Drue drove the short three blocks to Coquina Cottage Friday night after checking out of the Sea Breeze motel. The last time she’d been here she was fifteen. It was the summer before Papi died. She cringed now at the memory. She’d been a horrible teenager: angry, rebellious, full of pent-up hormonal rage at the world in general and her family—especially her father and her stepmother Joan.
Poor Nonni. Her darling grandmother had been heartbroken at the change in her only grandchild that summer. The sweet, fun-loving child who’d spent two weeks at Coquina Cottage every summer since she was old enough to walk had turned into a selfish, sullen shrew.
She had the address, of course—409 Pine Street. But after such a long absence, the street, the houses, virtually everything was unrecognizable. Papi’s cottage—for that’s how she would always think of it—had been the middle house in a row of five humble wood-frame homes. The Harrells, a family with three rambunctious red-haired boys, had lived in the white house to the left of the Sanchezes, and the Maroulises, a retired pharmacist from Tarpon Springs and his wife, lived in the pale green house to the right.
Those summer weeks had been idyllic for a tomboy like Drue. She spent long sunny days swimming, bodysurfing and skateboarding with Brian, Charley and Davy Harrell, and evenings fishing and crabbing from the Johns Pass Bridge with Papi. In those days, she was rarely indoors.
Now, on the lot where George and Helen Maroulis had tended their basil, tomato and banana pepper plants, there was a boxy, towering gray concrete three-level contemporary house so large it completely blotted out the view of the Gulf behind it.
And the Harrells’ home had somehow morphed into a pink stucco faux-Mediterranean villa, with terra-cotta roof tiles and a turret that looked straight out of the Alhambra.
But there, crouching on the sand, dwarfed in between the pair of magnificent mansions, was Papi’s humble place, easily distinguished from its splendid neighbors by its complete lack of splendor—and the blue tarp covering the roof.
Everything about the cottage, from the peeling blue paint on the cedar shingles, to the dust-covered windows, seemed sad, saggy and forlorn. It was a far cry from the tidy, trim home on which her grandparents lavished with love and attention.
Papi was so proud of this cottage. After tobacco imports from Cuba were embargoed in 1962, shuttering most of the cigar factories in Tampa, including the one he’d worked in most of his adult life, Alberto Sanchez had operated a small neighborhood grocery store in Ybor City. Somehow, he’d managed to save enough money to begin building this small summer cottage, and eventually, when their only daughter, Sherri, married and left home, Papi and Nonni, whose given name was Anna, retired and moved full-time to Sunset Beach.
A blast from the car directly behind hers, a gleaming white convertible, let her know she was blocking the narrow road. How long had she been stopped there, just staring at the house?
She gave an apologetic wave and pulled the Bronco into the rutted sand driveway.
Drue picked up the key chain her father had given her and looked wistfully at the cottage.
She thought of that last summer, more than twenty years ago, when Brice had pulled into the driveway and beeped his horn, impatient to load her onto the Greyhound bus back to her mother in Fort Lauderdale, and out of his and Joan’s hair. Papi had stowed her suitcase in the back of Brice’s BMW, and at the last minute, Nonni had tucked something into the pocket of her shorts and whispered in her ear, “This is for you. Come back whenever. You call, and Papi and I will come get you.” It wasn’t until she’d climbed into the front seat of her father’s car that she’d thought to examine her grandmother’s gift. It was a fifty-dollar bill, wrapped around the key to the cottage.
But she hadn’t come back. Until now.
* * *
Brice had warned her not to expect much.
“We had the same tenant for the last seven years. I hired some guys to haul out the crap he left behind, but I just haven’t had time to really take a look at what needs to be done.”
Of course, Wendy had to put her oar in the water. “I walked through it. It’ll need a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of work to make it livable. Frankly, if I were you, I’d sell the house to one of these rich gay couples and walk away.” Drue had stared Wendy down with what Joan had termed her “dead-eye.” “I am not selling Papi’s house.”
