Chapter 30
Nancy answered early the next morning.
Jake read the email at the kitchen counter while Emma made coffee. When he finished, he handed her his phone.
Jake,
I didn’t send you that check as a memorial. I sent it because the money came out of my daughter dying, and I couldn’t bear to keep it. I know why you put it away. I probably would have done the same thing.
But you’re a young man with a lot of years ahead of you, and what I wanted for you then is what I want for you now. A life. I’m grateful you’ve stayed in touch with me these last three years, and I hope you always will.
Buy the house.
You don’t need my permission to live your life. I’m going to assume you weren’t asking for it. You were telling me that something good has finally happened, and I’m glad you did.
I have no doubt Emma is a lovely woman. If you love her, that tells me everything I need to know. I hope the two of you are very happy.
Nora would want good things for both of us. I’m trying to remember that myself. Maybe one day I’ll come to Key West and meet Emma. Until then, write to me about the house, the garden and the life you’re building there.
And send me a photograph of the trees.
Nancy
Emma read the email again before handing back the phone.
“It’s beautiful, Jake. She sounds like a wonderful woman.”
“She is.”
Emma watched him look at the screen once more.
There was sadness in his face, but it wasn’t the kind that closed him off from everything around him. Emma understood now that Nora would always be part of Jake. Loving him meant there would be room for that.
She slipped an arm around his waist.
Jake kissed the top of her head.
At nine-thirty, Jake called the number on the sign in front of the blue house.
The woman who answered lived in Marathon. She had been handling her late mother’s estate and trying to sell the house since February. In her words, she had about given up on it.
She could meet him at one.
“That works,” Jake said. “I’ll see you then.”
Emma drove them to William Street and parked behind a white sedan. She reached for her bag as Jake opened his door.
“I’ll wait out here.”
Jake looked back at her. “Come look at it with me.”
“It’s your house.”
“It isn’t anybody’s house yet.” He kept one hand on the door. “And I don’t want to walk through it alone and then come back out here trying to describe it to you.”
Emma smiled and got out.
A woman in a yellow linen shirt met them at the gate.
“I’m Jake, and this is my girlfriend, Emma.”
The word still gave Emma a small rush of pleasure.
“Delores. It’s nice to meet you both.” She handed Jake a sheet with the property details, then opened the front door. “Go ahead. Take your time.”
The house smelled of dust and old wood. Somewhere beneath it was the faint trace of cigarettes smoked years ago. The front room had a fireplace no one in Key West had ever needed. In the kitchen, the window above the sink looked into the side yard and directly at the lignum vitae.
Jake moved through the rooms slowly. He pressed his palm against the plaster in the back bedroom and crouched to inspect the front step. He opened and closed one of the Bahama shutters several times.
“What are you finding?” Emma asked.
“Nothing that scares me. The roof is four years old, and the electrical was redone in 2019.” He ran his thumb along the crack in the front step. “I’m tempted to leave this exactly the way it is.”
“Why?”
“Because people walked across it for seventy years to make it look like that.”
Emma studied the crack. “Or somebody dropped something heavy on it in 1987.”
Jake laughed. “Also possible.”
“And if I trip over it, I’m going to remind you of this conversation.”
“I’ll fix the step.”
They went outside last.
The garden had nearly swallowed the fence. Thorny growth filled one bed, and the jasmine along the porch needed cutting back badly. The lignum vitae rose above all of it.
Jake stood beneath the tree and looked up. Emma came up beside him.
“Well?” he asked.
“I think it’s adorable. I also think you knew I’d say that before we got out of the car.”
“I was hoping.” He looked at the house again. “I’m going to buy it.”
Emma heard the certainty in his voice.
“It feels right,” he said.
She slipped her hand into his. “Then buy it.”
Back at the cottage, Jake sat at the kitchen table with his computer, the property sheet and a calculator. He went through the numbers twice before calling Delores with an offer.
She accepted.
Jake ended the call and stared at the phone.
Emma waited.
“I bought a house.”
“You did.”
“I think I need a minute.”
Emma laughed and kissed him.
That evening, they went back to William Street so Jake could take a photograph of the lignum vitae for Nancy. He spent twenty minutes trying to fit the whole tree into the frame before the light disappeared.
Emma watched from the sidewalk.
There was something she had waited long enough to ask.
“What else did Edmund say to you the day he left?”
Jake lowered the phone.
“I wondered when you’d ask again.”
“I’ve been remarkably patient.”
“You have.”
He put the phone in his pocket.
“He told me Gloria spent six years deciding whether she was allowed to be happy. By the time she decided she was, she had eight and a half years left.” Jake paused.
“Then he said, and I’m giving you this exactly, ‘Don’t wait until it’s convenient, Mr. Kelleher.
It never becomes convenient. It only becomes late. ’”
Emma looked toward the house.
“He said something like that to me too.”
“I figured he had.”
“Between Grandma and Edmund, they spent a lot of time trying to make sure we didn’t waste ours.”
Jake reached for her hand. “Maybe we should listen.”
Later that night, he sent Nancy the photograph.
Her answer came almost immediately.
Thank you. Beautiful tree. Now send me one of the house when you own it.
Jake showed Emma the message.
“I think she approves,” Emma said.
“I think so too.”
