The sun rises and falls with the flick of a switch. The grass never needs cutting.
And Edna shuffles around the diamond at Tropicana Field, pumped through the arteries of a packed home show — another — meant to fill the sportless void of winter. When snowbirds and retirees and bright young suburbanites seek salvation in the shape of a hot tub or plastic fencing or lawn plugs or a carbon monoxide sensor. A time when the ballplayers are at home or playing in dusty, foreign leagues, in Arizona or Puerto Rico or Mexico.
She knows the sore knees of a veteran. She knows the optimism, the hope, of the rookies, the minor leaguers, hustling through one more season. Maybe a shot, this year, at the show. They all come to the Trop.
Edna knows it is futile. She has been here before. She has smelled the Italian sausages, watched the old men sit on garden benches and sip beer while their wives scout rain-resistant siding.
But she searches on. And she finds him: Pepe.
Pepe and his toilets.
"No, no lo-flo," he smiles. "Look at this one, you could flush a sneaker with this one."
And she nods back, a hint of hardness in her eyes.
She has heard the sneaker-flushing promise before. She has seen plenty.
She was there, back before the Condo Wars of '93 and the land grab of the '80s. Back before the developers came, before landlords wanted the mobile homes off their waterfront lots, made suddenly valuable in the unending crush of newcomers yearning for a space of marshland.
She came early to this peninsula in the sun. She bought her home, not some subdivision aberration, but a real, brick home, on a street named after a number. No Briarwood or Palms Reserve. She had hard vinyl flooring, and an American Standard in the bathroom.
Now that, that could flush a sneaker.
And Pepe nods at her. He knows her. As much as she knows him.
He knows he has only lo-flo to offer her, here, on the fake turf of Tropicana Field. Here in a public place, where the sun rises and falls with the flick of a switch.
Chase Squires is a staff writer at the St. Petersburg Times in the Pasco County office. "Lo-Flo" is his first work of published fiction.
This article appears in Nov 24-30, 2004.