Body Language

Alexandra took the brochure Mrs Rogers offered and led her father back out into the afternoon heat.

‘Whew,’ he said as she held open the door to the Camry. ‘What the hell did those people do to deserve getting locked up in that god-awful place?’

‘They got old,’ Alex said.

‘Then I’m staying eighteen years old from here on out. Eighteen’s fine.’

Alexandra made it back to South Miami by four, just ahead of the rush-hour onslaught. She parked on the street out front and sat there for a moment staring down the row of identical neat white houses, all with two bedrooms and one bath. ‘Starter houses,’ they were called these days. The sterile architecture of the early fifties, when those houses served as winter retreats, little more than oversized motel rooms for the yearly crop of snow-birds. Now the neighborhood was a ghetto for university students and windows and newlyweds. No children, only a few pets. Lots of turnover. In the nine years they’d lived on Silver Palm Avenue, seven different families had occupied the house to their east. Nine years married and she and Stan were still starting out. Still exactly where they’d been.

‘You forget something?’ her dad said.

‘I was just thinking.’

‘Myself, I’m always forgetting things. It’s what I do now. It’s my full-time employment. I wake up in the morning and I lie there and decide what I want to forget that day. I make a list and scratch things off one by one. Forget my thirty years on the police force. Forget my wife. Forget my teenage years. It’s my job now, and I’m getting pretty damn good at it, if I do say so myself.’

‘Let’s go inside, Dad.’

‘You going to stash me in that place, that nursing home?’

‘No. You’re staying right here.’

‘You’re going to lose your marriage, Alex. You heard your husband. He gave you a choice. It was him or me – the half-wit.’