* * *
The front door had been painted red for as long as Drue could remember. Somebody, the hoarder, maybe, had slapped a coat of school-bus-yellow paint on it. She easily flecked a chip of the paint with a fingernail, revealing the red beneath. “Repaint front door” would be among the first items on her to-do list for the cottage.
The door hardware was shiny brass, obviously new and cheap-looking. She fit the key into it, turned the handle and pushed. The door was stuck, the old wood swollen and warped. She pushed harder, leaning into it with her shoulder. The rusted hinges squealed and the door gave way.
It wasn’t until she’d stepped over the threshold that she realized she’d been holding her breath.
Once she’d exhaled, and inhaled, she wished she hadn’t. The air inside was hot and fetid, ripe with the dank smell of mildew and the lingering stench of cigarette smoke.
She was standing in the living room. The wooden floors, which Nonni had mopped and polished weekly with her homemade lemon-wax mix, were now covered with garish green wall-to-wall shag carpet coated with a fine dust of plaster from the peeling walls. She walked slowly through the wide arched opening into the dining room. Like the rest of the house the room was bare of furniture. The doors of the corner cabinets Papi had built to house Nonni’s wedding china gaped open, their glass panes coated with a thick yellow sludge of nicotine.
Clamping one hand over her nose, she rushed to a front window, pushing and tugging at the swollen wooden window sash until she’d managed to shove it upward a scant six inches. There were no screens, of course, but those would have to come later. She worked her way around the living and dining rooms, desperate for fresh air. Some of the windows had been painted shut, but she managed to open two of the four picture windows in the front room, and one in the dining room.
Drue followed the abbreviated hallway toward the two bedrooms, which were separated by the cottage’s only bathroom. She poked her head into the bath, breathing through her mouth in anticipation of whatever horrors she would find there.
At least, she thought gloomily, the Hermit Hoarder hadn’t been able to do too much permanent damage here. The black-and-white penny tile floor was filthy, but the tiles were all intact. The ballerina-pink toilet and matching pink sink and bathtub were still standing, though coated with what looked like decades of grime.
The chrome towel bars and toilet paper holders had been wrenched from the walls, and a lone, nearly empty roll of toilet paper stood atop the toilet tank.
“Bleach,” Drue muttered. “Gonna need a lot of bleach.”
Swallowing hard, she stepped into the bathtub and wrenched the aluminum sash of the window there upward, letting in a welcome rush of fresh air.
Drue tiptoed into the larger of the two bedrooms. By current real estate standards Nonni’s room was tiny, hardly the stuff of a real master bedroom suite. The carpet here was a purple red, the walls painted to match. In Nonni’s day, the walls and carpet were baby blue. The picture window opposite the wall where Nonni and Papi’s bed had been was covered with venetian blinds, giving the room the overall effect of a burgundy cave. Without another thought, she went to the window and yanked the blinds free of the wall, flooding the room in welcome sunlight. This window had been painted shut too.
She stood in the center of the room, waiting to see if she could sense her grandparents’ presence here. On the right side of where her grandparents’ bed had been, she imagined the mahogany nightstand, with its ever-present box of tissues, Nonni’s Avon hand cream and, always, her white-leather-covered missalette. She glanced over the door frame and was jolted, and then reassured,
by the presence of the hand-carved wooden crucifix. It was still there!
Reluctantly, she moved on to the second bedroom, “her bedroom,” Nonni always called it. She’d furnished Drue’s room with a frilly white-canopied bed and a fussy French provincial dresser and nightstand, which Drue had adored until she turned fourteen and decided she hated everything, including this room.
In the intervening years someone had painted Drue’s room mud brown. Two walls were covered with crudely constructed sagging wooden bookshelves still loaded down with rows of paperback books. Obviously this had been the hoarder’s den. The double window, which had been adorned with ruffled, white dotted-swiss curtains during Drue’s youth, was now covered with a beige woolen blanket, which had been nailed to the wall. Maybe the tenant had been a vampire?
