The Postcard (4 page)
I had just entered the Florida room to continue packing the buffet, when the phone rang. It was a very loud ring, which made sense since Grandma was probably hard of hearing. I went into the kitchen and answered it.
“Hel —”
“So how smart are you?” said a man’s voice abruptly. And loudly. The volume of the call was turned up, too. It was an old voice, raspy and thin and a little muffled. “Because now . . . it’s starting.”
“Starting? Excuse me? Who is this?”
“Wait, is this the right number?”
I think I laughed. “It’s the right number for this house. Do you want to talk to someone here?”
“Well, who’s there?” the voice said.
I wasn’t stupid. You never tell people that. Still, the man sounded old, so I didn’t want to be rude and just hang up. Maybe he really did have the wrong number.
“What number were you dialing?” I asked him.
There was a pause, then a crinkle of paper. “Three, four, four . . . one, nine . . . three, six. What number is this?”
When I realized I didn’t even know my grandmother’s number, it flashed across my mind that I had never called her. The number on the phone was too faded to read. I looked everywhere.
“Can you hold on a second?” I said.
“Take your time,” said the voice.
I set down the phone and found a phone book on the counter. As I checked it, I heard the sound of a siren, beeping, slamming doors, a sound like the clatter of silverware, and a burst of wild cawing, like parrots, in the background of the call, the phone was turned up so loud. Glancing out the window, I saw Mrs. K chattering wildly on a cell phone and laughing.
Man, I hate this place!
Finally, I found my grandmother’s name and address in the book:
A. M. Huff, 4028 30th Avenue North.
I took it back to the phone and read the number out loud. “Three-four-four, nineteen, thirty-six.”
There was another crinkle of paper and then a laugh. “I was right!”
“I guess so.”
“You can learn a lot at a desk.”
I frowned. “Uh-huh . . . huh?”
“A desk. It’s where you learn stuff,” he said. Then, after a pause, he added, “So, how smart are you?”
“What, that again?” I said. “What does that even mean —”
Click.
He hung up.
“Fine. Be that way.” I slammed the phone down.
I really hate this place!
I stared at the piles and piles of stuff to sort through in every room, but I couldn’t stop going over every line of that stupid conversation until I got to the part about the desk.
You can learn a lot at a desk.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see the far end of the Florida room. Just under the windows was Grandma’s desk.
I felt a sudden nervous flash in my chest. I moved toward it, then saw a shape pass by our front window, first one way, then the next, and heard the sound of a motor coming close, then receding.
“What the heck?”
I went out on the front step. The girl who liked to use yard tools as weapons was cutting the grass. She must have taken off her T-shirt because now she was wearing a bathing suit top with her cutoffs.
I don’t know exactly what I was looking at or for how long, but she stopped the mower. “Pull your eyes back in your head, Jo-Jo.”
I just stared at her. “Uh . . . this is my grandma’s lawn . . .”
“No! Am I mowing her yard by mistake? I keep doing that!”
I didn’t know what she meant. “No, it’s just that this is my grandmother’s yard —”
“No kidding, Batman. I’ve been mowing her lawn for, like, three years? Only I didn’t get to it last week because I was away. Dia.”
I just looked at her. “Dia?”
“Dia.”
“Okay. Isn’t that, like, Spanish for
day
?”
“It’s a name,” she said, staring at my pale face as if I were an unripe fruit or something. At least she wasn’t staring at my throat or my ears. “I spell it with letters. Dia Martin. Didn’t she ever tell you I’ve been doing this?”
“I never . . .” I stopped. “No, she didn’t. Anyway, Dia. Yeah. Hi.”
After using all those words in a row, my tongue must have loosened up or something, because it just kept flapping. “My best friend back home is a guy named Hector. He’s Puerto Rican —” That sounded so unbelievably wrong coming out, but my mind darted away somewhere and left my mouth hanging open with nothing else to say. “I mean . . . uh . . . no . . .”
“Hector,” she said flatly.
Oh, no,
I thought.
Here it comes. You idiot!
“No —”
“And are you going to ask me if I know him because he’s Latino?”
“Jeez, no. I mean, why should you —”
She had already started the mower again and was finishing the next stripe of the lawn.
“We’re selling the house!” I yelled.
She stopped the mower again, looking amazed that I would speak again. “And . . . what?” she said quietly.
I breathed in. “Sorry, it’s just that my dad and I are selling the house. My grandma died yesterday —”
Her eyes widened. “I knew she was in the hospital. She’d been there before. But she always came back. I’m sorry. She was cool. She always smiled at me. Well, at everybody . . .”
“Really?” I said. The girl looked at the ground for a second, as if she were lost in thought.
“Anyway,” I said, “she . . . we’re selling the house, so you probably won’t have to do this anymore —”
“So fine,” she said suddenly, “I won’t.” She pushed down on the handle so that the front wheels lifted from the grass and steered the mower around.
