Sanibel Scribbles Read Online Free PDF Page A

inside. Her head began to pound as the woman treated the beans, then roasted and brewed them.
    Finally, with her hot mocha in hand, Vicki passed the dry cleaners, remembering she had a blouse to pick up, but first, her hot drink was scalding her hand, so she stopped in another coffee shop and grabbed a protective sleeve before going any further. Then she remembered she desperately needed toothpaste and had forgotten to borrow someone’s, so she stopped at the drugstore for mints.
    Once each errand was crossed off her list, she rushed back to her apartment, grabbed her suitcases, and started to walk the block to the Greyhound bus station. She scolded herself for packing too much and blamed it on her wooden shoes. Why bother to bring them to Florida, where it would be too hot to wear eight pairs of socks and wood on her feet? She started opening the suitcase to dump the shoes, just as a friend driving by spotted her.
    “Vicki, we all offered to drive you to the bus station. And Jamie said she’d take you all the way to the airport.”
    She felt like a dog hit by a car, shocked and running down the road, away from everyone trying to help. “I know, I know. I need to be alone right now. Thanks so much. I’m fine,” she said in the tone of someone under quarantine. She didn’t want to be with anyone. She had declared herself legally isolated, not wanting to spread her shock, anger, denial, pain, and guilt to anyone else.
    “Are you sure you don’t want to cancel your flight and stick around? I’ll help you with the arrangements.”
    “I can’t. I’m fine. Thanks.” She was glad when the car turned the corner, and she could no longer see the woman full of common sense and legitimate offers.
    She sat down on a bench near the bus station and across the street from where she had sipped her last coffee with Rebecca the night before. She sat at a distance, staring at the same row of red tulips. Now, with a few minutes left in Holland, Michigan, the tulips reminded her of the green costume with white lace she had sold two weeks before. Dutch-blooded or not, it had never mattered. Every spring she had danced down the streets in the tulip festival anyway.
    The tourists never knew her secret. She didn’t come from Holland at all. She came from Chicago. They photographed someone they assumed was Dutch, but she was Irish, English, and Czechoslovakian. They left Holland by the hundreds on tour buses, taking photographs of the Dutch dancers with them.
    As for the residents of Holland, well, many she knew never left. Why would they leave their hometown? Why would anyone? Leaving a hometown is like burning the fingerprints right off one’s hand. Arriving in a new town, someone else’s hometown, is like asking to borrow someone else’s prints. Vicki had started school in Holland at age nine. Back then she had felt like an outsider stepping into someone else’s hometown. Even the tulips belonged to the ethnic background of her friends—her friends who participated in family devotions after every dinner and went to church twice on Sundays. As a child, she lied about her family working on Sundaysand refrained from saying things like “holy cow!” at slumber parties. She wanted to make the strange new place her home and, gradually, living there became so comfortable that she stayed through high school, and now college. She had felt safe in Holland then, and she felt safe there now. She didn’t feel like leaving this comfort zone and that was why she stole the tulip. She wanted to grab onto something comfortable.
    She glanced down the same street she used to dance down in wooden shoes. She stepped and swept that street with pride, a trait she borrowed from Dutch ancestors who were not her own. Looking at the tulips, she marveled how they always opened just in time for the annual Tulip Time Festival, as if the little bulbs could hear the Dutch dancers clomping down the street in practice before they started. Now they stood tall and