Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County Read Online Free PDF Page A

nothin’. I’m stuck.”
    Dolores examined her hands. Twenty-five years workingin the ’Glades, and they looked like the skin of the alligators she caught. But that was the least of her worries. Back when she’d been a dancer, the owner of the club had complained that her breasts were too small. Unless she allowed liquid filler to be injected into her breasts, she would lose her job. She’d gone along with it. Now they were lumpy, and hard, and hurt in ways she didn’t think possible. How stupid she’d been when she was young. Some mistakes you pay for, forever.
    Her first mistake was thinking she was in love. She was fifteen and had just finished eighth grade. When her belly started swelling, she thought maybe she had worms, or possibly a hernia. But her mama and daddy knew otherwise. They threw her out.
    She’d hitchhiked to Tampa on the back of a tomato truck in pouring rain. She still didn’t know what was wrong with her or why her parents made her leave, but a stranger on the streets of Tampa took one look at her and walked her to a hospital emergency room. Three hours later she had her baby. The nuns convinced her she was racked by sin and not worthy to be a mother. She never had a chance to hold the baby. She wasn’t even sure if the baby was alive or healthy, and there were times when she wondered if she had dreamed the whole thing.
    She left that hospital four days later on her own two feet, alone. She hitchhiked to the beach in St. Pete and survived by stealing picnics from tourists. Being so young, her body bounced back quickly, and soon she got herself a job at a nightclub. It was only after she showed up on her first day of work that she found out she was to be a dancer, not a waitress. She went along with it, thinking she’d do it just for a while, but “a while” turned into seven years. And that’s when she got pregnant again.
    The owner of the nightclub suggested an option that would,as he said, “fix” the situation but Dolores was too scared to consider it. One of the other dancers—a sweet-faced girl from Alabama—had gone to an underground clinic and died.
    Surrendering another baby to the State of Florida was out of the question, as far as Dolores was concerned. This baby was a keeper, come what may. She had him at the same hospital as the first one, only this time she was prepared. She scooped him up and took off out of there before somebody could thrust papers in her face and hand her a pen. She named him Robbie-Lee after a crop reporter she liked to listen to on the radio. A man who sounded nice, day in and day out, whether he was discussing the worrisome possibility of a January freeze in the orange groves or warning listeners about a fierce storm that had popped up over the Gulf on a summer day. Sometimes the friendly voice asked questions which he quickly answered himself. For example: Did you know that Tampa is the lightning capital of the United States? (Well, it is!) Or: Did you know that many historians believe our city gets its name from the Calusa Indians, or the Shell People, because “Tampa” means “sticks of fire” in their ancient language? (Well, it does!) So her radio announcer was smart as well as nice, a quality which Dolores admired.
    Within hours of leaving the hospital, she fled the area with Robbie-Lee curled up like a kitten under a silk scarf she’d snatched years earlier from a Canadian traveler, or “snowbird.” She skipped out of Dodge without so much as a fare-thee-well to anyone, not wanting to alert her landlord, who would have had her sent to jail for being late on the rent. Never mind that her baby would be taken from her.
    All she could think of was to head back down to Collier County. That’s what people do when they’re almost out of hope, right? Head home? She had heard through the grapevine thather parents were dead, so at least she didn’t have to face