Page 152 of Key West Homecoming

“So they say.”

“There are more than fifty of them.”

“There are.”

“Who does that?”

“A man with money and a wife who liked cats.”

At the pool, Emma listened to the story about the penny. Pauline had built the pool while Hemingway was away. When he returned and learned what it cost, he'd supposedly pressed a penny into the wet cement and told her she might as well have his last cent too.

Emma looked at Jake. “That's either the meanest thing I've ever heard or the funniest.”

“It's both. That's the whole island in one story.”

They crossed the street and climbed the lighthouse.

By the sixtieth step, Emma was breathing hard but refused to mention it. At the top, the gallery was narrow enough that she and Jake had to stand close together.

She didn't mind at all.

Key West stretched below them. Tin roofs and white clapboard houses appeared between the trees. Cruise ships sat at the western end of the island, and beyond them the water seemed to change color every few miles.

Emma stood quietly for a while.

“There it is,” Jake said.

“It's small.”

“Two miles by four.”

“That's the whole thing?”

“That's all of it.”

Emma looked north and east toward the highway that eventually led back to the mainland.

“Where's the cottage?”

Jake stepped behind her and pointed over her shoulder. Emma followed the direction of his hand toward a green pocket of trees in the distance.

There, almost hidden among them, was a small square of pink.

Emma stared at it.

From up here, the cottage looked tiny. For the last eighteen days, it had felt large enough to hold Gloria, Arthur, her father and every question Emma had carried to Key West.

Now it was simply a house among hundreds of others.

Her house.

“Amazing,” she said.

Jake's hand settled lightly against her back.

They had lunch at Blue Heaven in Bahama Village. Their table sat beneath a tree in the courtyard, and a rooster stood beside an empty chair watching Emma.

“That's a rooster.”