A Place We Knew Well Read online

  Now, for some reason, the priest was back, brushing rain off his freckled forehead and the shoulders of his black suit.

  “Please, uh…sir, have a seat,” Avery said. In his mind, the term Father was reserved for prayers to the Almighty.

  The priest nodded, sat, and began. “It’s been a month, Mr. Avery. I’m making the rounds, checking how our boys are doing.”

  Overhead the gas bell, triggered by the arrival of a powder-blue Ford Fairlane, rang its rapid ding-ding. Both men turned to watch Emilio snap the sides of his clear plastic rain poncho, straighten his cap, hustle out to greet the driver, then sprint around the car to the red Fire Chief pump.

  “Great kid,” Avery said. “Gets along with everybody…even old Steve in there, the station grump.”

  “Heard that,” Steve called from under the big Merc in his service bay.

  “I know it,” Avery called back. “Turns out they’re both nuts about baseball. Same team, too,” he told the priest. “What is it, Steve? The Senators?”

  “The Twins!”

  “Yeah, that’s it. I can’t keep up. Anyway, the boy’s a walking encyclopedia on Cuban ballplayers. Played catch as a kid with one of the rookies. What’s his name?”

  “Tony Oliva!”

  “Ah, yes.” The priest nodded. “They’re from the same town in western Cuba. Pinar del Rio. Pines by the River.”

  “Well, you should’ve heard those two howling over the World Series last weekend.”

  “Damn Yankees!” Steve complained, then remembered himself. “Sorry, Padre.”

  The priest winked a sky-blue eye at Avery. “I understand, my son. Red Sox man myself.”

  “So you in mourning, too? Over the end of the season and all?”

  The priest chuckled. “Not a fan, Mr. Avery?”

  “More of a basketball man myself.”

  “Ahhh…Russell or Chamberlain?”

  “Russell. No contest.”

  “Indeed!” The priest beamed. “Boston is twice blessed by her sporting teams.” Then, raising his voice to carry, the priest called to Steve in a comforting tone, “Four months, my friend. Pitchers and catchers report for practice in a mere one hundred fourteen days.”

  Avery jerked his head toward Steve’s feet, the only part of him that was visible. “He and Leo already made plans for opening day at Tinker Field.” The Twins’ spring training park was in south Orlando.

  The priest’s forehead furrowed. “Leo?”

  “Sorry. That’s Steve’s nickname for Emilio. He doesn’t seem to mind.”

  “The boy enjoys it here, Mr. Avery. And we sincerely thank you for your support, but, um…” The priest turned briefly to eye Emilio, now cleaning the Fairlane’s dipstick. “Come spring…there’s no telling where he’ll be by then.”

  “What do you mean?” In the service bay, Avery heard the wheels of Steve’s work trolley roll out from under the car.

  The priest pursed his lips. “There’s word from the monsignor in Miami—credible word—that very soon the marines will finish what the Bay of Pigs failed to start, if you know what I mean. Once Castro’s gone and Cuba’s free again, the boys will return to their families, just as soon as it’s safely possible.”

  Steve, now standing in the doorway, locked eyes with Avery in a solemn stare.

  One question rose higher than all the others crowding Avery’s mind: If we squeeze Castro out of Cuba, won’t Khrushchev cut off Berlin?

  —

  DESPITE THE IMPROVED FORECAST, pounding rain and gusting winds continued throughout the afternoon.

  Avery was in the left service bay replacing the fan belt on DeeDee Martin’s Corvair.

  Nearby, Steve had spent the better part of the past half hour explaining to Emilio what a thing of beauty the 413 cross-ram Max Wedge engine was in attorney Clem Grimes’s Chrysler 300F. The only flaw, unfortunately, was the difficulty in reaching and replacing the spark plugs. Attempting to do so had set Steve off on a grumbling, foulmouthed tirade.

  Avery shot Emilio an amused wink. Both turned to scan the pumps to make sure no customers were in earshot.

  “That the Reverend Steve I hear, warming up for tomorrow’s sermon?” a familiar voice called from the office: Charlotte Avery, dark ponytail damp and curling with rain.

  “Hey, kiddo, what’s up?” Avery called, delighted, dropping the Corvair’s trunk lid with a resounding thunk, wiping his hands.

