The House on the Gulf Read online

  I didn’t want to worry her, didn’t want to ruin her mood. But I couldn’t get Bran’s odd behavior out of my mind.

  “Bran showed me the house today,” I said, starting out cautiously. “Just the outside, because Mr. Marquis was still there.”

  Would Mom think that sounded suspicious? Was that enough to start up the same alarm bells in her mind that were going off in mine?

  Probably not.

  “Um-hm,” she said vaguely. “Nice, isn’t it?” “You haven’t seen inside either, have you?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Bran drove me there back in March, I think, when he first started working for the Marquises. We rang the doorbell, but the Marquises weren’t home. I don’t know where you were then—volleyball practice, maybe?”

  I’d joined the volleyball team at my new school in a desperate attempt to make friends. It hadn’t worked, and I’d hated volleyball—hated the ball smacking my arms, hated the other girls screaming out, “It’s mine, it’s mine!” around me, because they’d already figured out that I wasn’t any good.

  Bran, meanwhile, had made tons of friends at the high school. The Computer Club had welcomed him with open arms; the Drama Club had been delighted at his expertise with the sound system for their plays.

  I tried not to think about school.

  “Don’t you think it’s a little . . . strange that you’ve never even met the Marquises, and we’re going to be living in their house?” I was inching closer to something I hadn’t quite let myself think yet.

  “Well, kind of,” Mom conceded. “But between my work schedule and their—what did Bran call it?—their ‘social calendar,’ it never worked out. I guess they’re the kind of people who are always going to their canasta club and their backgammon tournaments and all that.” She grinned, stopping just short of making fun of the Marquises. I’d learned from the kids at school that there was a whole stereotype about old people down here. Supposedly they all went to dinner at four o’clock, and drove five miles per hour even when the speed limit was fifty-five, and, yes, spent most of their time playing canasta and backgammon and games like that.

  “But you talked to Mr. Marquis on the phone, right?” I persisted.

  “Sure,” Mom said. “I wouldn’t have felt right about this house-sitting deal at all if I hadn’t at least done that.”

  I realized that I’d just been standing there holding the shirt I was supposed to be folding. I flipped it over, tucked it into the box, and dropped the hanger onto the stack on the floor. But I didn’t pick up a new shirt to fold just yet.

  “What did you think of Mr. Marquis?” I asked.

  Mom shrugged.

  “He seemed nice enough. A little hard of hearing, maybe. Kept shouting out, ‘What’s that?’ and ‘Eh?’ when I was telling him we’d do our best to take care of his house, and how much the job meant to us. Honestly, it was all I could do not to laugh, so I probably didn’t talk to him as long as I would have otherwise.” Mom grinned again. “But there wasn’t that much I needed to discuss with him, because Bran’ll be the one doing all the work.”

  I couldn’t quite bring myself to grin back at Mom. Mr. Marquis hadn’t seemed the least bit hard of hearing when I’d met him. But maybe it’s easier to hide deafness when you’re talking to someone face-to-face, instead of over the phone.

  “Kitchen now?” Mom said.

  “What? Oh, okay,” I said. We were done folding clothes, and I hadn’t even noticed. I followed Mom toward the tiny cubbyhole that passed for a kitchen in Sunset Terrace. It wasn’t big enough for both of us to fit in there at once, so she started handing out pots and pans for me to put into boxes in the living room.

  When Mom had her head inside the cupboard I could say what I was really worried about, and feel like I was just talking to myself.

  “It was weird there this afternoon,” I said. “Bran was weird. He acted like—like he didn’t want Mr. Marquis to see me. Like maybe he thought that if Mr. Marquis met me, he wouldn’t want me living in the house. Bran didn’t even let me introduce myself!”

  Was I exaggerating? No, Bran had started talking even as I said “I’m Britt.” I felt hurt all over again.

  Mom popped her head out of the cupboard.

  “Oh, honey,” she said. “Did Bran really give you that impression?”

  I nodded forlornly.

  “Mr. Marquis knows I’m staying there too, doesn’t he?” I asked. I had a sudden vision of Mom and Bran living happily in the house and me banished to, I don’t know, maybe the shed in the back. I knew it was ridiculous, but I felt even more sorry for myself.

