Heart of Palm by Laura Lee Smith Page B

Will said, finally. “We’re above the explosions.”
    “Can you beat that?” Dean said. He had a bottle of beer in his hand but he backed up to the table behind him, set the beer down and came back to the railing. He put his hand on Arla’s shoulder, and she let him.
    “I want to come back here,” Will said, leaning into Frank, and Frank could feel the warmth of his two brothers’ shoulders against his own. “I want to live here. Don’t you, Frank?”
    Frank drew a cool breath, felt the rush of it in his lungs. He looked at Will. “Yeah,” he said. “I do.” Will grinned, leaned in closer.
    And then the valley exploded in color again, and the light came soft through the clouds, and the Bravos watched the thwarted fireworks together. In the foreground, the trees were straight and narrow, like bars, but beyond and below, the clouds swelled and the very mountain shook from the effort of holding down the great rainbow explosions.
    That was a long time ago. A lot of Fourths ago. Now, in front of the Lil’ Champ, Frank fished into the wax bag and fed one Krispy Kreme to Gooch and then, on second thought, gave the dog the other doughnut as well.
    “You might as well,” he said to Gooch, who responded by thumping his tail against the back of the truck’s bench seat. “I can’t eat that shit.” Indeed, his stomach had begun to gnaw at itself with the familiar malaise that he’d been growing steadily accustomed to for the past few months, a feeling like hunger that did not respond to food, a feeling like corrosion, like decay, like dread.
    He started the truck, drove toward Aberdeen.

T WO
    The Bravo family house was in North Utina off Monroe Road, which led northward off Seminary Street, out of Utina’s business district. The road twisted and turned as it wound deeper and deeper into a tangle of ancient Florida hammock and sagging clapboard houses, farther into the woods until it came to the banks of the Intracoastal, to the towering shape of Aberdeen.
    Aberdeen . Shortly after Frank’s parents had moved into the big house, his father had named it. Dean had always wanted to live in a house with a name, and this one had the personality and austerity to warrant it, even if it was more than a little rough around the edges. It stood like a sentry on the Intracoastal, a towering structure at three stories high, with a spindly turret climbing the northwest corner. Once a vibrant blue, the house had faded over the years to a gunmetal gray, with dark patches of green mildew under the windows, an effect not unlike the kohl eyeliner of an Egyptian queen, or, depending on the light, an aging hooker.
    The funny thing is that the name stuck. With a vague notion of some faraway Gaelic adventure, and because he’d seen the word once in a magazine and liked the feel of it, Dean called the house Aberdeen, and so did everyone else, even today, twenty years after Dean had run out on his family and left Aberdeen and Utina for what everyone assumed was forever.
    With the name, the house, once just a house, became something like a person. Which was a weight, it occurred to Frank as he pulled down the long, pine-lined driveway, that he’d never fully considered. Most people just dealt with houses —buying, selling, fixing, razing. But Frank had to deal with Aberdeen . He parked, looking up at the front of the house. The jasmine was as unruly as ever, and now an aggressive sweet potato vine had begun to thread through the floorboards on the porch. The screening on one of the windows was torn. A gap under the front door revealed the pale light of a lamp inside the hall. Frank sighed. He thought, not for the first time, about lighting a match to the whole thing. It was the only sensible thing to do.
    He drained the last of his coffee and stepped out of the truck. Gooch followed, tail wagging, having spotted the enormous frame of Biaggio Dunkirk, Aberdeen’s tenant, caretaker, and chief referee, walking up the drive.
    “Saw you pull