The Orange Blossom Special Read Online Free Page A

details,” it read, “but let’s just say that if it wasn’t for your store I don’t think that little Landy Williams would have entered this good earth on July 29, 1954.” Maynard would watch people read that letter, then laugh his nicotine laugh and start counting backward on his fingers to September. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what this girl was doing during homecoming weekend, now does it?” He was a hard man to read, always friendly and laughing, but decidedly opaque when it came to his own feelings. When people like Anita Bryant or Rocky Graziano passed through town, Maynard and his wife, Victoria (“If you call me Vicky, I swear I’ll scream”), would get their hooks into them and have them to a dinner party at their grand house in the Cypress Woods section of town. That’s the kind of people they were.
    Maynard Landy came by his money honestly. “The House That Landy’s Built,” as he liked to call it, was one of the biggest in Gainesville. There was a kidney-shaped pool in the backyard and the only cabana in the neighborhood. By anyone’s standards the place was deluxe. There was a sunken living room decorated in all white— “The Graziano Room,” they called it because they used it only when a famous person passed through. There was a soda fountain in the real living room, and a built-in television set that swiveled into the adjacent den. The bath in Victoria and Maynard’s bedroom had a glass wall that looked onto a palm tree and a hibiscus bush growing outside their window. “It’s like bathing in Bali Hai,” Victoria Landy would say, repeating the decorator’s intention.
    The older of the two Landy children, Charlie, lived in an all-blue bedroom with a painted blue wooden desk, a blue toy box, and three pennants on the wall—one from the newly minted Los Angeles Dodgers, another from the University of Michigan, and a third fromthe New York Giants football team. This wasn’t because Charlie rooted for teams that were from three completely different parts of the country, but because all the pennants were blue, another of the decorator’s inspired details. Crystal’s room was painted in what the decorator called “Crystal Pink.” There was a pink telephone, a pink shag rug, a pink stereo. Even the hangers in her closet were pink. Maynard would tease Crystal: “If you ever get a sunburn, we’ll never find you in there.” Victoria saw the pink and blue motifs as strokes of genius. “He had all his creative juices flowing,” she would say of the decorator when showing off her children’s rooms to guests.
    Maynard never forgot that he was short and thickset with droopy turtle-like eyes, and that the redhead on his arm was as statuesque as Gina Lollabrigida. Even after two children, Victoria was still the most beautiful woman he had ever met. “Maynard is the brains of our family,” she would say with a half smile. “All I have to do is keep up my appearance.” She said it because it seemed to explain everything, and because Maynard liked hearing it. Maybe she even believed it herself.
    Every Saturday morning, Victoria had her hair done at the fanciest beauty parlor in town, J. Baldy’s. And once a week, she had a massage therapist come to the house. “Suppleness is the most important thing,” she would instruct Crystal, with the assumption that her daughter had the same grooming ambitions as she did.
    Maynard came from a poor family. The men on his father’s side helped to build the Seaboard Airline, the railroad line that connected the southeast to the northeast along the Atlantic coast. His father, Matthew Landy, would tell stories about how they had to dig up the trenches and use landfill to hold back the ocean water. The first passenger train that came down those tracks from New York to Miami was called the Orange Blossom