“Tony’s an extremely self-centered man,” Hazel said briskly. “And she’s worse. Dangerously so. Neither is capable of being happy unless they’re pushing other people around. I’m tired of it and I’m tired of them. I’ve been an owner here right from the start. They ought to respect that. They ought to respect
“I’m sure they do,” I said, holding my hand up to attract a waitress. This meeting had gone on long enough. I needed to be somewhere else. Somewhere out of direct sunlight. “They have their own way of doing things, and progress comes hard to people. There’s comfort and convenience to the status quo. Everyone needs a compelling reason to change.”
I might have kept quoting random self-improvement mantras forever, but thankfully a waitress arrived with the check, though not the waitress who’d been serving us previously. It was, as a matter of fact, the girl who’d waited on Steph and me the night before. She evidently saw me noticing the switch.
“Shift swap,” she said. “Or maybe Debbie just exploded. You never know. Hey,” she added, belatedly recognizing me. “Back so soon? Should get you a loyalty card.”
“Is there one?”
“Not really. But I could make a prototype, maybe. Out of a serviette and, like, drawing our logo on it.”
“What would the rewards be?”
“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “But the card itself would be an awesome thing.”
I handed over my personal Amex. She went back indoors.
“You come here often, Bill?” Hazel asked, one eyebrow lightly raised.
“Last night,” I said. “Stephanie and I had a great meal on the balcony. That girl was our waitress.”
“You must be on the up if you’re making a habit of hanging out at this place.”
“Hardly a habit. It was our anniversary.”
She nodded, her eyes vague. Phil Wilkins was six years dead, but it didn’t take a genius to work out that his wife still missed him hard. I’d met Phil a couple of times, soon after we moved to Florida, and even when hobbled with advanced cancer you could tell he’d once been a man of compelling character. Hazel still presented well, but there was an air of pointlessness about the performance. She was keeping her end up because that’s what you did, not because she especially wanted anyone to notice, or cared what anyone still alive thought of her. It was as though her husband had told her to stand to one side and wait for him while he fetched the car, but then had never come back to collect.
Her hands lay together on the round metal table as if they had been mislaid by someone else. I put one of mine gently on top of them.
“Look,” I said, as if the idea had just come to me. “You want me to try to have a word with Tony?”
“Could you do that?” Her gaze came back to the here and now. “I don’t want him to know it’s coming from me. I’m only looking to sell two of the units. The other I’m going to keep until the day I die, and then the kids can fight over it. The Breakers is in my life, and I never want to lose that. I just want to be able to make some changes, you know? I love it that I can still see Phil there. But I think maybe . . . I need to see him just a little less.”
She looked away. “Sometimes when I try to go to sleep at night, it’s like I can feel him standing by the bed, looking down on me. And that’s nice in some ways, but if he can’t climb in and get beside me, then I think maybe I could live without it. Do you understand?”
“Sure,” I said, feeling uncomfortable. I sat back in my chair, bringing my hand away with me.
The waitress returned with my card. She seemed to sense that Hazel was having a moment, and backed away again discreetly and without comment.
“Anything I can do, I’ll do,” I said. “I promise.”
Hazel smiled. “You’re a good guy, Bill,” she said.
By the time I’d parked outside the office I’d shrugged off the encounter. Refreshing dissent among owners at The Breakers remained a sensible tactic. I hadn’t been expecting that Hazel Wilkins’s issue with the decor would be quite so personal, but that was all to the good. Business concerns come and go and ebb and flow. Personal beefs are permanent. If someone who’d known the Thompsons for that long was prepared to start trusting me as go-between, it was going well. I didn’t actually care if she got what she wanted.
Karren’s desk was unattended when I walked in. Janine was in position bending over hers, laminating something. Personally, had I been born and bred a Floridian, I might have made the effort not to be fat when I grew up. In this weather and humidity, it’s simply not the thinking person’s choice. Janine cleaved to some other vision, however, and when stuffed into bright blue stretch pants, her rear end was another thing that Karren and I were at one in finding less than supergreat and perfect.
“Hey,” I said.
Janine let out a squeal and turned around. When she saw it was me, she rolled her eyes and fluttered a pudgy hand over her heart. She did this every single time anything happened that hadn’t been exhaustively trailed via radio, television, and public service announcement. How she’d managed to make it to twenty-six without a heart attack, I had no idea.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”
“Live and in color. Who did you think it might be?”
“Well, you just never know.”
“I guess not. How’s . . .” I struggled and failed to come up with the name of her spawn. “Feeling better?”
This was not something I cared about in the least, but that morning a Danish positivity blogger had suggested going out of one’s way to attempt to get inside other people’s lives and minds, however small and unappealing they might appear, as a thought experiment in connection building.
“A little,” she allowed cautiously. A cynical person might have wondered whether the kid, whose name I suddenly remembered—Kyle—was in fact this morning so very healthy that he was being held up by pediatricians as an example to others everywhere, but that his mother was withholding this information in case she needed to come in late another morning that week.
“That’s great. Great.”
She smiled suddenly. “And so how was your dinner?” There was a strange inflection to her question, as if I was being upbraided for being coy.
I frowned at her, confused.
“At Bo’s, silly,” she said. “Was it great? I’ve always wanted to go. But of course it’s
“It was fabulous,” I said. “As always. But how did you know I was there?”
Now it was her turn to look baffled. “Well, you asked me to make the reservation,” she said. “You sent me an e-mail, end of last week.”
“Right, right,” I said. That was one minor mystery solved at least. “Of course. Thank you for sorting it out. We had a lovely evening.”
“That’s so cool.”
“Where’s Karren?”
“You know, I don’t actually know. She left about half an hour ago. I did ask her where she was going, just out of interest or in case you needed to know, you know, and she was all, ‘To meet with a client.’ So basically, I think that’s what it is, probably.”
“Okay then,” I said.
I discovered where Karren had gone as soon as I logged on to check my mail. She’d sent me a note explaining that a man called David Warner had called midmorning (while I was sitting listening to Hazel zone out over her dead husband), asking for me and wanting advice on selling his house up the key. He’d wanted to get onto it right away, her e-mail said with judicious reasonableness, and I hadn’t been there, so she was going to take the meeting instead. She hoped that was okay.
“Bitch,” I muttered.
She knew damned well it wasn’t okay. Warner was a guy I’d met at a bar on the mainland a couple of weeks before. He had an eight-million-dollar house on Longboat about three miles north of The Breakers, and selling it should have been my gig. I’d done the groundwork. I’d met the guy and started the fire.
“Excuse me?” Janine said.
“Just clearing my throat.”
