a block.
At the waterfront, speedboats swept across the mirrored surface, tubes bouncing off each other and rocketing into the muggy air. Wake splashed into the reeds and lapped against the shore, leaving behind slimy trails of algae. The air was fragrant with grill smoke.
It was the same when Milo and I were kids, running around by the water with our friends as our mother yelled at us to stay out of the cattails; that there were snakes coiled up down there just waiting for us to rush past so they could bite our ankles.
How were we so old when it felt like only seconds had passed? Milo worn down and always missing, Brynn unreachable. But here was her daughter, her tiny twin. Soon she’d leave too. Everything grew up and flew away.
Lolee walked to a picnic table half submerged in the overgrowth. The sun was less fierce there, and I sat with my back to the trees and rested my feet on a cypress knee. “You can go,” I told her. A clump of kids had gathered down next to the dock and they waved to get her attention, arms crossing and uncrossing over their heads. She abandoned her towel and her flip-flops and left me sitting there, sniffing in the warm barbeque air. She climbed onto the back of a Sea-Doo, holding tight to a boy’s waist. She yelled as he accelerated, the sound like a blender taking in a root vegetable. When they charged up over the wake, her hair flew out behind her.
Brynn had loved riding on boats and Jet Skis and motorcycles. She hung on to the sides of Jeeps and stood up in the backs of trucks, shouting at random people in the street. When Milo bought his first truck, Brynn commandeered the back of it. She lounged there on a towel, shorts rucked up into her crotch, unbuttoned and unzipped, working on her tan. He’d take her through the McDonald’s drive-thru and let her order dollar sundaes from the bed, handing back money through the open window. He told her he loved her on one of these rides, yelling it up to her as she banged her hands on the roof of the cab. I stared out the passenger-side window and swallowed down my sadness with another gulp of shitty beer.
You don’t know what love is, I thought, wanting to smack him. Love was the steady burn of acid indigestion. Love was a punch in the gut that ruptured your spleen. Love was a broken telephone that refused to dial out. Milo told Brynn he loved her and I could see from the look on his face he thought the words were a magical incantation. Say the word love and it’s there for you; say the word love and the other person feels it too.
What I should have told him that day: love makes you an open wound, susceptible to infection. But he was young then and so was I, and I wanted their happiness more than my own. So I swallowed my pain and let myself pretend love could flourish if I didn’t stand in its way.
Kids tramped through the underbrush behind me, bodies blundering through the knotted bracken and air potato vines. I turned on the bench, the wood digging into my thigh and threatening splinters. Looked past the hunks of Spanish moss and palm scrub that fanned out like spread fingers.
Two girls with dark hair were crouched in the dirt.
They looked to be about ten years old and were in a small patch of scrub, staring down at the body of an egret. One of its wings pointed skyward, extended as if in flight. Using sticks, they prodded at the bird’s underside. The girl with the ponytail pushed hard enough that her stick finally gave way and broke inside the body.
“Look at this nasty gunk.”
“Bugs are in the eyes, little black ones. Are we standing in ants?”
“Probably.”
The other girl peeked beneath the wing, tangled hair falling over her eyes. “There’s a freaking hole inside it.”
My boot snapped a fallen branch. They looked up simultaneously, eyes wide. I didn’t recognize either of them. The girl with the ponytail dropped the stick she’d been holding. The other girl clutched hers against her chest where it smeared a mess of black against the fabric. She reminded me of Lolee when she was little, kind of bedraggled and dirty, as if she’d just stumbled in from the playground.