The Last Cadillac

by Nancy Nau Sullivan

  I had to find a house, something with four bedrooms within the budget. Florida had been a dream. Now I had to make it a reality. Prices on the island were beginning to climb. I went to open houses; drove around, and walked over scorched lots with palms and hedges, shell and sand, into cottages, stucco ranches, and birdhouses on stilts. I inspected appliances, sized up floor plans, flushed toilets, and poked into a variety of machinery and infrastructure, like I knew what I was looking for.

  I liked the newer houses, but by law, they were on pilings with the living areas commencing at fourteen feet off the ground. Dad couldn’t handle that. The more I looked around, the more I decided to stick with the idea of finding an adaptable ranch. I could make the adjustments to suit us, if I found the right one.

  I drained my cup of coffee and stood up. Dad needed frosty flakes, the kids needed clean underwear, and we all needed a house. Thank goodness the beach would always be there, waiting. Something I could count on.

  That afternoon, I drove down Pelican Avenue and found the perfect house with a promising yard full of crotons and palms, and neat, new windows set in freshly painted stucco. I called the realtor for a showing, and once inside, I found a decorating scheme straight out of the Adams Family. Dark, furry bedroom walls and a black-and-brown bathroom, like a dungeon, and black lacquered tables and headboards, complete with gilt Japanese trees and teensy figures in kimonos. The owner had carefully matched all the furniture to the wallpaper. The kitchen, bathrooms, and laundry had never been updated; the garage door creaked like the House of Usher; and the windows were so layered with tapestries and sheers and thermals, I couldn’t see in or out. If we moved into such a place, I would need an axe and a large Dumpster, to start.

  In the following days, I visited many decorating nightmares with possibilities. At night, I went to bed and slept with the floor plans dancing in my head, and by the time I got up next morning, the nightmares had slipped away. Something was always wrong: not only the furry wallpaper and the black bathroom fixtures, but the wiring and other code problems that hadn’t been touched in decades. In the light of morning, I faced the facts. I couldn’t touch this one or that for all the expensive updating.

  I didn’t have enough savings to cope. I estimated a budget of $60,000 for a down payment, with some left over for decorating. The Ex’s lawyer had reminded me how lucky I was to walk away with such a nice chunk. I reminded him, that, in fact, the sum amounted to approximately $3,043.48 a year after twenty-odd years of marriage.

  I kept after the real estate agents, and they were getting to know me well. It was a small island, with just so much inventory. The agents were chatty and friendly, but soon enough I earned a reputation as a shopper, not a buyer, and they began to tire of me. One realtor I ran into at Tick’s baseball game leaned on the fence and said, “You’ll never buy a house on the island. You just like to look, and time’s running out. Prices are going sky high. But there is that nice little place over on Coconut.” His tone was clipped, and irritating, like a dripping faucet or the sound of a bird pecking me out of a pleasant dream.

  The kids agreed. It was probably true I wouldn’t make the leap. We would have to go on living in the cottage on the beach until we got kicked out—or drowned, Tick suggested.

  “Mom, you like shopping,” he said. “I don’t think you want to give up your hobby.”

  That’s when I met Cynthia. She bubbled over with sales persona. She would get the job done. She was a tigress, but she didn’t pounce, and she was the only realtor who called me back more than once. I met her at an open house one Sunday, and after that day, she kept me posted with flyers, prices, and square footages, and indulged my love of poking through various “prospects.”

  One of her favorite sayings was: “You aren’t looking for a ‘house’. That’s so cold. You are looking at ‘Prospects for Progress’.”

  We became prospectors, Cynthia and I. She picked me up and we drove around to our appointments, and she kept me updated almost daily. If we weren’t out on the road together, I saw her at least weekly at church where she stood at the altar and read the epistle. Her short, red-gold hair, depending on the light, gave her a peculiar halo, and when she passed out communion, she smelled of Tabu. I had a healthy mistrust of most salespeople, but Cynthia, despite all, gave off a positive aura.