“Wait. That isn’t what I meant.” I didn’t actually know
what
I meant or why I said anything at all, but I knew we didn’t want a half-mowed lawn. “Wait —”
But she flicked her hand up flat without turning and rolled the mower away across the unfinished lawn and down the sidewalk.
What is her problem? Man, I hate this place!
I went back into the house, slammed the door, and hunched down on the couch. “Dia? Dia? What kind of name is that, anyway? And so what, anyway?” I heard the mower start up again on some other lawn.
I sat there and sat there. “Where’s Dad?” I said out loud. Then I saw the desk again and remembered the phone call.
Stupid phone call!
It was crazy to think that just because some nutty old guy said “desk” I’d find something in the desk, or that this was the desk he meant, or that he meant anything at all!
But there it stood, uncluttered and clean, and I hadn’t so much as touched it, so I decided to look. The main drawer under the work area was brushed out and empty. All the letter compartments and spaces were empty. The small drawer in the center between the compartments was empty, too. Okay, so Dad had gone through it. He’d done that much in the time before I came. It was only a piece of furniture now.
But when I closed the little drawer, it jammed halfway in, with one side deeper than the other. I tried to jostle it loose, but when I did, something fell into the drawer from above.
It was a postcard.
It must have been taped to the whatever-you-call-the-ceiling above the drawer, but my jerking it around had loosened it. The shiny cellophane tape around its edges was yellow and dry.
The postcard was old. I could tell that when I picked it up because it didn’t feel the same as a new postcard. It was heavier, for one thing. When I turned the picture side up, I must have made a strange sound to the empty house.
It was the Hotel DeSoto!
The same hotel the real estate agent told us about! The same hotel my great-grandfather owned!
Holy crow! What is this? Did the caller want me to find this? Did he expect me to find it? What the heck is going on?
I lifted the card to my nose. It smelled dusty and woody, of having been in that cramped desk drawer forever. Maybe for the last, what, fifty years?
Try sixty. The postmark on the back was from San Diego, California, and dated March 4, 1947. There was no message on the card and no name, there was an address typed on it by, it appeared, an old typewriter:
1630 Beach Drive NE, St. Petersburg, FLA.
Was that where Grandma used to live when she was growing up? Dad would know. The address sounded fancy. The card wasn’t like any I had seen before. It wasn’t a glossy photo of some place with a happy blue sky like modern postcards. What it really looked like was a black-and-white photograph that had been painted afterward. The colors were bright and a little too perfect. Artificial. The green of the grass was as bright as the skin of a lime. The awning reaching out from the hotel was a kind of bright cartoon orange that I thought was meant to be red.
The surface of the card wasn’t smooth under my thumbs, either. It had a texture to it, a cross-hatch of lines that gave the picture the feel of fabric, like a painting.
It
was
like a painting, the way the colors were added, but the more I looked, the more I could, I don’t know,
feel
what was in the picture. Despite the unreal coloring, it almost seemed as if the fringes of the awning were waving. I imagined the slapping of the canvas pulled tight over its ribbing of pipes. Tables and chairs were set up beneath and on either side of the awning in a courtyard formed by the two jutting wings of the building. They were shaded by a cluster of palm trees in the court. The more I looked at the trees, the more I could hear their sharp leaves clatter in the breeze.
The sixty-year-old breeze.
I closed my eyes and breathed in. The air in the house now smelled of some plant. Eucalyptus from the backyard, I think Dad had told me. I propped the card up on the desk, looked at all the tons of work still to be done in the incredible heat, thought about the lawn mower girl, the strange phone call, thought about Dad and Mom, and got mad.
Hector was in his hammock when I called.
“I hate this place,” I told him. “Stupid place. I hate every stupid thing about it!”
“Now don’t hold back,” he said. “Tell me what you really think.”
“First of all, everybody’s cracked and weird; second of all, they’re insane, even the kids. I actually met one. Probably the only kid in Florida, and she’s a total insane-o. Plus it’s so hot. It also turns out there’s something fishy about my grandma, but I can’t tell what it is, except that she was never married when she had my dad, but I’m not even sure I care about that. No, wait. I don’t care. Plus, the real estate agent guy is really odd, and I got a cracked phone call from some guy telling me to look in a desk. And I looked in Grandma’s old desk and found a hidden old postcard of an old hotel that my old great-grandfather used to own.”
“Dude, no husbands, phone calls, hidden postcards. Sounds like a mystery to me,” said Hector. “Like in a book.”
“It’s not a mystery,” I said quickly, wondering right away why I did. “It’s nothing. It’s just people, cracked people. Plus, all this is happening and it’s three hundred degrees. I’ve been going around soaked all day, especially in my shorts —”
“Dude, enough.”
“Well, what a stupid place! I hate it. What’s going on there?” I asked. “Tell me everything.”
There was a pause, then the sound of a snort. “Oh, all kinds of stuff. Since yesterday, they paved over the school and now there’s a racetrack and a pool hall there. Your house, man, your house was turned into a giant aquarium this morning, but it exploded, and now there are sharks everywhere. But nobody cares because they moved Boston to LA and my hammock is on the beach now. Hey, waiter, another piña colada, please —”
“Shut up,” I said with a laugh.
