“We don’t want it to die.”
“The guy just came and looked at it.”
We look at the tree. The taller palms were too expensive, my father says. “This one’s a different variety.”
“I like the other kind,” I say.
“The royal palms? You like those? Well, then, after we get going, we’ll get some.”
We’re quiet for a while, gazing over the patio and the purple sea. “This place is going to get all fixed up and we’re going to make a million dollars!” my mother says.
“Knock on wood,” says my father.
*
Five years ago, my father actually made a million. He’d just turned sixty and, after working all his life as a mortgage banker, went into business for himself. He bought a condominium complex in Fort Lauderdale, resold it, and made a big profit. Then he did the same thing in Miami. At that point, he had enough to retire on but he didn’t want to. Instead, he bought a new Cadillac and a fifty-foot powerboat. He bought a twin-engine airplane and learned to fly it. And then he flew around the country, buying real estate, flew to California, to the Bahamas, over the ocean. He was his own boss and his temper improved. Later, the reversals began. One of his developments in North Carolina, a ski resort, went bankrupt. It turned out his partner had embezzled $100,000. My father had to take him to court, which cost more money. Meanwhile, a savings and loan sued my father for selling it mortgages that defaulted. More legal fees piled up. The million dollars ran out fast and, as it began to disappear, my father tried a variety of schemes to get it back. He bought a company that made “manufactured homes.” They were like mobile homes, he told me, only more substantial. They were prefabricated, could be plunked down anywhere but, once set up, looked like real houses. In the present economic situation, people needed cheap housing. Manufactured homes were selling like hotcakes.
My father took me to see the first one on its lot. It was Christmas, two years ago, when my parents still had their condominium. We’d just finished opening our presents when my father said that he wanted to take me for a little drive. Soon we were on the highway. We left the part of Florida I knew, the Florida of beaches, high-rises, and developed communities, and entered a poorer, more rural area. Spanish moss hung from the trees and the unpainted houses were made of wood. The drive took about two hours. Finally, in the distance, we saw the onion bulb of a water tower with OCALA painted on the side. We entered the town, passing rows of neat houses, and then we came to the end and kept on going. “I thought you said it was in Ocala,” I said.
“It’s a little farther out,” said my father.
Countryside began again. We drove into it. After about fifteen miles, we came to a dirt road. The road led into an open, grassless field, without any trees. Toward the back, in a muddy area, stood the manufactured house.
It was true it didn’t look like a mobile home. Instead of being long and skinny, the house was rectangular, and fairly wide. It came in three or four different pieces that were screwed together, and then a traditional-looking roof was put in place on top. We got out of the car and walked on bricks to get closer. Because the county was just now installing sewer lines out this far, the ground in front of the house—“the yard,” my father called it—was dug up. Right in front of the house, three small shrubs had been planted in the mud. My father inspected them, then waved his hand over the field. “This is all going to be filled in with grass,” he said. The front door was a foot and a half off the ground. There wasn’t a porch yet but there would be. My father opened the door and we went inside. When I shut the door behind me, the wall rattled like a theater set. I knocked on the wall, to see what it was made of, and heard a hollow, tinny sound. When I turned around, my father was standing in the middle of the living room, grinning. His right index finger pointed up in the air. “Get a load of this,” he said. “This is what they call a ‘cathedral ceiling.’ Ten feet high. Lotta headroom, boy.”
Despite the hard times, nobody bought a manufactured home, and my father, writing off the loss, went on to other things. Soon I began getting incorporation forms from him, naming me vice president of Baron Development Corporation, or the Atlantic Glass Company, or Fidelity Mini-Storage Inc. The profits from these companies, he assured, would one day come to me. The only thing that did come, however, was a man with an artificial leg. My doorbell rang one morning and I buzzed him in. In the next moment, I heard him clumping up the stairs. From above, I could see the blond stubble on his bald head and could hear his labored breathing. I took him for a deliveryman. When he got to the top of the stairs, he asked if I was vice president of Duke Development. I said I guessed that I was. He handed me a summons.
It had to do with some legal flap. I lost track after a while. Meanwhile, I learned from my brother that my parents were living off savings, my father’s IRA, and credit from the banks. Finally, he found this place, Palm Bay Resort, a ruin by the sea, and convinced another savings and loan to lend him the money to get it running again. He’d provide the labor and know-how and, when people started coming, he’d pay off the S&L and the place would be his.
*
After we look at the patio, my father wants to show me the model. “We’ve got a nice little model,” he says. “Everyone who’s seen it has been very favorably impressed.” We come down the dark hallway again, down the stairs, and along the first-floor corridor. My father has a master key and lets us in a door marked 103. The hall light doesn’t work, so we file through the dark living room to the bedroom. As soon as my father flips on the light, a strange feeling takes hold of me. I feel as though I’ve been here before, in this room, and then I realize what it is: the room is my parents’ old bedroom. They’ve moved in the furniture from their old condo: the peacock bedspread, the Chinese dressers and matching headboard, the gold lamps. The furniture, which once filled a much bigger space, looks squeezed together in this small room. “This is all your old stuff,” I say.
“Goes nice in here, don’t you think?” my father asks.
“What are you using for a bedspread now?”