  Though Charlotte grinned at Steve and Emilio, she didn’t stop to chat. Instead, his daughter headed straight toward him. Avery noted her graceful toes-out gait (the product of six years’ ballet at Mrs. Pounds’ Dance Studio). But her eyes, always a window on her feelings, were clouded.

  “What?” he asked, worried.

  Charlotte stepped close, her back to the other bay, and said softly, “Mr. Beauchamp came by the Ag Barn while we were working on the floats. They counted the votes. He wasn’t supposed to tell, they’re not announcing it till Monday, but…” Tears welled in her eyes. “I’m in the Homecoming Court.”

  “But that’s great!” he said, confused. “Isn’t it?”

  “Noooo,” she said, widening her eyes, willing him to understand. “Now I have to go to the dance. I mean, I was, but with the twirls. We were going as a group. Now…” She gave a ragged sigh. “Well, all the boys in the court have girlfriends. They’ll be pairing up at the dance. And I’ll be all dressed up”—her lower lip quivered with misery—“with nobody to dance with.”

  Avery slung a comforting arm around her, pulled her to his chest, and felt the flicker of outrage over the stupidity of the boys in her class.

  At age thirteen, his daughter had shot up to five-nine, the tallest girl in eighth grade. It had taken a couple of years for the boys to catch up and pass her. In the interim, her braces had come off and her frame had changed from lean, like both her parents, to downright curvaceous. Charlotte was, to him, a dark-eyed, dark-haired knockout, but the sting and shyness of being over-tall remained. And now this…

  He squeezed her close. “Poor Kitten,” he murmured. With a girl like Charlotte, the average guy would probably figure he hadn’t a chance. Why risk the embarrassment of asking, or the potential humiliation of being told no? Easier by far to do nothing and accept that you were—same as I was, back then—a tongue-tied, ham-handed oaf.

  “Leo could take her,” Steve suggested softly.

  Avery took a slow inhale. Over Charlotte’s head, his eyes sought Emilio. The boy’s ears flushed red, but he nodded earnestly. He could.

  “What?” Charlotte asked, turning around to peer at Steve. “What did you say?”

  “Leo can take you,” Steve repeated confidently, problem solved. “And I’ll bet you a ten spot he’s a better dancer than any of the local clodhoppers.”

  Emilio stepped forward. “When my sister was in Cotillion, I was her practice partner. Enrique Jorrín, the man who invented the cha-cha, was our teacher,” he told Avery proudly. Then, respectfully dipping his head toward Charlotte, he said, “It would be my great honor to take you.”

  Nicely done, Avery thought. I’d never have had the nerve.

  Charlotte stilled head-to-toe, but her face flashed delight, then indecision, then, in the glare of their communal stare, froze with embarrassment. She glanced at the floor and raised a flat hand to blot the tears clotting her lashes.

  Emilio politely averted his eyes. Steve took a sudden, keen interest in the rain pelting the station canopy like gravel. But Avery’s attention remained on his daughter. Watching her sly appraisal of Emilio’s profile—his height, probably, and handsome good looks—he tried to guess her thoughts.

  From the beginning the two teenagers had been shyly friendly. The first week Emilio started work and school, Avery had heard them comparing class schedules. Emilio had admitted his hardest was trigonometry, which Charlotte had aced last year. “The formulas are tough at first,” she’d told him, “but once you get to factorization, it’s kind of fun.”

  Her least favori
te was speech. “I get so nervous in front of the whole class,” she’d confessed.

  Emilio’s face had softened with understanding. “Back in Cuba, our teacher told us to forget about the crowd, pick out one or two friendly faces, and speak directly to them. It helps,” he’d said.

  Just last week, she’d thanked him for the tip. “It does help,” she’d told him. And because her college applications were top-of-mind, she’d asked him his plans after graduation.

  “I’d always hoped to study law like my father but…” He’d trailed off, at an obvious loss.

  In response, Charlotte had blushed almost as bright red as her Edgewater Eagles sweatshirt. “Oh, Dad,” she’d told Avery later, “I was just so certain that, as a teenager with no parents, he was having all kinds of fun, and freedom. But it never occurred to me—until then—that, coming here, Emilio not only left his parents and his past behind, he lost the future he’d always planned. I felt like such a dimwit!”

