No Judgments Read online

  Drew was building his own house on beachside property left to him by his parents (who’d died under circumstances nearly as mysterious as Nevaeh’s living arrangements . . . or at least, mysterious to me).

  It wasn’t long before rumors began to circulate that all was not well between him and Leighanne (the big-city girlfriend) out there on Sandy Point Beach.

  “I heard she can’t take the heat,” Nevaeh informed me one morning as we were refilling ketchup bottles. “I mean, literally. Uncle Drew hasn’t got the air-conditioning system installed yet. He says he might not install one at all. He doesn’t like air-conditioning.”

  I was appalled. “It was eighty-five degrees last night. I wouldn’t be able to sleep without AC.”

  Nevaeh nodded. “It’s more than just that, though. I hear she’s got island fever.”

  “Island fever?”

  “It’s like claustrophobia. It happens to people who can’t stand living so far from the mainland. They have to get out. Just watch. Leighanne’s gonna dump him and move back to New York. I already warned him, but does he listen to me? Nope.”

  A few weeks later, that’s exactly what Leighanne did do—in a dramatic fashion we all got to witness, since she chose to do it at the café, storming in during the height of the breakfast rush and hurling a small object at Drew’s chest as he sat at his usual place at the counter, sipping his coffee and reading the sports page of the local paper.

  “Here,” Leighanne had shouted. “You can have your damn keys back. I won’t be needing them anymore.”

  Drew had looked confused . . . even more so when the next thing she’d hurled at him was, of all things, a saltshaker. I knew this because I’d been standing beside him holding two orders of huevos rancheros when the object struck him in the chest, then landed at my feet, miraculously unbroken. The shaker was empty, except for a slight tinge of pink at the bottom.

  “And you can have that back, too,” Leighanne had shouted. “I don’t want anything of yours. And you’ll never have to worry about putting up with anything of mine again.”

  Then she’d turned and stormed from the restaurant, the glossy brown curls beneath her straw cowboy hat bobbing, while Drew only sat there, looking mildly astonished. At least until Nevaeh, now worried that she was losing her glamorous potential aunt-to-be forever, had cried, “Well, don’t just sit there, Uncle Drew. Go after her!”

  But Drew had chosen not to—which had probably been for the best, since even if he’d tried, it would have been too late, given the possible case of island fever. As Leighanne sped off, all of us could see that the back of her Mini Cooper was piled high with her belongings, most likely not only including the infamous salt, but also the heart that she’d reclaimed from him.

  So I could understand why “Uncle Drew” might feel a little down on family at the moment, especially since Nevaeh had spent the better part of the following week bitterly informing anyone who would listen, “I told him she was going to dump him if he wasn’t more careful. I told him!”

  That didn’t give Drew the right, however, to swing his unnervingly blue gaze on me and say what he did next, which was, “Although in your case, your family is right. You should evacuate, Fresh Water.”

  I was so stunned, I couldn’t even summon up a suitably stinging retort before he turned and headed coolly back indoors to his breakfast.

  Where did he get off, I wondered as I stood there, open-mouthed in the early morning heat, suggesting I couldn’t handle myself in a hurricane? He barely even knew me. After three months of serving breakfast to him nearly every day—Spanish omelet, café con leche, no sugar—this was the longest conversation we’d ever had.

  True, he’d always been a generous tipper—30 percent, and cash, even when he’d paid for the meal by credit card.

  But still.

  Maybe, I told myself as I grasped the handle to the café’s side door, it wasn’t that Drew thought I couldn’t handle a hurricane, but that I’d been there to witness his humiliating breakup. Some men could be sensitive about things like that.

  Although I had to admit, he’d never seemed too upset about it. I’d seen at least half a dozen attractive young women walk up to him in the café since and inform him that they had plenty of “salt” for his “shaker” anytime he needed some . . . not that he appeared to have taken any of them up on it, so far as I could tell.

