Free The Last Cadillac by Nancy Nau Sullivan Page B

was big as a couch. By the time we arrived in Florida, I’d thrown up many times on that seat, but my grandparents didn’t say a word about the mess.
    Grandma only said, “Poor sweetie, are you better now?” And my grandpa said, “Give her some of that magnesia.” That night, my grandmother chased me around the motel room with a nasty, chalky liquid in a blue bottle.
    I stayed with my grandparents for three months in Florida. That is when Grandma found the cottage. My grandfather, of course, went along with her wishes to buy it. They both had a nose for real estate of all sorts.
    One afternoon on the porch, my grandmother was reading
The Bradenton Herald
, crinkling up the want ads, while my grandfather watched
The Secret Storm
, his cigar smoke mixing with the scent of gardenias that wafted through the screened door. He growled at me for racing back and forth off of the porch and into the yard among the orange and grapefruit trees. I flew across the spongy Zoysia grass, bouncing along with Punky, the cocker spaniel, his blond ears flopping, like we were running across a wide, green bed.
    Later, I sat sweating on the porch, drinking a Seven-Up. My grandmother tapped the crumpled pages of the newspaper with a pencil and smiled at me. “Ha! Let’s go out there and have a look.” I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I was excited, and, in my six-year-old brain, I knew this had to be something special. “Out there” meant the beach.
    We drove just a few miles west to Anna Maria Island. My bathing suit was wadded up under the front seat, just in case. Off we went. My grandfather with the cigar in his mouth, and my grandmother with a frill of white hair blowing in the humidity. We clacked over the wooden drawbridge, past the tall, spindly palms and the mangroves, the Brazilian berries and the Australian pines, out to the white beach and turquoise water. Small, stucco, ranch houses were popping up, but in those days, the narrow, seven-mile-long island was still a tropical paradise of overgrown sables and palmetto.
    The cottage stood on stilts, slightly crooked on the white sand, at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. It was built of enormous cypress logs that were interspersed with wide swaths of stucco; it was a striped house, the black logs alternating with the white stucco. A rusty-red shingled roof topped it off, and the white-framed windows on either sideof the faded green door were like two great eyes that peered right into my happy soul.
    My grandfather was laughing when we pulled up to it. “Liz, the Gulf is almost at the door!” But that didn’t seem to bother her. She was falling in love, and I was, too, the two of us standing next to one another looking out at the water, my hand holding her silky fingers. I squinted up at the sun. There, all around, yellow, soft, golden sun. The Gulf sparkled with diamonds of sunshine, and from that minute on, the turquoise water dazzled me.
    My grandfather came around right then and there, chomping the cigar and looking up into the palms that lined the short street of crushed shell to Gulf Drive. Grinning, he nodded at my grandmother. She raised the edge of her floral housedress and waded into the foamy surf. (She went to her grave saying the salt water was good for her bunions.) I immediately flopped into the waves beside her, bathing suit forgotten.
    My grandmother had saved for just this place. She kept “egg money” tucked in her rubber stocking, and it was from those savings she was able to make a down payment on the cottage. She was always frugal, washing and saving tin foil, making gooseberry and grape preserves from the arbor—she watched me pour the hot wax over the jelly to seal the jars. She was the first person I ever knew to clip coupons. As reluctant as she was to spend money, my aunts made a point of dragging her to Goldblatt’s in downtown Hammond for a new outfit at least once a year.