On the first Saturday in September, Jake’s closing took less than twenty minutes in a title company office on North Roosevelt Boulevard.
The moment the keys were in his hand, he and Emma drove to William Street.
The house was empty except for dust, a folding chair Delores had forgotten in the kitchen and the sound of their footsteps moving from room to room.
Jake stood in the middle of the front room with the keys in his palm.
“It’s yours,” Emma said.
He looked at her. “That’s going to take some getting used to.”
They spent the next hour making plans.
Jake wanted to do some of the work before moving in. The shutters needed attention, several rooms needed paint and the garden required more patience than either of them could estimate. He also needed furniture. At minimum, he needed a bed.
“I’ll pack most of my things and keep out what I need for a few weeks,” he said. “That’ll get me out of your cottage sooner.”
Emma looked at him. “There’s no rush.”
“You’ve been at Winslow’s long enough.”
“I agree, which is why I’m checking out tomorrow.”
Jake pulled the Hibiscus Lane key from his pocket and held it out to her.
Emma looked at the key, then at him.
“No.”
“Emma.”
“Don’t be foolish.”
“It’s your house. You shouldn’t stay in a hotel while I’m tying up two of them.”
“I’m not staying in the hotel. I’m moving into the cottage tomorrow, and you can stay there while we work on this place.”
Jake raised an eyebrow. “Where exactly am I sleeping?”
“The sofa until we buy you a bed.”
He laughed. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because you’ve been preoccupied with your new house.”
Emma closed his fingers around the key.
“Keep it. You’re four blocks away, not moving to another country.”
“That sofa isn’t very comfortable.”
“Then I suggest we buy a bed today.”
Jake smiled. “Now you’re talking.”
When they returned to Hibiscus Lane, Jake stopped at the gate.
The pergola stood finished in the garden. His herb pots lined the porch. For three years, his mornings had begun here. He had drunk coffee on those steps, worked in the yard and learned how to live with the quiet when quiet was all he could manage.
Emma saw the change in his face.
“You okay?”
Jake nodded, but he took his time answering.
“Three years.” He looked toward the porch. “This place was my sanctuary. I don’t know what I would’ve done without it.”
Emma slipped her hand into his.
“I know.”
He looked at her then.
“And now it’s yours again.”
Gloria had kept the cottage for her. Jake had cared for it when Emma couldn’t. Now he was leaving it better than he found it and moving toward a home of his own.
Nothing about that felt like loss.
Jake glanced toward the lane.
“Would you mind if I took my sleeping bag over to the new house tonight?”
“Tonight?”
“I know there’s no furniture. I just want to wake up there once before we start tearing things apart.”
Emma smiled. “Of course.”
“You can stay here instead of Winslow’s if you want.”
“I’m checking out tomorrow, remember?”
“Right.”
“And you’re only four blocks away.”
“Ten minutes walking.”
“Less if you use your bike.”
Jake brightened. “I’ll be in better shape than ever.”
Emma laughed. “That’s fortunate because I need to tell you something.”
“What?”
“I have to buy a car. I’m returning the rental before it costs me the price of a small boat.”
Jake considered this.
“How about we buy me a bed and you a car?”
“That is an expensive afternoon.”
“It is.”
Emma took his hand. “I’m right behind you.”
The next evening, Emma checked out of Winslow’s.
Marisol came around the desk and hugged her.
“I knew you weren’t going back to Chicago.”
“You did not.”
“I suspected.”
“That I’ll give you.”
Marisol smiled. “You got your cottage back, and you found someone you love. Key West did all right by you.”
Emma thought about everything that had happened since the day she arrived.
“It did.”
At nine o’clock, the cottage was quiet.
Emma had carried in only what she needed for the night. The rest could wait until morning. Her father’s model sat on the shelf in the front room where the early light would reach it.
Her father had built a tiny version of this house long before Emma understood what the cottage meant to him. Her grandmother had held on to the real one for years so it would someday belong to her granddaughter.
And now Emma was finally home.
Her phone buzzed.
Water the lime tree.
Jake.
Emma smiled and set the phone on the porch step.
The garden was dark except for the lantern she carried with her. Tree frogs called from somewhere beyond the fence. Palm fronds moved in the warm breeze, and she thought she heard a foghorn far off toward the water.
The lime tree could wait until morning.
Emma sat in the secondhand teak chair with Gloria’s leather notebook in her lap.
She opened it near the back.
The Florida Power and Light envelope was still tucked between the last written page and the first blank one.
Emma took it out and read the five things her grandmother had wanted to remember.
1. Cardinal on the rail two mornings running
2. The Erdrich. Did she finish it
3. Hurricane photograph on the wall at Max's
4. E's pelican joke. Not funny. Tell it anyway
5. The lime tree
Then she read the question beneath them, written in a different pen and a less steady hand.
Ask her if she’s happy.
Emma had already answered Gloria once on Rebecca’s veranda.
Tonight, sitting in her grandmother’s garden with her father’s model inside and Jake four blocks away in a house of his own, she wanted to answer her again.
She turned to the first blank page in the notebook and picked up her pen.
Emma thought about the woman who had come to Key West believing she was here to sell a cottage and go home.
She smiled.
Then she wrote one word beneath the date.
Yes!
THE END