Page 6 of Key West Homecoming

“Someone who desperately needs a vacation.”

Emma laughed. “You’re not wrong about that. One of these days I’ll get around to that.”

She finished her pie and got back in the car.

The first bridge came without much warning. One minute she was on solid ground, and the next she was crossing a stretch of open water so blue it didn’t look real. Key Largo on the other side, dive shops and seafood restaurants and hand-painted signs advertising snorkeling trips she drove past without slowing. Then Islamorada, where the ocean sat close to the road on both sides. The sun came off the water so bright she was grateful for her sunglasses.

She continued through Long Key, then the causeway, and slowed coming into Marathon. It looked like every other town on the drive down. There were strip malls, marinas, cinder-block houses with hurricane shutters and boats parked everywhere. But somewhere in these blocks was her uncle Arthur. His address wasn’t something she’d ever had reason to learn, and she’d never once been to his place. Knowing he was near most likely having his coffee, doing whatever a man did when he’d spent the last decade stealing from his mother a little at a time.

She knew more about Arthur’s dealings than she wanted to and felt there was little she could do about him. Until now, when her anger grew the longer she made her way to Key West.

At the end of Marathon, the road lifted, and there it was. The Seven Mile Bridge.

Nothing had prepared her for it. The bridge went on and on, the old one running parallel to the new. On either side the water changed colors from blue to turquoise. With both hands on the wheel she drove straight through the middle of nothing. A memory of her mother driving over the bridge popped up and she remembered asking her mother if the water underneath was deep.

“Yes, it’s very deep, sweetie. It’s so deep that if you’re not careful the mermaids might come up and take you down with them.”

Emma believed it for the whole crossing.

Big Pine Key came and went with a sign warning her to watch for the Keys’ deer. Then, Sugarloaf, Cudjoe, Boca Chica. The road narrowed, the traffic thickened, and the light changed from open-sky bright to the softer green of trees closing in overhead.

Key West appeared just ahead. She drove down a smaller road at a slower speed and looked at houses painted the color of tropical fruit. She followed the GPS off the highway and onto side streets that got narrower and quieter until it told her she’d arrived.

Twenty-Three Hibiscus Lane.

The cottage sat behind a low white fence in the middle of a quiet street. Emma pulled up to the curb and turned off the engine. And for a while, she did nothing but stare at the house.

Arthur had told her the roof was gone. He'd said the porch had collapsed. And that the garden was a jungle. As if that wasn't dramatic enough. He'd added that she'd break her ankle on the front step. And that the whole place was one good storm from coming down.

What Emma saw kept her in the seat with both hands still on the wheel. Same pink as her last summer here. The white trim fresh, the black shutters neat against it. On the drive down, she'd told herself that even if the cottage was still standing, it wouldn't look like anything she knew. It looked like everything she knew. Lilies bloomed along the fence in the same yellow and pink. The bougainvillea over the porch railing was the wild magenta her grandmother had always said was the only proper color for bougainvillea. At the corner of the yard, the tall palm bent the way it had always bent. Someone had raked the crushed shell path and the edges were still sharp. And by the front steps in a clay pot that was new to her, sat a young key lime tree with three small green fruits already on the branches.

Whatever this was, it wasn't the ruin Arthur had described.

She got out of the car and walked to the gate, where the latch was clean and new. Inside it, she started up the path, and that's when she saw the man on the porch.

He was crouched at the far end, working on something with a paintbrush. He hadn't heard her come in. His back was to her and she could see the long line of his shoulders under a faded gray T-shirt. He had dark hair that was a little too long and he had paint on his forearms.

Emma cleared her throat.

He looked up, saw her and stood. Tall, about her own age, with a face that hadn't decided yet whether to smile. He wiped his hands on a rag and set the brush down on the paint tray.

“Can I help you?”

His voice was careful. Not unfriendly but not welcoming either.

“I’m looking for the owner of this cottage,” Emma said.

He watched her for a beat. “There’s no owner living here. It’s a rental.”

“Do you live here?”

“For the last three years.”

“And your name?”

“Jake Kelleher. And yours?”

“Emma Kendrick.”