  She was my realtor. She stayed with me, and I decided, without even thinking about it, that I would be loyal to Cynthia. She was going to collect the commission.

  Lucy said that was stupid: “Go with the one who finds you a house, for god sakes.”

  She had taken to swearing at me on a regular basis now, and thankfully, it was long distance, so I could hang up on her for any number of made-up reasons.

  I loved house shopping with Cynthia. She was plump and joyful, looking at me sideways with a glint in her eye like she had a secret, which was usually “the perfect prospect” with my name on it. Before she picked me up for a showing, she made up her eyelashes and pink cheeks and got decked out in a pastel pantsuit, decorated with pins that declared Realtor of the Year, Realtor of the Month, Best Realtor, most popular Realtor, and Chamber of Commerce and Rotary Club member. She drove me around in her large, immaculate white Lincoln, and we lapsed in and out of chitchat. She talked in a low voice, which prefaced serious talk, or in a screeching pitch, which meant she had a good piece of gossip to share. The latest bits were often tame but always interesting: On one trip I heard that Betsy Tibbens, formerly of Marietta, had a son who continually upset the geranium pots at Sun Landscaping. He was on his way to juvie. It made me shudder; where was Tick? This incident surely would appear in the police reports of The Island Bystander, but apparently there was more to the story, and Cynthia would fill me in later.

  Cynthia, a fountain of knowledge about resources, helped me learn about heat pumps and termites, mold and flood insurance, taxes and code enforcement and overgrown landscaping, which were the priorities of island ownership. It was nothing like living in Indiana. But she had confidence in me, and exuded the optimism that all things were possible, even the prospect of me finding a suitable house.

  She didn’t know it (I wasn’t too aware of it myself), but she became a sort of therapist to whom I sounded out my plans. The plans were always met with endless enthusiasm.

  “Just look at you,” she said. “You could do anything, you could go back to news writing, or be a teacher, a public relations consultant, heck, you could have your own private business, maybe in the den of that cute little bungalow I showed you on Tuna.”

  She rounded off the conversation, as usual, at the bottom line, which meant, it would be difficult to find me a mortgage if I were not gainfully employed. This was a concern, and Cynthia delivered it with all due respect. This was our business at hand, and I’d already worked that one out. Dad was going to co-sign the loan, I was putting my own money down, and Dad was going to be my renter. I would meet the payments with my “renter,” my savings, the child support, and “maintenance” I’d receive from my Ex—and the sporadic pieces I was able to send to the Calumet Times, and magazines and journals. Eventually, though, I would have to think of steady employment. I’d already looked into teaching English as a Second Language at the local vocational school. That would be my next career leap—into the realm of deciphering the English language for the growing population of Haitians, Latin Americans, and the occasional German and Korean visitor. But for now, I had another agenda. I had to find us a place to live.

  Cynthia continued to be a great help. I figured the world needed a couple of million enthusiastic Cynthias to straighten itself out. Part of the reason I’d put off buying a house was that I’d lose Cynthia after the deal went through. But she was patient, worked hard to look for houses for us, and she became a friend. She understood our situation. She kept coming up with possibilities—ground-level houses with three-plus bedrooms—and I held out for that reasonably priced miracle house, because some day, maybe suddenly, Dad would not be there any more. I ha
d to face that awful fact that he would just be plain gone, like Mom.

  Dad had announced to the family before we left for Florida that he was going to be my “renter,” and that he wanted to help out with the costs of keeping house.

  Jack wanted to know, exactly, what that meant.

  “Renter?” he said, like he had something distasteful in his mouth. “How much rent is Dad going to pay you?”

  “Jack, lighten up,” I said. “I don’t have any idea how much rent he is going to pay me. It’s his idea.”