  “Of course Mr. Marquis knows,” Mom said. “But maybe. . .” She seemed to be choosing her words carefully. “Maybe the Marquises are feeling a little strange about this house-sitting deal. They’ve never had a house-sitter before, remember? Bran and I know you’re mature and responsible and trustworthy. I’d trust you to take care of my house, if I had one. But maybe Bran thought Mr. Marquis would look at you and think, ‘Oh, I didn’t know she was such a little kid. What if she breaks something?’ It’s not your fault. It’s just—this is kind of a weird situation.”

  “I’m twelve years old—almost thirteen,” I said. “I’m not a little kid.” I knew I was making myself sound like one, because my voice came out all whiny. “It’s not my fault I’m small for my age.” I was. I’d been the shortest kid in my class back in Pennsylvania, and I was the shortest kid in my class here in Florida. Come to think of it, that was probably one of the reasons I hadn’t been any good at volleyball.

  “I know,” Mom said. “But Bran’s sixteen, and I’m kind of surprised the Marquises would trust him with their house.” She scrambled up from the floor, her buoyancy back. “Of course, I’m not about to tell the Marquises that. I wouldn’t want to do anything to mess up this deal!”

  She put the last pan in the box and sealed it with tape.

  “Mr. Marquis thinks Bran is conscientious,” I said, a little sulkily.

  “He is,” Mom said. “He’s conscientious and responsible and mature beyond his years, because of the way he’s had to grow up.” She grimaced, and I knew she was thinking about Dad leaving us, and her having to work all the time, and Bran having to take care of me. Her grimace turned into a rueful smile. “He’s much more trustworthy than I was at his age.”

  When Mom was sixteen, she eloped with my father. Her parents were so upset they disowned her.

  I couldn’t imagine Bran doing anything so bad that Mom would disown him. I couldn’t imagine him doing anything so bad she’d frown at him, even ever so slightly, the way she did at me when I forgot my homework or overslept or tracked in mud.

  But I still thought Bran was up to something. Mom hadn’t been there that afternoon. She hadn’t seen how Bran was acting. And I hadn’t done a very good job of describing it.

  “Ready for bed?” Mom said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m beat.”

  Mom went into the bathroom to brush her teeth. Then I helped her make up a bed on the couch where Bran would sleep when he got home from the restaurant. Back in Pennsylvania, the three of us always took turns sleeping on the couch. But ever since we’d gotten to Florida, Bran had insisted that Mom and I get the bedroom. It had something to do with the footsteps we sometimes heard racing past our door in the middle of the night. Once we’d even heard gunshots.

  And I was worried about moving to the Marquises’ house? Whatever Bran was up to, there couldn’t be anything bad about getting away from Sunset Terrace.

  We moved into the Marquises house the day after school ended. It was only May, but the day was already roasting hot at 7:30 A.M. when Mom backed our car and the rented U-Haul into the Marquises’ driveway. Mom hopped out and fanned her T-shirt back and forth to cool down.

  “They do have air-conditioning, don’t they?” I asked as I peeled the backs of my legs from the sticky vinyl seat.

  Bran was busy unlocking the front door.

  “Don’t worry. It’s a
lready on,” he said, and disappeared inside.

  “I knew I liked these people,” Mom said. She grabbed a box from the trunk and handed it to me. “Let’s get this over with.”

  I walked up the Marquises’ front walk—no, our front walk, I corrected myself. We’d never lived in a house before, and I felt downright extravagant having a front walk just for my family. For the summer, anyway.

  Bran held the door open for me as he went back out for more boxes. I was hit by a wave of stale, warmish air. Where was that air-conditioning Bran had promised us?

  Mom was right behind me, and she chuckled at my expression of dismay.

  “Don’t forget, the house has been shut up for a while,” she said. She peered at a thermostat on the wall. “Just as I thought—it’s set on eighty-two. We’ll crank it up after we’ve got everything in.”

