If I was going to write a novel of my life, 2017 would be the chapters were everything I knew and counted on to be a certain way in my life went all to hell.
And Christmas was when I managed to claw my way back up out of there.
The year before -- a bad year in its own right -- my hometown here on the ill-defined border between Florida's Treasure and Gold Coast learned that a tourist hotel chain was looking to expand by building one of its thirty-story, three hundred suite-sized roomed, hotel monstrosities here. Now, my family, we wouldn't have cared about this in the least except we found out that they wanted to build it right where my family's home sat. Our house had been overlooking the sandy beaches here since the early 1920s.
Now the Scotts family had what they call
strong local ties to the community
. We had been here for a century after all. So when we discussed refusing to sell with our local city official, we expected some support.
Nope.
The Mayor and Town Council basically begged Mom and Dad to take the offered money and get the hell out of the hotel's way. In fact, they wanted us to do it as quickly as we could possibly pack.
Now, this house was built by my great-grandfather and his son, my grandfather, had rebuilt the house at least twice. (Apparently, various hurricanes have tried to relocate it -- a Scotts family tradition, by the way) -- so, given all that family history here, we were not partial to selling.
So the hotel threw offers of larger and larger sums of money our way.
Which Dad refused.
I was in my last year of high school at the time and, let me tell you, I began to feel an incredible amount of peer pressure from people that had been friends to me for a decade. Hell, in one case particular even longer. My family was suddenly the town pariahs. Seems we were standing in the way of hundreds of new jobs for the locals and we were keeping tons of money, that would be in-flowing from the thousands of tourists, from flooding into this historically poor-ish area.
My girlfriend of three years, Jennifer Elliot, even broke up with me over this crap! Right before the fucking prom, if you can believe that.
Yeah.
So, the town was pushing, the hotel was pushing, old friends were pushing and, if anything, all of this pressure made Dad dig in his heels even more.
Mom might have caved in, she had not been born in and raised in this house after all, but she had raised my brother, two sisters, and me in it, so she didn't particularly want to move out herself. Her resistance, however, was nothing to my dad's. Dad was adamant and vocal about never selling.
Never.
I would like to think the fire was a coincidence.
But I can't.
Upon graduation, I had received an incredible gift. A fifty-foot sailing yacht called The Caribbean Star. It had been left to me by my grandfather in his will -- held in abeyance upon me finishing high school -- and the family's lawyer had turned it over to me with a ton of paperwork I had to sign. My older brother Tyler had received my boat's somewhat older sister ship The Midnight Star five years before and he was ... well, somewhere off on the other side of the world. He wanted to be the first person in our family to circumnavigate the world. Or maybe it was to sail on every ocean and sea.
Tyler's weird that way.
Now I had no such long distance sailing ambitions. Nope, I simply loved the fact I now had my own place. Privacy had been hard to come by in my teen years. Even a place that
floated
was a divine blessing. The family home was wonderful but had been built in a different age. It was, truthfully, way too small for a family as large as ours.
That single bathroom alone had caused many an angry exchange.
So I packed up most of my stuff, bid my two younger sisters, Tina and Mani, goodbye and fled to my new water-surrounded abode. The day I left, Tina instantly began repainting my old room day-glow pink. You would figure twin sisters would delight in the fact that they had gotten to live in the same room for thirteen years together. Nope. They're weird too, I guess.
Anyway, the fire.
It started after midnight in the attached garage. It spread in a way that was terribly suspicion to me, but apparently not to the local fire inspectors. By the time my mom and Dad had awakened, the whole house was engulfed. As luck would have it my sisters had been staying over at our grandmother's house. Keeping our Nana company and baking cookies. The town's Fire Chief and the county Sheriff -- both once old friends of my Dad's but estranged at the time of the fire -- said neither of our parents had stood a chance of getting clear once the blaze started. Just the way that old houses like ours were built. Fire traps. Shoddy construction. Old, faulty wiring systems.
Death traps, really.
Good thing they're being torn down left and right to build new hotels, huh?
My grandmother was as devastated as all of us, but she took charge. Nana sold the land to the Hotel's restate developer. The money from the sale covered the double funeral cost and put enough aside for my sisters and me to go to college, with a good bit left over.
