Moving From Miami: Why One Family Headed A Little North

The Drive Up North

Marcus had made the drive from Miami a hundred times, but never with everything he owned packed into a U-Haul behind him. Moving from Miami to Vero Beach was now very real.

His sister Renata sat in the passenger seat, scrolling through her phone, occasionally glancing up at the changing scenery. The high rises and the snarl of I-95 had given way to actual trees somewhere around Fort Pierce. The billboards thinned out. The sky seemed to get bigger.

“You’re really doing this,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“I’m really doing this.”

“What does a place even cost up here? Because in Brickell you couldn’t touch a one bedroom under like three grand. And that’s before parking.”

Marcus laughed. “Try this. The house I just signed for, three bed two bath with a yard, my mortgage is less than what I was paying to rent that shoebox off Biscayne.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m serious. Insurance, taxes, everything baked in, it still comes out lower than my old rent. The math stopped making sense to me about two years ago and I just kept paying it anyway. I think I finally got tired of setting money on fire every first of the month.”

Renata put her phone down. “Okay but you give up a lot too. The restaurants, the beach, the scene.”

“There’s a beach up here. A good one. Less people on it, which I’m fine with. And I haven’t been to a club since I was thirty one. I was paying Miami prices for a life I stopped living a long time ago.”

They pulled off at the Vero Beach exit and Renata sat up straighter. Moving from Miami to Vero Beach looked different from this view.

“Where’s the traffic?”

“There isn’t any. That’s kind of the point.”

“No, like, where is it. It’s four o’clock. This should be a parking lot.”

“It’s a Tuesday afternoon and we’re doing the speed limit. Get used to it. The worst it gets is when the seasonal folks come down for the winter, and even then it’s nothing. You wait two extra minutes at a light and people up here act like the world’s ending.”

Renata stared out the window at the open road ahead of them. “I genuinely don’t know what to do with my hands. I’m not gripping the wheel for once and I’m not even driving.”

“Took me about a week to stop bracing for somebody to cut me off. You catch yourself doing the Miami merge, the aggressive one, and people just kind of let you in. It throws you off. You keep waiting for the catch.”

“That’s not normal.”

“It’s normal here. That’s what I’m telling you.”

Their cousin Danny met them at the new house to help unload. He’d moved up three years earlier and had the smug look of someone who’d been proven right and was enjoying it.

“So?” Danny said, leaning against the truck. “What do you think?”

“It’s quiet,” Marcus said.

“Wait till tonight. You’ll hear bugs and that’s it. First week I couldn’t sleep, it was too quiet. Now if I go back to Miami I can’t sleep down there. The sirens, the bass coming through the wall, somebody’s car alarm at three in the morning. I forgot that wasn’t just normal life.”

Renata jumped in. “Okay but real talk, is Vero Beach safe? Because I’m not moving anywhere where you have to look over your shoulder, small town or not.”

Danny shrugged. “My neighbor leaves his garage open half the time. I forget to lock my car. I’m not saying nothing ever happens anywhere, it’s not Mayberry, but I haven’t worried about my car getting broken into once since I got here. Down there I had the steering wheel club, the alarm, the whole thing, and they still got my catalytic converter.”

“Twice,” Marcus added.

“Twice,” Danny confirmed. “Second time I didn’t even file the report. What’s the point.”

“And up here?”

“Up here my biggest problem last month was a hawk that kept landing on my fence and staring at my dog. That’s the crime wave. A judgmental bird.”

Renata laughed despite herself. “I’m sorry, I cannot picture you calling that a problem. You used to carry pepper spray to the gas station.”

“I still have it somewhere. Haven’t touched it in three years.”

They worked until the light started going orange, hauling boxes and furniture and the dresser that had nearly killed all three of them on the stairs of Marcus’s old apartment. Renata flopped onto the couch the second they set it down.

“Okay,” she said, breathing hard. “Slow question. What do you actually do for fun in Vero Beach? Like on a regular day. On a random Saturday.”

Danny thought about it. “Honestly? Not much, and that’s the thing nobody tells you. You go to the beach. You get coffee. You know the guy at the coffee place. You go to the farmers market and run into three people you know. The first few months I thought I was going to lose my mind from boredom.”

“And now?”

“Now I realize I was confusing busy with happy. In Miami I was always going somewhere, always in traffic, always paying forty dollars to park to do a thing I didn’t even enjoy that much. Up here I do less and I feel like I have more. I can’t explain it better than that.”

Marcus nodded slowly. “That’s the part I’m hoping is true.”

“It’s true. Give it three months. You’ll stop checking how long it takes to get places because everything’s fifteen minutes. You’ll stop flinching at your bank account on the first. You’ll sleep. That’s the whole pitch. You sleep again.”

That night, after the truck was empty and Danny and Renata had gone to grab food, Marcus sat on his back step with a beer and listened.

Danny was right. It was just bugs.

He’d spent fifteen years in Miami telling himself the energy was worth it. The noise, the cost, the way everything felt like a competition you didn’t sign up for. And maybe for a while it had been. He’d been young and it had felt like the center of the world. But somewhere along the line the trade stopped being worth it, and he’d just kept making it out of habit, the way you keep a subscription you forgot you had.

His phone buzzed. A text from an old coworker still down there.

how’s small town life. bored yet?

Marcus looked out at the dark yard, the one that was his now, attached to the house that cost less than his old apartment, in the town where he’d done the speed limit the whole way in. Somewhere a few streets over a dog barked once and then stopped. No sirens answered it.

not yet, he typed back.

He set the phone face down on the step, picked his beer back up, and stayed out there a while longer, in no hurry to go anywhere. For the first time in a long time, there was nowhere he needed to be.

He had a feeling it’d be a while. Moving from Miami to Vero Beach was turning out just fine.