The Postcard Read Free Page B

29th Avenue South?) and alongside two other backyards. A hedge of flowering bushes and a couple of thick, dense, low palm trees shielded it all around from the neighbors, except on the right side, where the hedge was low and looked into the yard next door.
    I jerked back from the screen. There was a tiny white-haired woman in the next yard, leaning in over the hedge, staring at a big open flower on our side. She was about a foot away from it and not moving an inch.
    “Is she a statue or something?” I whispered over my shoulder.
    “Who, the lady?” said my dad, stopping his work.
    “She’s gawking into our yard and not moving. Like a garden ornament.”
    He snickered and said her name was “something like Mrs. Keep or Mrs. Keefe.” She had been a friend of my grandmother for a long time. “She takes photographs,” he said. “She used to work for the city or something.”
    “I don’t get it,” I said. “Which is it? Keep or Keefe?”
    He snorted a chuckle. “I never heard it right to begin with. Maybe it’s Mrs. Keese. Or even Quiche. She helped me a bit, but she can’t lift anything, of course. She did go through Grandma’s closet and found some important papers.” He pointed to a white carton in the living room. “I haven’t gotten to them yet.”
    “So what do you call her?”
    “Ma’am,” he said.
    The lady moved slightly and lifted a small black box up to her face. That’s when I saw that what she had been staring at was not the big flower, but a tiny bird. A hummingbird. It had been hovering inside the flower and now emerged, its wings blurring. The lady tensed. I didn’t hear the
click
of the camera, but the next moment she pulled away, and the hummingbird jerked up and off into some other yard. She then stepped backward across her own yard and disappeared into her house.
    “You could check the phone book,” I said.
    “She’s unlisted.”
    “There’s gotta be a way to find out what her name actually is.”
    “Well, it’s too late to ask her,” he said. “I’ve been talking to her every day for two weeks. Each time she calls on the phone and says her name, it sounds different. I think it has something to do with whether she has her teeth in or not.”
    I laughed. “You could look at her mail when she’s out.”
    “You think I didn’t try that?” he said, coming up next to me and peering through the screen at her house. “It’s not like she gets a lot of mail to begin with, but the moment it comes, she snatches it in. Besides that, she’s almost never out. She lives alone and hardly goes anywhere. Meals on Wheels brings her stuff to eat. I tell you, she never leaves.”
    “That’s so bizarre,” I said.
    He was almost laughing now. “That’s St. Petersburg.”
    CHAPTER SIX
    After having jelly sandwiches, we started on the buffet, emptying the drawers of silverware and plates, wrapping whatever was worth saving in newspapers. We did this for an hour or so, not making much of a dent, when he looked up.
    “Hey, Jason. I just remembered the obituary is supposed to appear today. Grandma’s obituary. Can you run to the store on the corner and get a paper?
St. Petersburg Times.
I stopped delivery last week.”
    I nodded. “Sure. Any chance to go out in the heat.”
    He dug in his wallet for a dollar. “It’s nothing much. The funeral home helped me write it up. We should have a copy.”
    I went out into the sun, wilted down the sidewalk, crossed at the corner to the store, pulled a paper from the twirly rack, and paid for it. When I left the store, a long funeral procession was going by. Nice. Was this to prepare me for tomorrow? I saw headlights and black cars far away into the distance, so I couldn’t cross the street. I decided to walk back on the far side.
    I had just started up toward the corner and was flipping to the obituary page when I felt something hit my shoulder from behind.
    “Off.”
    I turned around. Standing there was a girl around my age in a bright