At least this window had screens. After opening the sash, Drue stood at the picture window, which now left the room flooded with light. Outside, she could see what was left of the narrow patch of lawn Papi had seeded and weeded and babied. The tangerine tree she’d climbed to pick fruit to eat out of hand (and to use as ammunition in the never-ending rotten-fruit wars with the Harrell boys), was still there, stunted now and nearly leafless. But beyond it stood the fringe of Australian pines, and beyond that, the dunes. Just barely visible was a sliver of turquoise ocean.
She sucked in her breath. It had never occurred to her until this moment that her grandparents had given her the room with the best view of the water. In fact, they had always lavished her with the best of everything they had to give. She put a hand to the grimy glass. Even now, Nonni and Papi were looking out for her.
Her cell phone rang. She extracted it from the pocket of her jeans and reluctantly answered.
“Hey Dad.”
“How’s the house?”
She walked back toward the front door, mouth-breathing as she went. She stood outside on the abbreviated front porch, gulping in the clean air.
“Pretty grim.”
“Sorry about that, but you’re young. Probably nothing a little elbow grease can’t fix.”
Staring around the corner of the living room, she saw a mound of plaster shards she’d overlooked earlier. Glancing up she saw the source of the problem. A huge brown water stain blossomed over the ceiling, where the raw lath was exposed.
“Yeah, elbow grease and a new roof,” she muttered.
“I meant to ask, what are you doing for furniture?”
“I dunno,” she admitted. “My old garage apartment came furnished. All I brought was my clothes, my kiteboard rig, some books and my coffeemaker.”
“Pretty much what I figured,” Brice said. “After we talked earlier, it occurred to me that we’ve been paying rent at a self-storage place out in Pinellas Park ever since we redecorated our house. I know there’s some of your grandparents’ stuff left from after Nonni died, and of course, the stuff from my ‘bachelor pad’ that Wendy made me get rid of. I don’t remember what all’s there, but you’re welcome to it, if you want.”
Drue ground her back molars. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him she didn’t need Wendy’s rejects, but she forced herself to reconsider. The reality was, she needed those hand-me-downs. Spite could wait.
“Uh, thanks. That’d help a lot.”
“I’ll text you the address, unit number and key code for the gate, but you’ll need to come by here to pick up the keys. Anything else?”
“I’ve got to get the cottage cleaned. It’s been closed up for so long it’s like a mildew buffet. The first thing I need to do is pry the windows open so I can breathe, but I don’t even have a screwdriver.”
“Yeah, I guess it would be pretty bad, what with the hurricane damage to the roof. Tell you what. Alberto’s shed is still there. We never gave any of the tenants access to it. Maybe his tools and stuff are there. The keys are on that ring I gave you. Okay, well, Wendy and I are about to leave for dinner at the yacht club, but I’ll put the storage unit key in our mailbox for you. Unless you want to join us?”
She looked down at her shredded jeans, tank top and flip-flops, thankful for an excuse to decline.
“Better not,” she said. “I’ve got a lot of carpet to rip out tonight.”
8
Papi’s toolshed was a peak-roofed wooden building he’d built in the side yard of Coquina Cottage.
As far as she could tell, the shed was just as he’d left it. She pictured him here now, puttering away at the workbench that ran along the back of the shed, his bald head bent over his project, the transistor radio blaring his favorite talk radio station. He’d be chewing one of the cigars Nonni banned him from smoking in the house, humming as he worked, or talking back to the radio host, dropping the occasional cuss word in Spanish.
Everything was in order, although coated in dust, cobwebs and what looked like an entire village of dead bugs. A pegboard held his saws, chisels, hammers, vises and screwdrivers. He’d used old wooden cigar boxes with tiny knobs screwed to each to construct drawers for a homemade cubby holding a wide assortment of nails, screws, bolts and washers. The power tools were neatly arranged on the wooden shelves beside the bench. An old nail barrel held scraps of lumber. She inhaled deeply. The shed smelled of cigar smoke, WD-40 and sawdust. It smelled like Papi.
She gathered hammers, screwdrivers, pry bars and a box cutter and loaded up the leather tool belt that hung from a nail near the door.