  It had been nearly a week since the Marquises left, and I guess it made sense that they wouldn’t have kept heavy-duty air-conditioning on when no one was here. They’d said it was okay for Bran just to look in on the house occasionally until we could move in. I guess the greatest danger to the house was after school was out.

  Mom put down her box and followed Bran back out to the car for more, but I couldn’t help stopping to look around. My eyes took a minute to adjust fully to the dim room in front of me. It held two new-looking flowered green couches, a recliner, three coffee tables, a TV, a VCR/DVD player, a stereo, gold-framed pictures on the wall. . . . No wonder the Marquises were worried about something being stolen. They had a lot of things.

  I set my box on top of Mom’s and walked through the rest of the house, looking at everything. After the tiny apartment back at Sunset Terrace, this house seemed to go on and on. In one direction from the living room, there was a kitchen and a dining room and a laundry room and a sunroom and a screened-in porch. The bedrooms were in the other direction, down a long hall. There were three of them, all with double beds and wide chests and bureaus. The biggest bedroom even had a bathroom of its own.

  Not only would none of us have to sleep on a couch in the living room, one of us wouldn’t even have to share a bathroom.

  “I feel rich,” I said aloud. “I can’t believe we’re going to live here.”

  “Yeah?” Bran grunted, bringing in another box behind me. “Well, rich girl, you forgot to hire movers. Guess you’ll have to lower yourself to carrying your own boxes.”

  He handed me the box and I carried it on down the hall.

  “Can I have the yellow room?” I asked. “You can have the blue one and Mom can have the one with the pink swirls.”

  “Doesn’t matter to me,” Bran said, turning back for more boxes.

  By midmorning we were all soaked with sweat, but everything we owned had been transferred into the Marquises’ house. It was strange to see our solid brown couch jammed in the sunroom with all the Marquises’ white wicker furniture. Our kitchen table was folded up and hidden behind the couch. It had never hit me so strongly before that the table we’d eaten at and done our homework on for as long as I could remember was really just a flimsy card table, stored so easily. I felt like apologizing to all our possessions for shoving them aside and hiding them in out-of-the-way places, just because the Marquises’ possessions were nicer. Every pot and pan and cup and glass we owned was going to stay boxed up all summer, because it made no sense to unpack our stuff when the Marquises’ things were already on the shelves.

  Thinking about glasses and cups reminded me how thirsty I was. I began opening cabinet doors in the kitchen, until I found a row of cups. I pulled one down, filled it from the faucet and gulped down the water. It had that same slightly seaweedy taste I’d never gotten used to back at Sunset Terrace. To distract myself, I studied the design on the cup, a strange plaid pattern of red and blue and yellow. I looked in the cupboards again—the plates were covered in the same design. Everything was an odd plastic that looked like it’d been around for decades. I turned over one of the plates and read the name on the bottom: Melmac.

  “Hey, look at this,” I called to Bran, who was stacking boxes in the laundry room. “How old do you think this is?”

  Bran glanced my way but didn’t answer.

  “Know what I think?” I continued. “I bet they bought new dishes for their house up North and they brought all their old kitchen stuff down here. I bet this was the set of dishes they got as wedding presents or something. And they used it for years, up North, and now when they come to Florida and use it, it reminds them of being newly weds, years and years and years ago.”

  I was having fun imagining the Marquises’ lives, but all summer it was going to be strange eating off plates that were full of memories for people we didn’t even know.

  So silly of me—it wasn’t like I hadn’t been wearing secondhand clothes all my life. But this was different. The Marquises weren’t done with these plates or their memories.

  Suddenly I had Bran’s attention.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked. I repeated my story. This time I added little flourishes: “They probably look at the little teeth marks on the cups and reminisce about when little Johnny got his first tooth—even though little Johnny’s probably forty years old now. . . .”

  “Jeez, Britt, you think these are antiques or something?” Bran asked. His voice didn’t sound quite right. I figured he was straining to place a heavy box right at the top of a stack. But when I turned around, he wasn’t even touching the boxes. He was staring at me and the plates.