“Dude, you have been gone for, like, an hour. Nothing’s new.”
I realized as we were talking that I had picked up the postcard again and was feeling its texture under my thumb.
“Hey, you know what?” I said. “They call this the ‘Sunshine City.’ It’s the ‘Sunshine City’ in the ‘Sunshine State.’ Guess what it’s doing right now.”
“Raining?”
“No. The sun is shining.”
“Imagine,” he snorted.
“So, fine. Talk to you in a couple of days. We bury my grandma tomorrow.”
“Say ‘bye’ for me,” he said, and we hung up.
The funeral was set for eleven o’clock the next morning. First of all, I didn’t sleep well in the creepy old bed. All night long, I went over the weird real estate agent, then the weird lawn mower girl, then the phone call, and finally the postcard. Why, after all, had it been hidden?
I told Dad about the phone call and showed him the card. He looked at it, said nothing about it, but did tell me that he had gotten a few strange calls himself. It was probably just the same mixed-up guy who couldn’t remember the right number.
“Hang up when that happens,” he said. “Old people are always making mistakes.”
I finally met Mrs. Kee-whatever in the driveway. She was going to the funeral home with us. She seemed like a nice lady, short and round and neat. Her hair was a silver helmet. She wore two hearing aids and glasses, but not thick ones, with a pair of clip-on shades that she lifted into the up position to say hello to me.
“It’s a blessing, your grandmother’s passing, you know,” she said to me, touching my arm. “For everyone.”
I smiled at her. “Thanks.”
Then I thought,
Blessing? How was Grandma’s death a blessing? And for who, exactly?
She smiled and flicked her shades back down as we got into the Mosquito, she next to my dad and me squashed in the tiny backseat next to a box of clothes.
“So, how long did you know my grandmother?” I asked her. “Did you know her for a long time?”
“What day is this?” she asked.
I looked at my dad in the mirror, and he glanced back.
“Friday,” I said.
“Friday,” she repeated.
Another look at Dad while she closed her eyes and tapped on her fingers as if counting. She popped her eyes open and said, “About thirty years, give or take. Heee!” She cackled like a witch on Halloween. “Heee!”
So maybe everyone in this town was “off.”
In case my dad couldn’t find the funeral home, I had the obituary page in my pocket for the address. But Mrs. K knew where the Brent Funeral Home was, or “Brent’s,” as she called it. She seemed to know where all the “mortuaries” were, and pointed out a few of them on the way and told us the names of people who had been “laid out” there.
When we got to Brent’s, the parking lot was full, which made me scared that I would have to meet all kinds of Grandma’s friends. “Everyone,” as Mrs. K had said. But the cars were there for another old person. We were shown to a very small room by a narrow pasty-faced man. Except for the coffin, a few flower displays, and about twenty chairs, the room was empty. The place was overcooled, which I thought might have had something to do with it being where they kept the unburied dead.
The coffin was sitting closed on its stand in the front of the room. I liked that it was closed. I had never seen a real dead person before and didn’t want to start looking at one. I guess we were there too early. For nearly an hour it was just me, Dad, and Mrs. Kee-something in the front chairs. The room was tiny. The more we sat in it, the tinier it got. At ten-thirty, there was a rush of people from the other service. They jammed the lobby outside the door. They were loud and laughing. A few people looked in, hushed for a second, smiled sadly, then waved or nodded to the three of us. When they drove off in their cars, it was quiet again. It was like that for another fifteen minutes or so.
“They’ll come,” said Mrs. K, pressing my hand.
“Who? Everyone?”
“They’re just so busy,” she said.
“Doing what?”
She gave me one of those smiles again, then shared it with the pasty man at the podium rustling papers. He smiled back at her. I couldn’t tell if he was just being nice, knew what she meant, had a secret, thought she was “off,” or was fascinated by her helmet hair. His name was Chalmers, which seemed oddly right for a funeral director.
Mr. Chalmers.
If he even
was
a director. Maybe he was an assistant director. After all, his name wasn’t Brent. And we had the small room. Maybe Grandma’s whole funeral was on a budget. That seemed right, too, for my dad. I could just hear Mom complain about how cheesy it was, and him saying nothing, and us all thinking:
loser.
While Dad went to the bathroom or something, I got up and asked Chalmers about the obituary.
“My dad says that he didn’t write this part, about the ‘adventurous spirit.’” I showed him the clipping, and the man’s face got red.
He frowned, as if not understanding me. “We sometimes have help, you know. Writing obituaries. If we are overloaded.”
“Who?” I asked.
“With the deceased, of course,” he said, continuing his look. “This is St. Petersburg. They call it —”
“No, I mean, who helped you with my grandmother’s obituary?”
Now he seemed offended. He drew back. “Honestly, son, I don’t remember. Now, if you’ll take your seat, please. The guests are beginning to arrive. We must hurry along.”
Hurry? Why?