Ladies' Night Andrews, Kay (great novels .txt) 📖

for the bird rookery. It was nothing for him to work a twelve- or fourteen-hour day, come home and play ball with me, and then get up and do it all over again the next day. I think my mom’s death kind of took the wind out of his sails. He’s only seventy-four, but some days, you’d think he was twenty years older.”

“Your dad’s seventy-four? Wow. Rochelle is only fifty-eight. How old are you?”

“I’m thirty-eight,” Wyatt said. “You wanna see my ID?”

“I trust you,” Grace said.

“Dad was thirty-six when they had me, same age I was when we had Bo. Dad went in the navy when he was just eighteen and got out in the late sixties. He and my mom met at an Allman Brothers concert in St. Pete, at the old National Guard Armory there. Crazy, huh? To think about your parents grooving to the Allman Brothers back in the day? My mom was six years younger than him, so she wasn’t that old when she had me.”

“Rochelle always says she was just a baby when she had her baby. She was only twenty when she got pregnant with me. Of course, my dad was a good bit older, too. He was already thirty, and he’d just bought the Sandbox when she came to work as a waitress. Dad claimed he threatened to fire her if she didn’t marry him.”

Wyatt thought for a moment. “It still bugs me, you know? That my parents had this long, happy marriage, and I had a happy childhood, and, with all that, I’m still ending up divorced. And you’re in the same boat, right?”

“I guess.” Grace took a sip of her beer. “I mean, I always assumed they were happy. Lately, I’m not so sure. Little things Rochelle’s says. Maybe she wasn’t as happy as I always thought. Certainly, I didn’t have what you’d call the average childhood, growing up in a bar, but I don’t think there was any lasting psychological damage.”

“You grew up in a bar; I grew up in a tourist trap, playing with monkeys and parrots. And I always thought that was totally normal. I thought all kids had to shovel zebra poop when they got home from school every day,” Wyatt said. His voice turned wistful. “I always just assumed Bo would have that life, too. He really loves hanging out at the park.”

Grace’s eyes widened. “You mean he won’t, because Callie’s taking him to Birmingham?”

“Not just that,” Wyatt said. “I’m really not sure how much longer we’ll be able to hang on at Jungle Jerry’s. People don’t want to spend a half a day wandering around a park where the big attraction is a bird riding a bike. Nobody cares about a tree that’s two hundred years old or an orchid that doesn’t grow anywhere else in the world. We’re an anachronism. And we’re bleeding money.”

“It’s that bad?” Grace asked.

He shrugged. “This is too depressing. Let’s discuss something else. Like your new project.”

“It’s not depressing,” Grace insisted. “It’s just reality. Isn’t there anything you can do to turn things around?”

“I’ve tried everything I can think of. Billboards, social media, Groupon offers, coupons in the mail. It helps a little, just never enough. Did you know that up until nineteen seventy, there were at least a dozen roadside tourist attractions, right here in this area?” He ticked them off on his fingers, “Sunken Gardens, Sarasota Jungle Gardens, Weeki Wachee, Silver Springs, Rainbow Springs, the Aquatarium, Tiki Gardens, Six Gun Territory, and that’s just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Lots of them are long gone, but others are still limping along, like Cypress Gardens. The last I heard, most of it had been turned into Legoland.”

“I remember some of those places from when I was a little girl,” Grace smiled at the memory. “I guess Disney coming to Florida in the seventies probably was the kiss of death.”

“That and the interstates bypassing them,” Wyatt said. “And people’s tastes change. So, Jungle Jerry’s is a dinosaur. A really expensive, dying dinosaur.”

“What’ll happen to it?” Grace asked.

“I’m not sure. We had a hot offer from a developer, right before Bo was born. They wanted to build one of those new urban centers, shopping and office and multifamily housing. My mom was sick; she had cancer—although we didn’t know then that it was terminal—and she wanted us to keep the place running. Her father started it. He was the original Jungle Jerry. And like the fool I was, I thought maybe I could make it work.” He shook his head. “Callie never let me hear the end of it afterwards. ‘We could have been rich. You should have sold out.’”

“And then the economy tanked,” Grace said. “How well, I know. Since nobody could sell a new house or condo, they sure didn’t need a decorator to design a fabulous model home. And developers and builders probably couldn’t afford to break ground on yet another new project with all that unsold inventory sitting around.”

“Six months after we turned down the deal, we heard the developer defaulted on all his bank loans,” Wyatt said. “So probably, even if we had made the deal, we never would have gotten paid.”

“I know housing starts are starting to inch up again. Do you think it’s possible that another developer would be interested?” she asked.

“Right now, there’s only one interested buyer,” Wyatt said, lowering his voice, as the waitress came by their table to ask if they wanted another pitcher of beer.

“Who?”

“The state of Florida,” Wyatt said.

“Really? But that’s good news, right? What would they do with the park? Keep it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, sounding irritated. “Dealing with bureaucrats is a major pain. They say they’d turn it into a state park. They say if the state legislature approves their next budget, the money’s there, if Manatee County can kick in some money, too. There’s a lot of ‘ifs’ flying around.”

“What does your dad think?”

“He says he’s okay with