The Gallery of Unfinished Girls by Lauren Karcz

South Florida in the morning after a total lack of sleep is bright and unforgiving-a feeling that perhaps if you strip away all superfluous matter and reach the essence of the Earth, you’ll find yourself in a treeless McDonald’s parking lot in Broward County at 9 AM on a Saturday.

When I was 23 my fiancé and I drove all night from Atlanta to south Florida en route to Key West. Lauderdale, as though the mid-2000s big-box stores and Tex-Mex chains would give way to something true about this man. I didn’t have a plan for this, just a vague notion that I could grab onto some whiff of his being by driving the streets of Hollywood and Ft. When I was younger, before I had traipsed my way through newspaper archives to lay out my grandfather’s story, I had a frequent daydream about road tripping through south Florida to discover his life. I wondered why my dad chose to make his father’s life small for me. His plum mid-century life of selling washing machines and window air conditioning units to the outwardly delighted housewives was gone with time, the curvy early 60s appliances tossed for their boxy 70s counterparts. By that point, all nine of the appliance stores were gone, sold off in an all-stock sale in 1973. He died in 1975, five years before I was born. Nine stores and a warehouse, and my grandfather’s face turned into many a 1960s caricature for full-page ads in the Sunday papers in Miami and Ft. Hopkins’s retail venture had indeed started that way, it had grown into the biggest chain of appliance stores in south Florida. He said that his father, my grandfather, ran a small hardware store. Some people’s parents tell them tall tales. My first novel, The Gallery of Unfinished Girls, is set in south Florida. Even in the city, the notable features of my block are two churches and a Waffle House. Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’m a lifelong Atlantan who’s been known to sit, unfazed, in my hot car in the summertime to finish listening to a song.

The Gallery of Unfinished Girls by Lauren Karcz