Back in the house, she used the pry bar to remove a wooden broomstick that had been jammed inside the aluminum sliding-door track in the living room, and with what felt like herculean effort, managed to shove the door open, allowing for a welcome rush of fresh air. She stood in the doorway, looking out past the now rotting deck toward the beach. It had gotten dark while she worked, but she could hear the waves lapping at the shore and that was enough for now. She had work to do.
She dragged a box fan in from the shed, set it up near the open front door and got busy. For the next two hours she pried and cut and cursed and sweated and ripped at the filthy carpet, bagging it up and ferrying it out to the trash in the wheelbarrow she’d found inside the shed.
It was a clean sweep, she thought elatedly, sitting on an upended mop bucket to survey her work and eat her dinner—a convenience store sub sandwich, bag of chips and quart of red Powerade. She swallowed three Advil and was considering her next move when her cell phone rang.
She was surprised to notice the time—after 10:00 P.M.
“I thought you were coming by to get the key to the storage place,” Brice said. “We just got back from dinner, and the key’s still here.”
“I got busy ripping out all the old carpet, and I lost track of time,” Drue said. “Anyway, I can’t put furniture in here until I get it cleaned. This house is like a toxic waste dump.”
“Okay, well, maybe tomorrow,” Brice said. “Call me and let me know your plan.”
* * *
At midnight, she carried in her suitcase and the few boxes of belongings she’d brought from Fort Lauderdale and set them down in the clean but barren living room.
She washed up and brushed her teeth, then went out to the living room and unearthed her sleeping bag from one of the boxes, unrolling it on the floor in front of the open sliding-glass doors.
Every bone in her body ached, and the wooden floor beneath her was unforgiving, but she propped her head on a pillow improvised from a rolled-up sweatshirt and sighed a deep sigh of contentment. She closed her eyes and listened to the hypnotic whoosh of waves washing up on the beach. She was home.
* * *
She felt a toe, gently prodding her in the ribs. “Hey, lazybones!”
Drue’s eyes blinked open. Sunlight streamed in through the open sliding-glass door. Her father looked down at her, clearly amused.
She sat up, yawned and stretched. “What time is it?”
“Ten o’clock.”
“Seriously?” She grabbed her phone and saw that it was. “Oh my God. I haven’t slept this late in months.”
&
nbsp; She stood up and headed for the bathroom. When she came out, dressed in a faded T-shirt and jeans, he handed her a Styrofoam cup of coffee and a white bakery bag.
“Thanks,” she said, taking a gulp. “How’d you get in here, anyway?”
Brice turned and pointed toward the front door. “It was standing wide open when I got here. You might want to lock it in the future. Sunset Beach isn’t like it was when your grandparents were alive. There’s actual crime now.”
Drue opened the bag and lifted out a sugary pastry. She took a bite and smiled despite herself. “Apple fritter from Publix? I can’t believe you remembered.”
“I remember more than you give me credit for,” he replied evenly.
Brice changed the subject. “I saw all the trash bags piled at the curb,” he said, looking around the living room. “You must have worked your tail off last night. Okay if I look around?”
“Help yourself,” she said, still chewing.
His footfalls echoed in the empty rooms as he took the brief tour. “The bathroom doesn’t look too bad,” he commented, sitting down on the upturned bucket and taking a sip of his own coffee.
“You should have seen it when I got here,” she said, shuddering at the memory. She squared her shoulders and finished off the fritter. “I want to get the carpet pulled up in the bedrooms today, and then tackle the kitchen.”
Brice pointed up at the patch of exposed lath and plaster in the water-stained ceiling. “I’m thinking you are going to have to replace the roof.”
“I can’t think about that right now,” Drue said. “Definitely not in my budget.”
He started to say something, but a faint chirping noise emanated from his phone. He looked down at the incoming text message. “Wish I could hang around and help, but we’re meeting some out-of-town friends for brunch.”
He handed her a small envelope. “That’s the key to the storage shed. Take all or as much as you need.”
Sunset Beach Page 6