Beginnings
One
Dear Sir
He arrives a day early, drives the gaudy strip. Denny’s and McDonald’s squat between high-rise hotels and lurid beach shops. Ugly towels, $2.99. The hotels are full. He stops in, each after each. Says, “I’d like a room, please.”
The woman at the Hilton smiles, blue-suited and beautiful. “I’m sorry.”
He nods, exits the quiet lobby.
He drives on, hugs the Panama City coast, pulls into parking lots, semicircular drives. Declines valet. No vacancy. Beyond the city limits, in scrub-pine tracts, his hope. Among patchy shrubs and gray sand, small bungalows scattered in the forest and forgotten. He plods the dirt driveway, through the swinging door. “Any rooms?”
The T-shirted belly man looks up, shakes his head. “Tennis tournament.”
He heads back, veers from the sea and drives familiar twisting streets shaded with transplanted oaks. He drives past club houses and gates and reaches his ex-wife’s parents’ house, her father’s death an additional complication. Ex-wife’s mother’s husband, dead.
From three short stories I hope to send out come January.
