Page 25 of The Love Haters

She wore a caftan with hot-pink and white hibiscus flowers printed all over it, and clacky raffia sandals, and a long drapey necklace. Her bright silver hair was short in a pixie cut, and she was sporting the most enormous, thick-rimmed, stop sign–red glasses I’d ever seen—with red tassel earrings that matched.

“Oh,sweetheart,” she said, taking in the sight of me. “You’ve had an ordeal.”

Just from the sympathy in her voice, it felt like she already knew the whole story.

“Where are your bags?” she asked, looking around.

“Lost,” I told her.

She eyed my shirt. “Is that…?”

I nodded. “A lady in the airport’s full Venti latté.”

She frowned, like she was formulating a plan. “Well, first things first. I’m Rue.” She stepped back to hold out her hand for a post-hug shake.

I took it. “I’m Katie.”

“I’ve got your cottage all ready,” she said then. “But I think first you need some clothes. And some food. Though I’m not sure in what order.”

I wasn’t sure, either.

“Clothes first, I think,” she decided then. “My treat. Then a late lunch. Also my treat.”

I loved her instantly. How could I not? Plus, she said she was going to let me turn in my rental car and “rent” her Mini Cooper—for a very nominal fee. All because Cole had asked her to.

“But don’t you need something to drive?” I asked.

“No, no,” Rue said, shaking her head. “I have a Dutch town bike. It’s all I ever use—unless I’m road-tripping.”

She gestured behind her at a sleek black bike—complete with a basket festooned with flowers.

What can I say? I believed her. If she preferred her bike, she preferred her bike. The less money I spent, the longer I could stay, and the longer I could stay, the more footage I could get, and the more footage I could get, the betterbothvideos would be, and the better the videos… the lower the chances I’d get fired.

When Rue led me to a nearby boutique, I followed.

The shop was called Vitamin Sea, and it was like stepping into a kaleidoscope.

It was mostly clothes: dresses and tunics and skirts and sarongs—all in the brightest of bright oranges and pinks and reds and yellows. Blues and purples, too. So much color my eyes had to adjust, like when you flip on the lights in a dark room.

Bob Marley played on the speaker system, and as I followed Rue around the store, my steps fell into the rhythm of the music, and I found myself thinking how very different this was from, say, arriving in Omaha to start a project for Unity Home Mortgage.

Did I say it was like a kaleidoscope? Maybe more like a coral reef.

While we browsed, Rue told me all about buying the Starlite Cottages as an investment property when she’d retired—but then loving the vibe there so much that she moved into one of the cottages herself. Then her best friend from childhood, Ginger, lost her husband, and Rue convinced her to move in next door. She’d fixed the cabins up as vacation rentals, styling them lavishly in a “vintage tropics” look—with banana-leaf-printwallpaper and rattan furniture, and replacing the dated kitchenettes with new ones from IKEA.

Four of the ten cottages now had permanent residents.

“Not an old folks’ hometechnically,” Rue said, “but we’re not exactly teenagers.”

Rue had also bought the last remaining building on the same city block—which fronted onto Duval Street—and so she owned the building we were standing in, too. Other tenants included the Italian restaurant next door, an art gallery, a bar with a whole back wall of pinball machines, and, upstairs, a dentist, a travel agency, and a concierge doctor.

“It’s a lot of math,” Rue said, “but it keeps me out of trouble.”

The boutique was bright, and sunny, and it had—how to put it—a soothing flow?

It had been such a long journey, and I didn’t fully have my bearings, and so it took me longer than it should have to put the pieces together. I was, in fact, subtly mouthing along with the words to “One Love” and totally unprepared when Rue turned around with a pink-and-orange floor-length caftan, held it up in front of her, and said, “This one.”

I stopped walking. “I’m sorry?”

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