The Isle of Youth: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

prostitute, to read her a novel instead. I didn’t understand that my father wanted me to see him as being above temptation and superior to Bill Keller, who I had never met. I didn’t know the right questions to ask. What kind of novel? What did she smell like? Did she fall asleep on your arm? What was her name? Now I thought I would like to find that prostitute and get her side of the story.
    “So?” Julia said, her voice drowsy from the heat.
    “I realized the other day that it couldn’t possibly be true. I don’t think I ever saw Dad read anything, let alone novels, for starters.”
    “What was true?” Julia said.
    Our father was a grifter. He spent our childhood selling fake insurance policies. When he vanished, he left behind a mountain of debt; the house we’d grown up in went to the bank. Our mother moved us to Athens, Georgia, where she was from. She threw away all the photos we had of our father and encouraged us to tell people he was dead. All we were left with was the stories. The prostitute in Chicago. The time he escaped the Vietcong by jumping off a cliff. The time he ran with the bulls in Barcelona and saved his best friend from being gored in the ass. Things only children would believe. All story and no truth.
    I liked to tell myself that, unlike our father, we were on the right side of the law, me and Julia, with our firm and its solid-sounding name, but that hadn’t always been the case. Two years ago, Julia was arrested for breaking into houses. She’d been at it for a long time, picking places where the owners were away. When she finally got caught, in a mansion on Fisher Island, she did six months in Broward Correctional. The idea for the private detective business was hatched during visitation. We talked about how exciting it would be, how lucrative. My husband, a tax consultant for H&R Block, had always thought Julia was a professional housesitter; he was furious that I had lied to him, that I’d once gone down to Coral Gables to swim in the Olympic-size pool of an estate my sister was robbing, and even more furious that I insisted on visiting her twice a week in jail. Can’t you just write to her? he’d say. Do you have to actually go there? Our mother talked about Julia like she was away on a long trip. So it was just my sister and me, like always.
    In Georgia, we had gotten bored with college and dropped out, drifting back to South Florida like homing pigeons. I met my husband while working at a watch store in Pinecrest. He brought a Swiss Army in for repair. He’d had it for a decade; he said he liked to hold on to things. We married a year later, in the Miami courthouse. I loved him, but I didn’t always understand how to be honest. Over time, we became less sure we were something the other wanted to hold on to. And then there was Julia’s arrest and visitation. I saw how small she looked in her gray jumpsuit, how she wanted to ask if our mother was coming but knew better. As I listened to her talk about the PI business—her voice quick and grasping—I realized my thirties were on the horizon and I’d never had a job I found interesting. And that I liked the idea of busting people for doing things they shouldn’t be. Since Julia had a record, I’d been the one to apply for our firearm and PI licenses. I told my husband Julia and I were starting a catering company. When he discovered a Winslow & Co. business card in my purse, he bypassed fury and went straight to sadness.
    “Do you think Bill Keller was a real person?” my sister asked.
    “I don’t know.” I pulled at the collar of my T-shirt; the fabric was stuck to my skin. “The hotel is a real place, though. The Iron Horse. I looked it up once.”
    “Any sign of Defonte?” I could tell she was ready to change the subject.
    I raised the binoculars and scanned the entrance. The perimeter of the building was brightly lit and still. “Nothing,” I said. We were prepared to keep waiting. There were two more beers, a