  It was tough to keep a secret in a place as small as Little Bridge. Though I’d managed to keep mine.

  Back inside, the air felt pleasantly cool and scented with the smell of freshly cooked bacon, as it did every morning.

  Something was wrong, however. I sensed it as soon as I walked in. The usual early morning sounds to which I’d grown so accustomed—the scrape of forks against plates, and the low murmur of conversation as folks discussed the headlines in the local paper—were gone.

  For a second, I was worried I really had been fired—Ed was as well known for his fiery temper as he was for his ability to bake a truly outstanding key lime pie—but a glance at Angela’s and Nevaeh’s faces showed me this wasn’t the case. Instead of looking at me, everyone’s attention was glued to both of the television sets that hung from the ceiling, one at each end of the breakfast counter. Ed kept one tuned to Fox News, and the other to CNN, both with the sound off and closed captioning on. This seemed to keep all customers happy.

  But today, out of deference to the storm, both televisions were tuned to the Weather Channel, with the sound up.

  That’s how I was able to hear the meteorologists announce that Hurricane Marilyn was making a turn, and now appeared to be heading straight for Little Bridge Island.

  Chapter Three

  The high winds of a hurricane sweeping across the ocean can produce a dangerous storm surge, a wall of water that can cause massive flooding even hundreds of miles inland.

  Some people like to say that Little Bridge Island was discovered by the Spanish in 1513, but of course that isn’t true. You can’t “discover” something that’s already been occupied for thousands of years before you ever even got there. Little Bridge, a small island in a chain of similar islands off the coast of the tip of Florida known as the Florida Keys, was home to the Tequesta Indians for many centuries before the Spanish invaded it. The Indians were enslaved, and eventually the Keys were turned into U.S. territory.

  Little Bridge got its name due to the fact that it’s connected to the rest of the Keys by a bridge.

  But since most of the Keys are connected to one another by bridges, it makes no sense that Little Bridge is named after the fact that it has a bridge.

  But that’s part of its quirky appeal, and probably what drew my father to it when he was a young man and began planning our family vacations. He liked quirky places, and Little Bridge, with its odd name and even odder residents, is one of the quirkiest.

  So Little Bridge was where we vacationed every year, even though my mother was pretty vocal about the fact that she’d have preferred to go somewhere more cosmopolitan, such as the Hamptons, Paris, or Ibiza.

  But like my father, I grew to love our vacation house on the canal, waking to the smell of the salt water, finding manatees drinking from the hose of our dock, watching egrets pluck their delicate way through the sand. I loved boating, the rush of wind through my hair, the glassy stillness of the water near the sandbars, the challenge of painting that water, making it look as mirrorlike and gleaming on my canvas as it did in real life.

  And of course walking through the quaint, sun-drenched town, the historic buildings—by law none were allowed to be more than two stories tall, because anything higher might impede a neighbor’s view of the sunset—each painted a different shade of pink or blue or yellow, stopping for ice cream or groceries at the locally owned shops. I could see why my father loved Little Bridge, why he would have moved there if his job as a successful defense attorney in Manhattan—and my mother’s dislike of the town—hadn’t made such a dream impossible.

  I loved it, too.
I felt safe in Little Bridge—not that, back then, I had any reason to feel unsafe anywhere.

  It made perfect sense to me that it was to Little Bridge that I fled when my safety felt threatened. My father—if he hadn’t passed away last year—would have understood.

  But now the new comfortable, safe life I’d put so carefully together seemed to be crumbling. I knew it the minute I walked into my apartment after I got off work and found my roommate, Daniella, throwing clothes into a suitcase.

  “Where are you going?” I asked, though I had a sinking feeling I already knew. “You’re not evacuating, are you?”

  “Sure am.” She took a slurp from the frozen margarita she’d poured herself. I’d seen the pitcher from the blender sitting on the kitchen counter as I’d walked into the two-bedroom apartment we shared.

