face the people in the house.
He unlocked the bathroom door, and opened it.
Four elderly ladies were standing in the corridor, staring at him. He knew them. He knew all of them.
“What you doing now?” asked Mrs. Higgler.
“Changing shirt,” said Fat Charlie. “Shirt in car. Yes. Back soon.”
He raised his chin high, and strode down the corridor and out of the front door.
“What kind of language was that he was talkin?” asked little Mrs. Dunwiddy, behind his back, loudly.
“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
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.
There were stacks of books piled around a decrepit sofa Fat Charlie remembered from his childhood, and there were photographs in frames: one, in black-and-white, of Fat Charlie’s mother when she was young, with her hair up on top of her head all black and shiny, wearing a sparkly dress; beside it, a photo of Fat Charlie himself, aged perhaps five or six years old, standing beside a mirrored door, so it looked at first glance as if two little Fat Charlies, side by side, were staring seriously out of the photograph at you.
Fat Charlie picked up the top book in the pile. It was a book on Italian architecture.
“Was he interested in architecture?”
“Passionate about it. Yes.”
“I didn’t know that.”
Mrs. Higgler shrugged and sipped her coffee.
Fat Charlie opened the book and saw his father’s name neatly written on the first page. He closed the book.
“I never knew him,” said Fat Charlie. “Not really.”
“He was never an easy man to know,” said Mrs. Higgler. “I knew him for what, nearly sixty years? And I didn’t know him.”
“You must have known him when he was a boy.”
Mrs. Higgler hesitated. She seemed to be remembering. Then she said, very quietly, “I knew him when I was a girl.”
Fat Charlie felt that he should be changing the subject, so he pointed to the photo of his mother. “He’s got Mum’s picture there,” he said.
Mrs Higgler took a slurp of her coffee. “Them take it on a boat,” she said. “Back before you was born. One of those boats that you had dinner on, and they would sail out three miles, out of territorial waters, and then there