  When I was going through the divorce, Dad slipped me some “Grants” and “Franklins,” which helped me breathe a bit easier. At a dollar an inch, those feature stories weren’t exactly padding my bank account. One time, Dad handed over the green and said, prophetically—“For your dream house. Goodbye chill house.” It didn’t mean beans to Jack that Dad meant to pay me rent. If I was going to fit us all into that dream house, I needed the help.

  Jack called to bug me about it again. I hung up on him—before he hung up on me. The conversations with my siblings were abrupt; we constantly bumped into each other, even with the miles between us. The only problem? We were leaving bruises that might take an awful long time to heal. I prepared, mentally, for many more bumps down the road.

  I didn’t know where we were going to live, or when. But Jack wanted to know now. Too bad. I wasn’t about to tell Jack any of my tentative plans. I was too angry at him, as usual. I was going to buy my own house, and I was thrilled at the prospect. I was also more than happy that Dad was with us. He seemed happy and content, and so were we.

  Dad and I started out to the chairs under the windows in front of the cottage one late afternoon—my favorite time of day. The gulls were circling for their dinner before retirement for the evening. Dad picked up his feet carefully along the sand path next to the cottage. He was wearing his Irish hat and khaki jacket; he dug his cane into the sand and held my hand in a firm, bone-breaking grip, but I didn’t care. That grip was love, and something I could hold on to.

  We made our way slowly over the bumpy, sandy beach. He sat down and looked up at me. “Thanks, my little Sweetie,” he said. “This is fine, just fine.”

  We sat together. The sun was lowering below the horizon in a fluorescent glow, a new one, more riveting and softening than the last. As the birds began circling, I dug my toes into the warm, white sand and held Dad’s arm. The gulls frantically squawked and dipped, searching for a last snack. “Having their cocktail hour,” Dad said, bending his neck to study them. He took off his hat, and his white hair fluffed like a cloud, like his mother’s. Riding in her Cadillac, out to the island, to find the cottage. It took me back, flying up through the hourglass with the sand. I had wanted to go back, and now, we were back. We were a long way from the patio at the dollhouse. We were another step away from bad memories and on the way to make some good ones. I hoped.

  14

  THE BLUEBIRD OF HAPPINESS

  “Cynthia, it’s me.”

  “How are you, and the kids, and Dad?” she said. “I haven’t talked to you in, well, days.”

  “We’re OK,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “Well, a lot. I’m tellin’ ya. Everything’s going faster than I can list ’em. I had this little two-bedroom on Harkey’s Canal, a darlin’ fixer-upper, went for nothin’ and I wish you coulda seen it, but it was a little small.…”

  I loved the house talk. I thought of these places as having personalities, some on the seedy side, and others as quaint, possible friends. A lot of living had come and gone in those two-bedroom houses with yellow kitchens, terrazzo floors, and dusty old ruffled curtains on the windows that looked out on yards full of palm trees and twittering birds.

  Cynthia told me about a couple more prospects, and then I broke in.

  “Cynthia, you are a doll. You keep me going; you really do,” I said. “Fact is, we need to make the move, and soon.”

  I heard the gears shifting at the other end of the line, and no one shifted gears faster than Cynthia.

  “I’ll run the list right this minute,” she said. I heard her clicking away on the computer, even as we spoke. “You, your dad, and the kids! How did this ever happen?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well, we’ll just see what we can do about it. Something gracious, and spacious.”

  “Something with enough bedrooms that I can afford.”

  “Certainly not any of those boxes on sticks. Oh, no. No doubt about that.”

  “Just something I can paint all white and has enough stretch for the four of us.”

  The clicking stopped. “You know, I must show you what came up while we were talking. You’re gonna love it. It has a barrel-tile roof and it’s on a canal. Let me call you right back as soon as I get an appointment from the listing agent. Bye, now.”

  I’d seen enough white stucco houses with tiled roofs and I was tired of looking, and I bet Cynthia was, too.

