Her parents were remarkably youthful and good-looking, and you could tell that she was going to be beautiful, too. Rebecca was one of the few individuals who actually deserved to be pretty, because it wasn’t going to make her full of shit. She took after her parents that way.
People generally hated the whole family.
12
A de Havilland twin-engine turboprop banked at four thousand feet over the turquoise water of Florida Bay and lined up its approach. Samantha Bridges pressed her face to the window and looked down at the A1A traffic, moving only slightly slower than the plane.
Samantha felt a Bogart sensation of intrigue as her plane landed on the single, short runway with faded markings, bleached and hot, carved into the salt flats and coconut palms. The terminal was smaller than some houses in her neighborhood and needed paint.
Key West International Airport.
Stairs flopped down from the side of the plane, and Samantha appeared in the hatch. Two women waited on the edge of the runway outside the Conch Flyer Lounge, grinning, hoisting fruity drinks in toast. Sam almost didn’t recognize Teresa in the lavender dress. She was thin. And blond. Maria looked great, too, despite the fashion error of matching vertical stripes with gila monsters.
A pair of Beechcraft B 100s landed in quick succession, Paige and Rebecca, and suddenly they were all there, piling in an airport shuttle van.
It started two months earlier, a chance occurrence. Samantha Bridges was now an assistant state attorney in Miami, and her youngest daughter had just left for Florida State. She turned the extra bedroom into a home office with a new computer and AOL account.
Sam began fooling around with search engines one Sunday evening. Midnight came and went. She still couldn’t believe her screen. She had plugged in the names as a lark, and it had become a chain reaction of long-distance phone calls. Then they all hung up and hopped back on their computers, five women typing nonstop in the new Books, Booze and Broads chat room. Layoffs, surgeries, relocations to Boston and Belgium, a total of four new marriages that had gone south. Then, full circle, all back in Florida and single again. With one big difference. Empty nests.
“Let’s revive the book club.”
“Have a reunion.”
“What do you want to read?”
“Where?”
“What?”
“The reunion.”
“Slow down!”
“Let’s pick a book and visit where it’s set.”
“Or pick a place and find a book that’s set there.”
“I like the first idea better.”
“They’re the same.”
“No they’re not.”
“Whatever.”
First stop: Key West, Cayo Hueso, The Rock, Island of Bones. Rebecca had recommended the book, passed along by her parents. It was about a bunch of Jimmy Buffett fans on a pilgrimage to the Keys, and they spend the whole trip wasted on frozen drinks until they’re mysteriously murdered one by one.
The courtesy van pulled up in front of the Heron House on Simonton Street. The women wheeled luggage through the orchid garden and past the mosaic of a big wading bird tiled into the bottom of the swimming pool. They entered their suite through the sundeck, and there was no doubt where they were. Watercolors everywhere. Paintings of tropical plants, bedspreads with tropical fish. Rattan, marble, French doors, stained transoms. They crossed “the fulcrum” — that long-anticipated turning point when you’re traveling to a party town and finally get in your room and drop the suitcases, and it all lifts off your shoulders with a sudden buoyancy. This called for a meeting of the book club. They headed out the door to find one of the taverns in their Krunkleton paperbacks.
The five started north on Duval Street, past the Lost Weekend Liquor Store, into the drinking district. Freaks on the street, squares in the bars. Bars with plastic bulls crashing through walls, parrots and flamingos on the counters, sailfish over the taps, pinball machines in back and pitchmen out front barking about double-jointed strippers upstairs. People who should never limbo doing so, reggae bands joined onstage by bald drunks from Cincinnati, derelicts riding bicycles with iguanas in the baskets and big snakes around their necks, drunk couples necking, transvestites on stilts, dogs wearing sunglasses, college students falling off mopeds and vomiting all over their SEE THE KEYS ON YOUR HANDS AND KNEES T-shirts.