  “What about you?” Emilio had asked quickly, his eyes curious, his lips curving in an it’s okay smile.

  “Aeronautical engineering,” she’d told him; though that wasn’t something she normally admitted outside the family, for fear, she’d said, of being labeled a brainiac.

  “Like a lady astronaut?”

  “More like a rocket mechanic.”

  They’d shared a laugh over that one, but this going to the dance together, Avery thought, was something else entirely.

  Now, apparently resolved, Charlotte lifted her chin. “Thank you, Emilio,” she said. “I’d like that very much.”

  “Great!” Steve crowed and turned on his heel back to the Chrysler.

  Emilio’s delighted grin matched Charlotte’s, but before he could say more the ding-ding of the gas bell drew him out to the pumps.

  “But of course,” Charlotte said quietly, favoring Avery with the Daddy’s girl look that never failed to sway him, “you’ll have to square it with Mom.” Pointing out a slight letup in the rain, she added, “This be a good time to run me home?”

  “Sure, honey,” he said. The sooner Sarah was in the loop on this thing, the better. He grabbed his keys. “Hey, Steve, she’s all yours for a few.”

  “Roger Wilco, Cap,” Steve called back from under the Chrysler’s hood.

  With waves to Emilio, Avery and Charlotte dashed through the splattering rain to the green pickup, which Charlotte had nicknamed Otto for the words—ORANGE TOWN TEXACO, PRINCETON AT THE TRAIL, COLLEGE PARK—painted on both doors beneath the red-and-white Texaco star.

  College Park was a burgeoning Orlando neighborhood that could boast neither a college nor a park. It was originally conceived as Orange Town, because it was bordered on the east by Orange Avenue, the main drag into downtown, and on the west by busy State Route 441, known locally as the Orange Blossom Trail. It was renamed College Park, however, when the developer’s wife suggested “classing up” the titles of its red-brick streets to Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and the like.

  Thus far, the community had two dubious claims to fame: First, it was the neighborhood that Colonel Mike McCoy had crashed himself to save. Second, it was the place where poor old Mrs. Kerouac’s son Jack, having barely survived a trip to Mexico, arrived on her doorstep flat broke, spent the summer of ’57 on her back porch, mostly drunk, writing stories about his bum friends in San Francisco, and, that fall, received word that The New York Times thought him “the Voice of the Beat Generation.” Whatever that was.

  Avery wheeled east over the Southern Seaboard Railroad tracks, past the cottage on Princeton that had been their first home and was now one of three rentals he owned. At the light, he turned left on Northumberland, crossed Smith, Vassar, and the inadvertently misspelled Radclyffe, then headed right on Bryn Mawr into the low-slung split-level on pocket Lake Silver.

  He pulled in under the cover of the carport and parked beside Sarah’s Buick. Entering the kitchen, they heard the low rumble of her voice.

  “I told them the storm’s turning, Edith…,” she was saying and, seeing them, rolled her eyes at the woman on the other end of the phone line. “…the husband’s refusing to make the drive.” She compressed frustrated lips. “I said that, too….”

  “Hey, reinforcements!” Elsie Stout called from the propped-open doorway to the dining room, waving a handful of folded brochures.

  “Would you like to call him?” Sarah was asking. “I have the number right here.”

  “I’ve got to get back,” Avery told Elsie, “but maybe Charlotte…”

  The half smile Charlotte had worn all the way home spread wide at the sight of their next-door neighbor. “Reinforcements for what?” she asked brightly, obviously relieved that, with Elsie there, any discussion of her date with Emilio was delayed till later.

  “Right this way,” Elsie said, ushering her out of the room.

  “I really don’t think…” With the fingers of her free hand, Sarah pressed and circled the spot between her brows where she tended to get headaches. Avery gave her shoulder an encouraging squeeze, then returned, driving back through the renewed downpour, to work.

  At the station, Emilio was out front, replacing the wiper blades on Dick Johnson’s Rambler. In the office, Steve was packed up, ready to go, and smoking a cigarette. He gave Avery a wary look. “Sarah okay with this?”