  Cynthia picked me up and we headed toward Willow Avenue, not five blocks from the beach cottage. We turned off Gulf Drive that divided the island like a spine, with the Gulf of Mexico to the west and Tampa Bay on the east, and right away I liked what I saw. I hadn’t been down this road before, and I wondered how I’d missed it, except that vines and fronds shot up so fast on the island that new small jungles seemed to grow up overnight and create their own kind of hideaways. Pine trees, mangos, palmettos, and sea grape made a thicket along the stretch of broken-shell road that ended in a cul-de-sac. It was quiet except for the call of birds and wind in the palms. The Gulf roared faintly in the distance, a reassuring, tumbling sound.

  I closed my eyes. Let this be the house.

  “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” Cynthia said. “Wake up and see what that wickedly wonderful old realtor has found for you.”

  She adjusted her keys, windows, and locks, papers and purse, and rolled out of the car onto the driveway in a flutter of sweaty silk and Tabu. I looked up. A neat stucco house stood proudly about a quarter acre from the road with a tall, silver-sided palm next to the front door—the sort of house I’d seen a thousand times. A row of neatly trimmed hollies ran along the driveway to a one-car, attached carport. The place was quiet as a church.

  “Isn’t it great?” said Cynthia.

  “I think so,” I said. “But what’s all that?”

  Huge shiny boulders—cobalt-blue rocks of glass in varying sizes—dotted the front yard, which was also completely devoid of any vegetation and covered with glittery, white pebbles. The jagged blue rocks looked like pieces of fallen sky on a bright, cloudless day. Some looked knife-sharp and lethal.

  How odd, I thought.

  “I’m not so sure about these rocks,” Cynthia said as she breezed around them, while producing the key in one easy motion. We were inside before I could make anymore comments about the yard from outer space.

  There it was—the living room from 1960, and nothing appeared to have changed since the day the house was built. The dining room chairs and table were heavy glass and bamboo, the sort I’d seen in my grandparents’ house in Florida years ago. Historical tapestry covered two Early American sofas facing each other, coordinating with the maple touches in all the corners. We walked to the left and found a bedroom done up in gold chenille and red tassels, like Pauline and Ernest’s Spanish bedroom in Key West. All I needed was one of Pauline’s useless crystal chandeliers.

  “Olé,” I said.

  Beyond the living room, an enclosed porch with brown plastic paneling and dropped ceiling looked out over a deep, wide yard shaded with tall, overgrown oleanders and sabal palms. The thin line of water danced in the sunlit canal, the one bright spot. It cheered me. But throughout the house, sculptured brown carpeting covered every inch of flooring, and unfortunately, it looked almost new and certainly doomed for removal.

  “Great house. You really don’t need to do a thing to it,” Cynthia said. “Maybe a little paint and decorating is all.” She raised her arms in a s
weeping gesture, taking in every square inch of the place, and then she slapped her hips lightly for emphasis.

  I was about to tell her I needed an axe, but she darted off to the kitchen. She turned on the lights, and roaches scurried across the avocado green counter. She quickly turned on the faucet. “See?” she said. The water exploded in a whoosh of brown, which matched the peeling pink and brown linoleum floor.

  “At least that works,” I said. The water finally calmed down to a nice, clear even flow. Cynthia and I stood there, contemplating the faucet, afraid to look elsewhere. The roaches and unknown creatures, surely, were hiding from us.

  Yet somehow, I was already thinking about what I could do with the place, which would be to rip everything out and start over with the shell. After a cursory look at the electric and plumbing, the bare bones of the place appeared to be in pretty good shape. But, best of all, I loved the floor plan. The front door opened to a living room, and the enclosed porch ran along the back width of the house. Beyond, a real backyard with a view of the canal and hibiscus around a patio thrived.

  I walked out to the porch, and surprisingly, found a doorway to an added wing in the back with a bedroom. It was new, all white, with a tile floor, its own bathroom, and fresh paint. At least, I wouldn’t have to deal with one room. Sliding glass doors led out to the yard where bougainvillea and oleander adorned the wooden fences. A mango tree as big as a circus tent grew next to the covered patio.