  The place was tiny—each of the bedrooms hardly large enough to fit a queen-size bed—but I considered myself lucky to have found it . . . not the place so much as the person who’d come with it.

  A curvaceous, good-humored ER nurse, Daniella was outgoing and bubbly—exactly the kind of person I needed to be around after what I’d gone through this past year back in New York, just like the job at the Mermaid was exactly the kind of job I needed now. I was up and out the door by five thirty every morning, even on my days off, since Gary was used to being fed that early and woke me like clockwork daily at dawn.

  This worked out well since Daniella was a morning person, too—not to mention extremely social. She seemed to be friends with nearly everyone on the island, which wasn’t surprising: at some point, she’d either given a stitch, shot, X-ray, or bandage to nearly all of them.

  That’s how she’d snagged her two-bedroom rental for such a (comparatively) low rate: because she’d treated the landlady’s son for chronic asthma. Two-bedroom apartments were rare on Little Bridge—at least ones that were affordable to locals, since most living spaces on the island proper had been snatched up by vacation rental companies and were hawked at astronomical prices online to tourists.

  But since our landlady, Lydia, like most people, adored Daniella, she rented to her at a discount.

  “Mandatory evac for all city employees,” Dani was explaining to me, with her usual infallible cheer. “That includes the hospital. I’ve been reassigned to beautiful, sunny, downtown Coral Gables.”

  “Coral Gables?” I lifted Gary, who’d rushed over to give me his customary greeting (sprawling supine at my feet, then rubbing his face all over my shoes), and took a seat. “That makes no sense. Why would they send you to Coral Gables when the hurricane is supposed to be headed here?”

  “You’re asking for local bureaucracy to make sense?” Daniella let out a delighted laugh. Dani found everything delightful, even medical emergencies. She loved making sick people feel better. “You should know better than that by now, Bree!” Then she sobered and said, “No, but really, it’s because they don’t want people thinking it’s safe to stay here. If they know hospital and emergency services will still be staffed and up and running, no one will leave, because they’ll be lulled into a false sense of security. So all of us—ER staff, police, the firehouse—have been assigned to work at hurricane shelters out of the direct path of the eye. They hope that by doing this, the good citizens of this fine isle will follow. They’re sending us all out on buses later this afternoon. Which is why I’m drinking this.” She wagged her margarita at me. “I don’t have to drive.”

  I stared glumly at the sunlight streaming in through her bedroom window. Given the blue sky and steamy temperature outside, it was hard to believe any sort of storm was on its way.

  But the Weather Channel, blaring in the other room, was telling a different story, as were the dozens of text messages piling up on my phone, many from Caleb. And my mother.

  “What’s bugging you?” Dani asked. “You’re not upset about this hurricane, are you? Chances are it will lose a ton of steam over Cuba, you know. It’s a terrible thing to say, and poor Cuba, but that’s usually what happens. We’ll just get a lot of wind and rain. But they have to evacuate us anyway, you know, just in case.”

  I smiled wanly at her.

  “Not the storm,” I said. “Just . . . whatever. My ex called earlier and offered to come pick me up in his private plane.”

  Dani, who knew most of what had happened between me and Cal—though not the most sordid details, which were hard for me to discuss—almost spat out the sip of margarita she’d taken. “I hope you told him to stick his plane where the sun don’t shine!”

  “Of course I did. Well, not in so many words. But I kind of regret it now that everybody’s evacuating. Drew Hartwell even told me I should go. He called me Fresh Water.”

  Now Dani did spit, or looked as if she wanted to, at least. “Drew Hartwell can kiss my butt. He thinks he’s God’s gift to the ladies. Hey, look, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you come with me? They’re getting us all hotel rooms. I’m sure it will be super nice. Last time they put us up at the Westin. It had a pool and a generator and everything. And, oh my God, there were these firemen from Key West—you won’t believe how we partied. It was like The Bachelorette, but on steroids.”

  I smiled again, but less wanly. “Thanks, but I can’t. I’ve got this guy to worry about.”

