Heart of Palm by Laura Lee Smith

smelling of Pine-Sol and bleach and with not so much as a single rogue hush puppy left to molder behind a booth, not a single drop of grenadine left gelling on a jigger behind the bar. In three hours, she’d take Uncle Henry’s apart and put it back together. And tomorrow she’d do the whole thing again.
    By the time Gooch rose, stretched, and made his way back from the edge of the deck, Sofia had finished cleaning and departed on her bike, and Frank and Morgan had filled the three stainless-steel refrigerators with the day’s preps. They poured two steaming cups of coffee and sat down at the picnic table outside the kitchen door. Morgan lit a cigarette.
    “I got a call this morning,” he said, looking at the land next door, where his own profitable restaurant had stood many years ago, before the fire that claimed it. Morgan never voiced suspicion that the fire had been set, though Frank would not have blamed him if he had. Utina was not a place to appreciate even the most modest forms of prosperity, especially that which belonged to a black man.
    “Imagine that,” Frank said. “Who’d wanna call you?”
    Morgan flicked ash onto the deck, narrowed his eyes.
    “Man wants to build a fancy marina,” he said.
    “A marina?”
    “Docks. Big boats. Yachts. You know. Rich people stuff.”
    “Where?”
    “There,” Morgan said, waving his hand toward his own parcel of land. “And here,” he said, continuing the motion with his hand to wave toward the restaurant.
    “He wants our land?”
    “Look like it. Yours and mine both.”
    “Shit.”
    “That’s what I said.”
    “You tell him where to get off?”
    “Started to.” Morgan stubbed out his cigarette, looked out across the water, where a gray egret dropped down from an overhanging live oak bough and waded gracefully into a patch of reeds. “But . . .”
    “But what?”
    “But I think he mighta been serious,” Morgan said. “And I think he mighta had money.”
    “Then he’s not from Utina.”
    “Nope. Atlanta.”
    “No shit?”
    “Atlanta, Georgia,” Morgan said. “A man with money, from Atlanta, Georgia. Susan Holm was right.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “She was the one said the Atlanta people wanted to come and build a marina right on this spot. Don’t you remember nothing? She was telling us about it last Friday in here.” Frank did not remember anything about last Friday night, other than the feeling of Susan’s thigh pressing against his under the bar.
    “Why would he want to do that, Morgan?”
    “Beats me. He’s a developer, he says. Alonzo Cryder. That’s his name. Can you beat that name?”
    “And he flat out told you he’s got money?”
    “Nah. But that’s what Susan says she heard. Don’t you remember?”
    Frank sighed. “Morgan, Susan says a lot of stuff. And some of it is even true. But you know what I think? I think this guy is probably just like all the other people who’ve told me they want to buy this place through the years. They think they’ve got all they need to make it run like we do. They’ve got everything except one thing. Cash.”
    And it was true. Frank had heard all this before, always from some broken-down Utinian who looked at Frank from the other side of the bar and seemed to come to the notion that Frank Bravo had it made, that the restaurant was a steady paycheck and a solid place to land in a local economy that relied heavily on beer sales, shrimp consumption, and bootlegged Lynyrd Skynyrd albums. Even Carson had made a crack or two—Carson, with his investment practice in St. Augustine, sitting pretty all those years and now, with the recession in full swing and his clients panicking, looking at Frank as though Frank was the lucky one, Frank was the big winner. Shit. It infuriated him. As if Carson didn’t have it all. The house. The job. The beautiful little girl. And Elizabeth. Carson had Elizabeth. Wasn’t that enough?
    The phone inside the restaurant began to ring. Frank got