  “She was tied up on the phone, couldn’t talk, so I came back.”

  “Think she’ll be okay?”

  “We’ll work it out,” Avery said.

  I hope so, Steve’s look said.

  Fifteen years running and his wife and his best friend still seemed unable to fathom each other. Although Steve thought Sarah classy and attractive, he misjudged her natural reserve as stiffness, her wry sense of humor as arrogance. And while Sarah admired Steve’s work ethic, she often mistook his habitual gruffness for deliberate rudeness when, in fact, the guy was all bark, no bite. It was ironic, Avery thought—or was the word sardonic?—that the two people who knew him best so often misunderstood each other.

  “I was thinkin’ ”—Steve flicked ash into the desktop tray—“they usually put the girls in a convertible for the parade. Charlotte can ride in The Admiral, if she’d like. And I figure Leo can borrow it for the dance.”

  Avery hiked his eyebrows and rocked back on his heels in mock shock. The Admiral was Steve’s pride and joy. A jet-black, cherried-out ’59 T-Bird with custom red leather bucket seats; a special-order, 430-cubic-inch, four-hundred-horsepower Super Marauder engine; plus three two-barrel Holley carburetors. It was the envy of every hot-rodder in town.

  Steve shrugged. “Just a thought.”

  Avery smiled. For all his bluster, Steve could surprise you. “That’d be great. Thanks.”

  Steve peered out at the renewed rain and ground out his smoke.

  “You heading out now?” Avery asked.

  “Good a time as any, I s’pose.”

  “My regards to Miss Lillian,” Avery called in lieu of good-bye.

  Although he’d never laid eyes on Steve’s lady friend, Avery knew she was a nurse who lived on the coast in New Smyrna Beach. They’d met at one of Steve’s “Don’t Drink” meetings and shared a passion for surf fishing, baseball, and races at the new Daytona Speedway. That summer, in fact, she’d somehow arranged for Steve to be in the pit for local hero Fireball Roberts’s back-to-back wins at the Daytona 500 and the Firecracker 250. Steve had come back flush with speed- and power-boosting secrets from Roberts’s mechanic, Smokey Yunick, plus a bunch of track trivia: Like the fact that Fireball’s nickname sprang from his blistering fastball as a star pitcher at Apopka High. And that Roberts didn’t mind the fans applying it to his fearless racing style, but his friends called him Glenn, and the other drivers called him simply, respectfully, Balls.

  Avery had relished the inside scoop, but worried that Steve was planning to make a move. At summer’s end, he’d asked Steve directly, “You considering the coast full-time?”

  “Nah,” Steve said. “If it a
in’t broke, why fix it?”

  Watching his friend drive off, Avery wondered, had two divorces soured Steve on marriage forever? Whatever happened to “third time’s the charm”?

  —

  JUST AFTER SIX, AVERY surrendered the station to Emilio—“She’s all yours, son”—and drove home through the pouring rain. As usual, he made a beeline for the master bathroom to shower, shave, and change for supper. In the kitchen, he saw the dinette was set for two.

  “Where’s our girl?” he asked Sarah.

  “Oh, a few of the twirls came over to help fold brochures, and after they got word that tonight’s game was canceled, they all went off to see that new Pat Boone movie—State Fair, I think. Going to the Steak ’n Shake after.” She set a plate of steaming tuna noodle casserole with a side of green beans in front of him.

  Avery, suddenly starving, spread his napkin in his lap and waited for her to do the same. She’d brushed her hair, he noticed, left it loose the way he liked it. She’d put on fresh lipstick, too, but her eyes were red-rimmed with fatigue, her face drawn and tired.

  “Tough day?”

  “Just awful. Edith was a raving maniac over the Mininsons not coming—even though it wasn’t till five o’clock that the general decided tomorrow’s show is still a go.” Sarah sighed. “At least we got the brochures done. I just have to pack up the Grandma’s Pantry stuff and get it down there and on display by nine a.m.” She picked up her fork. “How about you?”

  “Rain slowed things down a bit.” He took a bite and winked his appreciation. The combination of creamy tuna, sweet peas, and the extra-sharp cheddar she got from a shop in Winter Park was one of his favorites. After a moment, he asked, “She tell you the big news?”