The Postcard Read Free

not have a house there at all? She has help. She’s all right for now.”
    “Why do we need a place there? I’m not retiring to Florida. It’s worth money. Much more than she paid for it. Or whoever paid for it. Not your father. Maybe Mr. Fracker,” she said, moving her hands but, glancing over and seeing me, not quite making air quotes around “father.”
    “Ha, ha,” he said coldly, letting it show now.
    That was a real dig. Dad’s father, a guy named Walter Huff, had supposedly died long before Mom and Dad got married. Dad had never had much to say about him maybe because he didn’t know him, either. But Mom didn’t seem to buy it. From the comments she made, I think she thought he’d actually been in prison or something, and that Dad was ashamed of him. Mr. Fracker was a lawyer who said he knew Grandma and who had met Dad a few times over the years. But the lawyer was old and that was a long time ago, and it seemed sketchy, anyway, so who knows?
    The less Dad said, the more Grandma seemed to become strange and shadowy and distant. I felt over and over that there was more to tell, but I didn’t know who would tell it, and it was never told, anyway. It only got worse as Grandma got sicker and fought more alligators. Mom wanted Dad to close off the subject of Florida, to shut it all down, and never talk about it. His mother, his father, Mr. Fracker, the whole thing. More than all that, there was the splitting up to worry about, too, so I gave up trying to understand it.
    Dad unlocked the front door, and we stepped in. It was cooler inside, but not much, and it was stale. My first thought was that he was keeping Grandma in there before the funeral. Was that how they did things in Florida?
    “You can have the front bedroom,” he said.
    While he went through the house opening windows, I looked around. To the left of the front door off the living room were two bedrooms and a tiny bathroom. To the right was a larger room that went from the front to the back of the house.
    “That’s called the Florida room,” he said.
    The front and back walls of the Florida room were nearly all windows, the kind with slats of glass you crank open and closed. He cranked them open now. In the room were a desk and chair, a couch, and a long, low buffet for dishes, like we had in Boston.
    The kitchen was no more than a hallway from the living room to the back door, and the backyard was small. The lawn needed to be cut there, too. There was a shed in the corner. I wondered if Grandma even had a mower and if Dad would ask me to cut the grass like I did at home. I hoped he wouldn’t; it was so unbelievably hot outside.
    Cartons were piled in every room of the house, some packed and taped, most empty and waiting to be filled.
    “Trying to get it all cleared so we can sell it,” he said as the air moved in and the stale smell began to lessen. “Not getting very far. And there are lots of things to fix up. Except for the kitchen tiles. For some reason, they’re new. She let a lot of things go.”
    I nodded. “Well, she was sick.”
    He didn’t say anything right away, then: “She was sick. The whole time, she was sick. So that’s why . . .” He set down his keys on a little divider shelf between the living room and kitchen, paused for a second, then said, “Look, Jason.”
    Oh, not another serious talk.
    “Uh-huh?”
    “It’s just that I have to tell you . . .”
    Really, you don’t.
    “I have to tell you, mainly because somebody might say it while you’re here. Not that we’ll really meet anyone.”
    My arms shivered. “Okay . . .”
    “My mom, your grandma, was never married.”
    I think I frowned, not really understanding. “Wait. What? What about Walter Huff? Your father?”
    “There was no Walter Huff,” he said.
    I looked at him, shaking my head.
What the heck does that mean?
    “Grandma’s father, your great-grandfather, made him up, he made the name up. He had some documents filed, there were a few newspaper