The idea of attending the local college was not even a thought for me. I wasn't going to look at the faces of people I had gone to high school with anymore. Faces that now looked so happy to see the construction being done upon the gray, wet ashes of my parent's pyre. Hell, even doing what my bother had done now held appeal.
Just pull up the Star's anchor and sail off? Yeah, that would be a solution.
As the summer passed into fall, and Halloween vanished into November, the idea of a long vacation from the world I had grown up in was becoming more and more dominant, I had a surprise visitor on the good ship Caribbean Star.
** ** ** ** ** ** **
"Randell?"
Looking up from my contemplation of the open throat of a beer bottle, I was surprised to see Victoria Elliot -- my ex-girlfriend Jennifer's mother -- walking down the pier towards me. Sitting the beer aside, least she chastises me about my underage drinking, I stepped up to the gangplank and caught a nylon line to stabilize my balance. I had already killed off a few of that beer's friends, not that I was drunk mind you.
"Hey, Ms. Elliot. How have you been?"
She shook her head a bit and gave me a disparaging look. "Vicky! Call me Vicky, I've told you that a dozen times." She smiled at my embarrassed shrug. "I've been good, how about you? How are you getting along out here alone?" Jennifer's Mom stopped at the end of the plank then grinned. "Permission to come aboard, captain?"
Laughing, I stepped out of her way. "Granted."
Reaching out a hand, I steadied her as Victoria walked across the six-foot fiberglass plank bridging the gap between the boat and the pier. Releasing her hand with some reluctance, she stepped down into the open deck, and I gestured her towards one of the padded bench-like deck chairs. I really wanted to return to my own seat given that her light steps had added an odd swaying motion to the normal rhythmic rocking of the large sailing vessel.
Taking a seat her eyes went to the half-empty bottle by my chair. I saw a moment's disapproval purse her lips, but then she seemed to dismiss it. Biting her bottom lip, she looked around as I eased myself back into my padded captain's chair. The fact that I did at least keep a clean ship was a plus on my side today. One of those life lessons my dad had instilled before he died.
"You didn't answer my question."
"Humm?" Looking up, I had to puzzle that out for a second. "Oh, well I guess I'm getting along well enough. I have pretty much everything I need and I can keep the bills paid easily enough."
"From the insurance money?" she asked. "Sorry, being nosy, but I promised your mom one I would try to look after you."
That was a surprise. But then I guess it shouldn't be, given that she and mom had been friends for years before I dated her daughter. "No, that money is still set aside for college. Mostly my trust fund that my grandpa set up is paying the day-to-day bills. Unless I have some major repairs to make to the Star here, I can basically live on the interest from it." I shrugged. "My needs are few."
"Most single men feel like that." Victoria instantly seemed to regret saying that. "Sorry. Have you talked to your brother?'
"Not since that phone call before the funeral." I shook my head. "Tyler's still in Malaysia or some such place. When we talked last, he said it could be a year before he can get back here. He might as well be off in Narnia for all that I can easily get in touch with him." I smirked. "Which is exactly how Tyler wanted his life to be, so I guess he's happy. Well, as happy as any of us can be, given ... well, just given."
She nodded "Yeah, I remember your mom telling me that. June was always so afraid he would get killed off on some foreign adventure and she would never hear about it. How ironic, the reverse happened." When Victoria looked up she saw my eyes. "Oh, sorry."
"Everything reminds me of it, Victoria. It's not your fault. Well, no more so than that of everyone else in this town."
She tisked. "Now Randal, you know that no one in this town set that fire. Your parents were loved by everyone. It was just a terrible accident." After a second, seeing my expression harden, she waved it away. "Anyway, that's not what I came by for. I wanted to see what you're planning for the holidays."
No longer caring what she thought, I reached down and picked up my beer. "Not really in a Christmassy mood this year. Will probably have Thanksgiving at Nana's with her and the twins. Christmas too, I guess. If I'm still here," I mumbled under my breath.
Apparently too loudly.
"You're thinking of leaving?" she asked sitting up a bit.
Wordlessly I pointed with the bottle toward the distant tower crane hovering over the spindly skeletal frame of the new hotel. I wanted to spit in its direction. "I want a change of view," I said, finally.
