“I think you’re not supposed to do that,” I say quietly.
Mrs. Cabot gives me her steeliest look. “Perhaps you should have tried saying that to your father once in a while.”
“Grandma,” Elijah warns, suddenly close to my back, eliciting goose bumps I plan to ignore.
I don’t know if she’s talking about my dad’s drinking or the way he beat the crap out of every member of my household, but where the fuck does this bitch get off throwing it in my face when she’s never done an honest day’s work in her life?
And I could say all these things, but then she’d have won. I’d be acting like a Walsh, with my potty mouth and my horrible insults and probably my threats of violence, and she would sit back aglow, having proven her point:See, Elijah? See, Betty? I told you she was trash.
I’ll need to adopt a slightly different strategy.
“Did you know Christopher Columbus and his men thought manatees were mermaids?” I ask. “He said they were ‘not half so lovely as they are depicted’ which still seems like high praise, like maybe they were a five out of ten. I guess it explains why he had sex with them.”
“That’s a disgusting lie,” says Mrs. Cabot.
“Here,” I say, reaching for my phone. “I can prove it.”
Mrs. Cabot stomps off toward the car with Betty tittering in her wake, and Elijah just shakes his head at me.
“What?” I cry. “It was true!”
He is trying not to laugh. “Just because something’s true doesn’t mean it’s okay to discuss. Especially when the subject is bestiality and you’re discussing it with aneighty-eight-year-old woman.”
I refuse to concede the point. If Mrs. Cabot doesn’t want to hear about sex crimes her ancestors committed against gentle members of the animal kingdom, she should stop being a pain in the ass. “Who was your family member on the Mayflower, by the way?”
He shakes his head, grinning as he turns to follow his grandmother. “Subtle, but I can see exactly where this is going, Easton.”
We return to the car. The Everglades prevents us from driving straight up the coast—we have to go back through Miami, then cross the state again to return to the gulf side. Mrs. Cabot suggests that we do a quick alligator tour “as long as Easton can manage to keep the conversation civilized.” I ask Elijah if he has an ancestor who’s fucked alligators, too, and Elijah says we’d probably better not stop. In spite of this, it’s nearly sunset by the time we reach the rental.
“I once had a day that was technically thirty-seven hours long by flying to Japan,” I tell Elijah as we start unloading the luggage carrier. “This was longer.”
“You’re handling this with all the good grace I’d have expected of a woman who brought up bestiality with an eighty-eight-year-old.”
“I didn’tfabricateit.”
He pauses, the box he’s just pulled from the roof tucked beneath his arm. “You know that’s a myth, right? Columbus didn’t really fuck a manatee.”
I reach up and snatch the box. “If I was the descendant of a manatee fucker, I’d be defensive too.”
He laughs and turns toward the roof again while I carry two small boxes inside.
Tonight’s rental is oceanfront, with two amazing upstairs bedrooms that have balconies and stunning ocean views.
I won’t be sleeping in either of those.
“I’m sorry about this,” Elijah says as he sets his bag in the ground-floor bunk room, which we’ll be sharing. Years of constant humidity have warped the walls. The air is seriously damp, and the smell borders on unbearable. I will definitely have all the diseases caused by mold after a night here. “I’dplanned to give you the other room upstairs, but I can’t make them share.”
The rubber mattress cover makes a deafening sound as I flop on one of the bottom bunks. “I wouldn’t have let you. But are the accommodations going to continue going downhill from here? I can live with this for a night, but I don’t need Thomas back if it means more than twenty-four hours of this.”
“You say something to that effect an awful lot,” he replies. “Maybe you ought to consider the possibility that you actually mean it.”
When I get to the upstairs deck, Betty and Mrs. Cabot are talking about yet another big seafood meal, but this time they want it to be boozy. I just can’t. We’ve had two huge meals already, plus we stopped for ice cream.
“Go ahead,” I tell Elijah. “I’m going to swim.”
His gaze darkens. “Where?”
“In the ocean, obviously.”