  We both eyed Gary, who’d crawled off my lap and was now sniffing the side of Daniella’s suitcase suspiciously. He either knew something was going on or was looking for a new place to curl up and sleep. Knowing Gary, it was the latter. His survival instincts weren’t exactly stellar. A middle-aged gray tabby cat who had spent years living in an animal shelter farther up the Keys before I’d come along and adopted him, he wanted only to be in the presence of human beings at all times, no matter what they were doing . . . even something as mundane as packing.

  “Bring him along,” Daniella suggested. “I’m sure the hotel’s pet friendly. Or, if not, we can smuggle him in.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “But you know Gary doesn’t exactly travel well.”

  It was true. Gary howled up a storm when in moving vehicles, even when medicated, and a four-hour bus ride to the mainland with him sounded like one of the circles of hell.

  “And besides, I don’t want to sponge off the city’s dime. I’d feel guilty.”

  “Oh for God’s sake.” Daniella leaned over to sweep some jewelry off her dressing table and into a pouch. The minute her back was turned, Gary leaped into her suitcase and began sniffing the inside. “The administration said it was okay for first responders to bring their families on the bus, and into their hotel rooms. You’re the closest thing I’ve got to family around here.”

  “Aw.” I was genuinely touched . . . though relieved that she hadn’t noticed what Gary was doing now, which was pawing through the clothes she’d neatly folded into the suitcase, in order to make himself a comfortable place to sleep. I stepped toward the bed and swiftly lifted his nearly twenty-pound girth from the suitcase, as he let out a tiny squeak of protest, then plopped him on the floor. “That’s sweet. But I think Gary and I would be better off here, especially given his recent medical issues.”

  Daniella frowned, but I could tell she agreed with me. I hadn’t meant to adopt a cat as needy as Gary, whose personality was a joy but whose health, from having spent so many years on the streets and then in the shelter, was a wreck. Just a week earlier I’d ended up shelling out twelve hundred dollars for the removal of every last one of his teeth due to his having something called feline stomatitis, a painful inflammation of the mouth.

  And while he already seemed to be on the mend, in a lot less pain (and a lot less smelly), I was in no hurry to take him on a weekend jaunt out of town, hurricane or no hurricane. He was still on antibiotics and several other medications and could eat only soft canned foods that I carefully mashed for him.

  But it was all worth it. At night, after thoroughly grooming himself and making a careful inspection of the entire apartment, he climbed onto my bed, curled up close to me, and dozed of
f.

  And for the first time since that last morning with Caleb, I was finally able to get a good night’s sleep. It seemed to me that this was only because of the sweet, heavy, purring warmth beside me.

  I hadn’t wanted to mention any of this to Caleb, let alone my mother or any of my other friends back home. Only my dad, a fellow animal lover, would have understood.

  But Dad was gone now.

  Daniella looked down at Gary as he wandered over toward her laundry basket full of dirty clothes, sniffed it, then leaped inside, molding a soft nest out of her scrubs, pajamas, and underwear from the day before while purring so loudly we could both hear him.

  “I get it,” Dani said. “He’s your boy, and he’s not really travel ready at the moment, storm or no storm.”

  I smiled at her gratefully. She really was the perfect roommate. She’d been fine with my asking if it would be all right if I got a cat (my first, since my mom had never wanted animals in the house. “So dirty!” she always said. “And they scratch up the furniture”). Gary had instantly won Daniella over with his big green eyes, foot-to-face-rub greetings, and constant purring.

  “But,” she said, returning to her packing, “if you change your mind, you can always take my car and come up. It doesn’t have much gas in it, but I’ll leave it parked over at the hospital with the keys under the visor anyway. Otherwise I’d say grab a rental car, but I heard the tourists snaked all of those in a panic to get out of here early this morning.”

  “Oh. Well, thanks, Dani. I might take you up on that.” I doubted I would, actually, but a car low on gas was better than no car at all.