The Postcard Read Online Free PDF

hotel was a kind of bright cartoon orange that I thought was meant to be red.
    The surface of the card wasn’t smooth under my thumbs, either. It had a texture to it, a cross-hatch of lines that gave the picture the feel of fabric, like a painting.
    It
was
like a painting, the way the colors were added, but the more I looked, the more I could, I don’t know,
feel
what was in the picture. Despite the unreal coloring, it almost seemed as if the fringes of the awning were waving. I imagined the slapping of the canvas pulled tight over its ribbing of pipes. Tables and chairs were set up beneath and on either side of the awning in a courtyard formed by the two jutting wings of the building. They were shaded by a cluster of palm trees in the court. The more I looked at the trees, the more I could hear their sharp leaves clatter in the breeze.
    The sixty-year-old breeze.
    I closed my eyes and breathed in. The air in the house now smelled of some plant. Eucalyptus from the backyard, I think Dad had told me. I propped the card up on the desk, looked at all the tons of work still to be done in the incredible heat, thought about the lawn mower girl, the strange phone call, thought about Dad and Mom, and got mad.
    Hector was in his hammock when I called.
    “I hate this place,” I told him. “Stupid place. I hate every stupid thing about it!”
    “Now don’t hold back,” he said. “Tell me what you really think.”
    “First of all, everybody’s cracked and weird; second of all, they’re insane, even the kids. I actually met one. Probably the only kid in Florida, and she’s a total insane-o. Plus it’s so hot. It also turns out there’s something fishy about my grandma, but I can’t tell what it is, except that she was never married when she had my dad, but I’m not even sure I care about that. No, wait. I don’t care. Plus, the real estate agent guy is really odd, and I got a cracked phone call from some guy telling me to look in a desk. And I looked in Grandma’s old desk and found a hidden old postcard of an old hotel that my old great-grandfather used to own.”
    “Dude, no husbands, phone calls, hidden postcards. Sounds like a mystery to me,” said Hector. “Like in a book.”
    “It’s not a mystery,” I said quickly, wondering right away why I did. “It’s nothing. It’s just people, cracked people. Plus, all this is happening and it’s three hundred degrees. I’ve been going around soaked all day, especially in my shorts —”
    “Dude, enough.”
    “Well, what a stupid place! I hate it. What’s going on there?” I asked. “Tell me everything.”
    There was a pause, then the sound of a snort. “Oh, all kinds of stuff. Since yesterday, they paved over the school and now there’s a racetrack and a pool hall there. Your house, man, your house was turned into a giant aquarium this morning, but it exploded, and now there are sharks everywhere. But nobody cares because they moved Boston to LA and my hammock is on the beach now. Hey, waiter, another piña colada, please —”
    “Shut up,” I said with a laugh.
    “Dude, you have been gone for, like, an hour. Nothing’s new.”
    I realized as we were talking that I had picked up the postcard again and was feeling its texture under my thumb.
    “Hey, you know what?” I said. “They call this the ‘Sunshine City.’ It’s the ‘Sunshine City’ in the ‘Sunshine State.’ Guess what it’s doing right now.”
    “Raining?”
    “No. The sun is shining.”
    “Imagine,” he snorted.
    “So, fine. Talk to you in a couple of days. We bury my grandma tomorrow.”
    “Say ‘bye’ for me,” he said, and we hung up.
    CHAPTER NINE
    The funeral was set for eleven o’clock the next morning. First of all, I didn’t sleep well in the creepy old bed. All night long, I went over the weird real estate agent, then the weird lawn mower girl, then the phone call, and finally the postcard. Why, after all, had it been hidden?
    I told Dad about the phone call