Matecumbe
Authors: James A. Michener
Matecumbe
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF FLORIDA
Florida A&M University, Tallahassee
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers
Florida International University, Miami
Florida State University, Tallahassee
New College of Florida, Sarasota
University of Central Florida, Orlando
University of Florida, Gainesville
University of North Florida, Jacksonville
University of South Florida, Tampa
University of West Florida, Pensacola
University Press of Florida
Gainesville · Tallahassee · Tampa · Boca Raton · Pensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville · Ft. Myers · Sarasota
Copyright 2007 by Joe Avenick
Cover photograph by Perry Hodies III
Printed in the United States of America on recycled, acid-free paper
All rights reserved
First paperback printing, 2007
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Michener, James A. (James Albert), 1907–1997.
Matecumbe / James A. Michener ; afterword by Joe Avenick.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-8130-3152-1 (acid-free paper)
1. Florida Keys (Fla.)—Fiction. I. Title.
ps3525.i19m38 2007
813.'54—dc22 2007005304
The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida.
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Matecumbe
Mary Ann Catherine Mays was born in Pennsylvania and spent most of her childhood living on a small chicken farm just outside Pottstown. Life was hard on the farm. There were always chores to do—feed to scatter, chicken coops to clean. She always felt sorry for the chickens and their short, penned-in existence. She was attending St. Aloysius High and had almost completed her sophomore year when she decided to leave school and get married to her dad’s auto mechanic. A life of cars and garages seemed so much more exciting than chickens.
Mary Ann and Donald Pienta had four children, all girls. But immediately after their eighth anniversary, the marriage was over. Donald had disappeared—leaving Mary Ann to care for the children.
Despite severe economic hardship, Mary Ann kept the family together. After all, she was used to dealing with adversity since her childhood. She’d work odd jobs, often two or three at the same time. Occasionally, she’d get help with the bill paying from a scattering of local relatives.
Whenever her daughters would ask the inevitable question, Mary Ann would say: “We’re not poor, we’re just low income. Poor people don’t have homes. They live in cars or in barns with the farm animals. We have an apartment.”
Medical bills constituted the most frightening of Mary Ann’s expenses. For whenever Melissa, Susan, Denise, or Annie would get ill unexpectedly, all previously designed budgets had to be scuttled. The girls’ asthmatic conditions called for constant monitoring.
“I’ll barter with your doctor,” Mary Ann told her oldest, when the damp-eyed teenager expressed worry about the cost of an emergency room visit. “Your grandmom and grandpop still have lots of chickens.”
As she walked along the beachfront of the Seascaper Resort Motel, Melissa Tomlinson was relieved that no one could see the tears that she quickly wiped from her cheeks. It was a spontaneous cry, born from pleasant memories.
She had come to the Seascaper to rejuvenate her life, to put back some semblance of mental order to a psyche that had been shredded to nothingness as a result of the recent divorce.
The Seascaper had been friendly to her in the past, and so had the little town in the Florida Keys—Islamorada—on whose beaches she now walked.
The word “Islamorada” is literally translated from the Spanish as “Purple Island.” This is due, no doubt, to the wild and colorful bougainvillea that grow everywhere, as if they were the ever-present springtime dandelions that cover farmlands and suburban lawns alike in her native Pennsylvania.
The tiny town of Islamorada, covering Upper Matecumbe Key, lies about halfway between Miami and Key West. The entire island is less than a mile wide, and from Route 1, the only highway, you can see the sparkling waters of the Gulf of Mexico on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other.
Thousands of years ago, there were no Florida Keys. When dinosaurs roamed the mainland, these islands were hidden under the ocean. But like buried treasure, they rose from beneath the swells, gem-like, to add a tiara of sparkling beauty to the mass of warm-weather vegetation that would come to be known as Florida.
Melissa stopped walking when she reached the easternmost point of the Seascaper’s grounds, where the sandy surface ended abruptly, and a line of large black rocks, forming a jetty, separated her from the sea.
She looked briefly over her shoulder at the setting sun, its orange glow quickly disappearing into what seemed to be the far end of the ocean. This powerful spectacle always seemed to evoke an increase in her visual vocabulary.
“I hope,” she told herself, “that this will not be symbolic of the rest of my days. I am determined that all the sunshine in my life will not be limited to my past.” For after thirteen years as a faithful wife, Melissa was recently divorced from Brady Tomlinson, a tenured English teacher at the University of Pennsylvania. They had been college sweethearts who’d married two weeks after graduation—the June wedding that Melissa had always dreamed she’d have. Now, suddenly, Brady had been excised forever from her life—with the swiftness of a sharp-edged sword cutting down flowers in full bloom.
The week lying ahead of her would mark Melissa’s first vacation without Brady since she was a teenager. There was no hope of reviving their relationship. It would be like trying to calm a tiger in the rain.
“Losing Brady was like losing a pet,” Melissa had told Cammie, her best friend and fellow reference librarian. “It was just like when the veterinarian advised me to have Pops, my cat, put to sleep. That’s the feeling I had when I signed the first of the divorce papers.”
Cammie, who was Melissa’s confidante as well as her co-worker in a Philadelphia library, had never been married.
“At least now we can go to the singles bars together,” Melissa had laughed. “Being six years younger than me, though, you’ll probably get the best of what’s left out there.”