  “Antiques?” I said. I fingered the rim of the plate I was holding. It looked pretty cheap to me. If the Marquises really had gotten these dishes as wedding presents, they were gifts from their poor relatives. “No, I think they’re just old.”

  “Still.” Bran looked very worried. “I wouldn’t want to break any of their dishes. Maybe we shouldn’t use them. Why don’t you pack all their kitchen supplies away right now, and we can use our own stuff all summer.”

  I looked at the open cabinet in front of me, full of glasses and dishes. It would take a good hour to empty just that cupboard. My shoulders already ached from carrying boxes. And I was so hot and tired I’d be more likely to break something trying to pack it now than I would using it for an entire summer.

  “Nothing’s going to get broken just sitting on that shelf,” I said. “We can keep our stuff out on the counter. I can unpack that later.”

  “But—,” Bran started to protest, just as Mom came walking toward the kitchen. He rushed past me. “Mom,” he said in a complaining tone.

  I stared after him. Bran didn’t usually tattle. He usually just yelled at me himself.

  But Bran wasn’t saying anything about me. He was steering Mom away from the kitchen.

  “Didn’t the U-Haul guy say he’d give you a discount if we took the trailer back early?” he asked.

  “Yep. And we’ve unloaded everything, so I’m ready to go. I was just making sure the AC was turned up before I left. Now that we’re not coming in and out every five minutes, there’s no reason to fry.”

  Mom was reaching for the thermostat on the living-room wall. Bran actually put his hand over the controls before she could touch it.

  “We can’t,’ he said. “I mean, I don’t think the Marquises would want us to—”

  “Bran.” Mom almost laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous. Surely the Marquises knew we couldn’t leave the thermostat at eighty-two all summer. They just had it set there to keep things from getting moldy from the humidity while no one was here.”

  “Well, um—” Bran seemed stymied, but he didn’t take his hand off the thermostat. “I just. . . I kind of promised them we wouldn’t use a lot of electricity.”

  Mom backed away from the thermostat a little and peered at Bran.

  “What exactly did you promise?” she asked. “Not to change the thermostat? Or just to do stuff like turning off lights when we’re not using them?”

  “Um, not to change the thermostat,” Bran almost whispered. He didn
’t sound very sure of himself. “Not by much, I mean. We could probably go down to seventy-nine or so and it wouldn’t matter.”

  Mom wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand. I could feel sweat trickling down my own face.

  “What if we just offered to pay for the difference?” I asked.

  Mom and Bran both just looked at me, and I knew what a stupid question that was. Air-conditioning was expensive. With Mom not working, we couldn’t even afford 78-degree air.

  “It doesn’t really feel that hot in here,” Bran said. “We’ll be all right.”

  But his dark hair was plastered to his head with sweat. His face was so red he looked sunburnt.

  I waited for Mom to tell him that he was crazy, that no one could survive in this heat. That the Marquises would have to be monsters to expect us to live in such a hot house all summer long. But Mom just stood there with her hair sticking up in sweaty clumps, tired wrinkles around her eyes. No, she looked more than tired. She looked scared.

  Scared?

  “I wouldn’t want to do anything to mess up this deal,” she’d told me that night when we were packing. Was she afraid that asking for a little cool air would make the Marquises change their minds, order us out, decide they didn’t need house-sitters after all?

  Would there be any moment the entire summer that we would be able to forget that we were living in somebody else’s house?

  “I guess people coped with a lot worse before air-conditioning was invented,” Mom said. “Probably we should be glad to have air-conditioning at all.”

  “Right,” Bran said, looking relieved. “Now, go on to the U-Haul place. Britt and I will unpack while you’re gone.”

  I could tell that we were supposed to pretend, for the rest of the summer, that we didn’t mind the heat. Bran and I were always pretending things like that: that we hadn’t outgrown our shoes and didn’t need new ones, that we didn’t mind using the same backpack year after year after year for school, that we didn’t want any of the toys or games we saw advertised on TV. Mom pretended too. She’d been pretending for years that she didn’t mind working two jobs and struggling to pick up a college class or two here and there. I guess she’d minded a lot, if she was willing to live in an oven in order to go to school full-time.