Tampa Alissa Nutting Sample Fix -

The Realtor of Sun City Center

I think of my own apartment in Ybor City, where the cockroaches wear tiny suits of armor and the upstairs neighbor practices the tuba at 3 AM. “Ma’am,” I say, pulling a Ziploc bag of Goldfish crackers from my purse, “in Florida, the house isn’t the thing that’s haunted. You are the thing that haunts the house.” tampa alissa nutting sample

Mrs. Hendricks touches the blinds. Her manicured nail leaves a tiny dent in the plastic. “Is it haunted?” The Realtor of Sun City Center I think

“The master bedroom faces west,” I say, gesturing to a room where the afternoon sun makes the dust motes look like airborne maggots. “You can watch the sunset melt the highway.” Hendricks touches the blinds

My newest client, Mrs. Hendricks, has skin the color of a faded Publix coupon and eyes that have been surgically widened into two wet, panicked coins. She wants a house “close to the good hospital” but far from “the changing neighborhoods,” which is code for everything she won’t say aloud. I show her a split-level in Palma Ceia with a pool shaped like a kidney. The water is the color of a melted peppermint patty. She stares at it and whispers, “My husband used to float.”

“People float here all the time,” I say, smiling. My teeth feel like Chiclets glued to a gumline. “It’s the buoyancy of denial.”

I drive back over the Howard Frankland Bridge, the bay below me the color of a dirty aquarium. I roll down the window and let the wind eat my hair. Another soul tucked into a stucco coffin. Another commission check for a woman who teaches tenth-grade English and thinks about her students’ fathers during third period.