Heart of Palm Read Online Free PDF Page B

a faint tendril of smoke in the air. But it was only the jasmine—sweet, stubborn, and ubiquitous.
    “I’ll be out in a bit, Mom,” he said. “Let me get some pants on.”
    “Hurry, Frank,” she said. “My Lord. Do you know what it’s like to have to wake up to this lunacy?”
    He started to tell her that he, did, actually, have some idea. But she’d already hung up.
    The light was growing brighter over the tops of the pines when Frank stepped out onto his porch and waited for Gooch to finish his morning toilette. He debated how much he needed to rush this morning. Although he’d checked the sky for signs of smoke in the direction of Uncle Henry’s and had seen none, the problem of the fryer had not—in his mind—been adequately resolved. True, he could be relatively certain that the kitchen had not caught fire as of this moment. But if the fryer was still running from yesterday—he did a quick calculation—at least nineteen hours, that would make it—it could certainly overheat and spark a fire at any moment. And even if it didn’t actually burst into flames, the odor of overheated grease and burning built-up carbon was going to have stunk up the restaurant damn good. It would take all day to air it out, and it was Fourth of July, one of the restaurant’s busiest days of the year. He didn’t have all day.
    “Pick up the pace, Gooch,” he said. Gooch glanced his way and walked farther out into the yard.
    Frank regarded his property. The house was a compact bungalow, and the parcel of scrub it sat on grew thick and unchecked, as it had for thousands of years. A dusty driveway led up to the house from Cooksey Lane, and the porch was unadorned save for two unpainted rocking chairs he’d salvaged from the trash of a rich doctor’s house in Ponte Vedra Beach, and his yellow kayak, suspended from the porch ceiling by two lengths of rope. Frank had bought the house in 1995 for next to nothing, and it still surprised him to be reminded—incessantly, in fact—by a real estate agent named Susan Holm, that his property value had actually increased. Significantly. Nearly every lot on his street was up for sale.
    In fact, the property next door to his had already sold to a corporate banker not a day over thirty. On it, a two-story house was under construction, the new Mediterranean style, with terra-cotta roof tiles, wrought iron balconies, and a four-car garage. Frank wanted to gag every time he looked at it. The banker, who told Frank he’d commute to Jacksonville from his new house, came out every weekend in cargo shorts and ski sunglasses to walk the perimeter of his property and observe the progress of construction. He’d supervised the clear-cutting of the entire lot and the painstaking laying of thick sod that spread like a noxious green carpet and stopped abruptly at Frank’s property line. One Saturday the banker had broached the idea of sharing the cost of a tall fence between the two properties’ backyards.
    “What do I need that for?” Frank had asked.
    “For privacy,” the banker had said, looking around at Frank’s land, where the palmettos grew thick and unrestrained and the catbrier weed threaded through the oak branches. “And maybe to keep your dog in,” he added, looking at Gooch, who had in recent weeks developed a preference for fresh sod for his daily constitutional.
    But Frank had declined.
    The fence went up anyway, on the banker’s dime, and now, instead of the thick curtain of green Frank had enjoyed for so many years, when he stepped out his back door he was confronted with an eight-foot-high wall of pressure-treated stockade crap encircling the banker’s backyard. Every time he looked at it, he felt violated. He’d redirected a few sprigs of climbing kudzu to the base of the fence and took some small satisfaction in watching them begin to inch up the boards and around the posts, but it was taking a long time, and he was disgusted, so after a while he simply quit looking in