Page 5 of Key West Homecoming

“Where are you headed?”

“All the way down to Key West.”

Yvette stopped typing and sat back from the keyboard.

“Ma’am, I want to be sure I heard that right.”

“The sedan is fine.”

“You’re going to drive the Overseas Highway, in May, in a Camry?”

“That’s the plan.”

“There are people who save up two years for that drive.” Yvette held up one finger and typed something with the other hand. “I’m going to put you in the sedan because you’ve told me twice, and I want it understood that I’m doing it against my professional judgment.”

“I appreciate the sacrifice.”

“It’ll sit with me all afternoon.” She slid the keys across the counter. “Space forty-one. It’s white. Everything out there’s white, so look for the one with no personality.”

Emma found her white Camry between a lime green convertible and a bright red Jeep. She loaded her suitcase into the trunk and pulled out of the lot. The GPS said the drive would take three hours and forty minutes.

Miami traffic was a mess for the first forty-five minutes, all semis and road construction. She drove most of that time behind a landscaping truck. Then the road opened up. Homestead came and went, and the long straight stretch through the mangroves started where the buildings disappeared and the horizon flattened into something wide and green.

Down came the window, and the air that came in carried a smell she hadn’t come across in a very long time. Damp, and a little bit floral. The last time it reached her she’d been in the back seat of her mother’s rental car with the windows rolled down.

Somewhere past Islamorada she pulled off the road because of a sign.

It stood on two posts in the gravel and it read PIE in letters a foot high. Underneath, in letters that had clearly been added later by someone who had grown tired of the question, it read WE ONLY MAKE THE ONE. Behind it was a shack with a window cut into the front of it and three picnic tables set out in the crushed shell sitting area.

Emma hadn’t planned to stop. She hadn’t planned anything at all since she got on the plane and it was starting to worry her. Once again, she questioned her decision to come to Florida, but now, here she was, getting ready to eat key lime pie.

The woman at the window was seventy if she was a day, in a T-shirt from a fishing tournament that had happened in 2009.

“Key lime,” she said, before Emma had opened her mouth.

“How did you know?”

“It’s the only thing I’ve got. It’s on the sign.” The woman cut a slice, put it on a paper plate and set a plastic fork on top of it. “Where are you coming from?”

“Chicago, as of about six o’clock this morning.”

“And you’ve driven yourself all the way down here since then with nothing in you?”

“Well, I didn’t drive from Chicago. I flew into Miami, so it’s not that bad.”

“It’s bad enough if you haven’t eaten.”

Emma began to question whether the pie was worth having to share the details of her life with this stranger.

“You sit down and eat that at a table like a person,” the woman said, “don’t you eat it in the car.”

So Emma sat at a picnic table by the road in a linen blazer, in the sun, and ate her pie. After only two bites, she didn’t question the cost after all.

The woman came out and wiped down the next table over.

“You’ve got the look,” she said.

“What look is that?”