“That’s not something you see every day,” said Mrs. Bustamonte, although, this being Florida’s Treasure Coast, if there was something you did see every day, it was topless men, although not usually with muddy suit trousers on.
Fat Charlie changed his shirt by the car, and went back into the house. The four ladies were in the kitchen, industriously packing away into Tupperware containers what looked like it had until recently been a large spread of food.
Mrs. Higgler was older than Mrs. Bustamonte, and both of them were older than Miss Noles, and none of them was older than Mrs. Dunwiddy. Mrs. Dunwiddy was old, and she looked it. There were geological ages that were probably younger than Mrs. Dunwiddy.
As a boy, Fat Charlie had imagined Mrs. Dunwiddy in Equatorial Africa, peering disapprovingly though her thick spectacles at the newly erect hominids. “Keep out of my front yard,” she would tell a recently evolved and rather nervous specimen of Homo habilis, “or I going to belt you around your ear hole, I can tell you.” Mrs. Dunwiddy smelled of violet water and beneath the violets she smelled of very old woman indeed. She was a tiny old lady who could outglare a thunderstorm, and Fat Charlie, who had, over two decades ago, followed a lost tennis ball into her yard, and then broken one of her lawn ornaments, was still quite terrified of her.
Right now, Mrs. Dunwiddy was eating lumps of curry goat with her fingers from a small Tupperware bowl. “Pity to waste it,” she said, and dropped the bits of goat bone into a china saucer.
“Time for you to eat, Fat Charlie?” asked Miss Noles.
“I’m fine,” said Fat Charlie. “Honest.”
Four pairs of eyes stared at him reproachfully through four pairs of spectacles. “No good starvin‘ yourself in your grief,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy, licking her fingertips, and picking out another brown fatty lump of goat.
“I’m not. I’m just not hungry. That’s all.”
“Misery going to shrivel you away to pure skin and bones,” said Miss Noles, with gloomy relish.
“I don’t think it will.”
“I putting a plate together for you at the table over there,” said Mrs. Higgler. “You go and sit down now. I don’t want to hear another word out of you. There’s more of everything, so don’t you worry about that.”
Fat Charlie sat down where she pointed, and within seconds there was placed in front of him a plate piled high with stew peas and rice, and sweet potato pudding, jerk pork, curry goat, curry chicken, fried plantains, and a pickled cow foot. Fat Charlie could feel the heartburn beginning, and he had not even put anything in his mouth yet.
“Where’s everyone else?” he said.
“Your daddy’s drinking buddies, they gone off drinking. They going to have a memorial fishing trip off a bridge, in his memory.” Mrs. Higgler poured the remaining coffee out of her bucket-sized traveling mug into the sink and replaced it with the steaming contents of a freshly brewed jug of coffee.
Mrs. Dunwiddy licked her fingers clean with a small purple tongue, and she shuffled over to where Fat Charlie was sitting, his food as yet untouched. When he was a little boy he had truly believed that Mrs. Dunwiddy was a witch. Not a nice witch, more the kind kids had to push into ovens to escape from. This was the first time he’d seen her in more than twenty years, and he was still having to quell an inner urge to yelp and hide under the table.
“I seen plenty people die,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy. “In my time. Get old enough, you will see it your own self too. Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.” She paused. “Still. I never thought it would happen to your daddy.” And she shook her head.
“What was he like?” asked Fat Charlie. “When he was young?”
Mrs. Dunwiddy looked at him through her thick, thick spectacles, and her lips pursed, and she shook her head. “Before my time,” was all she said. “Eat your cow foot.”
Fat Charlie sighed, and he began to eat.
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON, AND THEY WERE ALONE IN THE HOUSE.
“Where you going to sleep tonight?” asked Mrs. Higgler.
“I thought I’d get a motel room,” said Fat Charlie.
“When you got a perfectly good bedroom here? And a perfectly good house down the road. You haven’t even looked at it yet. You ask me, your father would have wanted you to stay there.”
“I’d rather be on my own. And I don’t think I feel right about sleeping at my dad’s place.”
“Well, it’s not my money I’m throwin‘ away,” said Mrs. Higgler. “You’re goin’ to have to decide what you’re goin‘ to do with your father’s house anyway. And all his things.”
“I don’t care,” said Fat Charlie. “We could have a garage sale. Put them on eBay. Haul them to the dump.”
“Now, what kind of an attitude is that?” She rummaged in a kitchen drawer and pulled out a front door key with a large paper label attached to it. “He give me a spare key when he move,” she said. “In case he lose his, or lock it inside, or something. He used to say, he could forget his head if it wasn’t attached to his neck. When he sell the house next door, he tell me, don’t you worry, Callyanne, I won’t go far; he’d live in that house as long as I remember, but now he decide it’s too big and he need to move house…” and still talking she walked him down to the curb and drove them down several streets in her maroon station wagon, until they reached a one-story wooden house.
She unlocked the front door and they went inside.
The smell was familiar: faintly sweet, as if chocolate chip cookies had been baked there the last time the kitchen was used, but that had been a long time ago. It was too hot in there. Mrs. Higgler led them into the little sitting room, and she turned on a window-fitted air-conditioning unit. It rattled and shook, and smelled like a wet sheepdog, and moved the warm air around.