Strange how that worked. He’d never wanted more to be alive than at this moment.
He made a call to Andy, who talked in a breathless rush about the fish he’d caught with his grandfather. And how his grandmother was making those fish for dinner, though Andy had doubts about eating living things. The cycle of life had begun to register with his four-year-old. But then grandpa had explained how it was okay to eat what you caught, as part of the cycle. It was only a sin if you wasted the gift of food. And how they were going crabbing off the pier tomorrow so they could keep that life cycle going with other kinds of seafood.
Noah’s blood pressure had subsided by the time the call ended. It helped to know that out in the world there were people, like his son, who worried about doing the right thing by sea creatures. Kind hearts. He wanted his son to keep his as long as possible.
Without even trying, his thoughts turned to Carly.
Where was Carly? What had her day been like? He hoped like hell it had been better than his.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“This is so not a good idea.” Carly put her car in park and stared at the back door to Flawless. She didn’t need to look inside another single time. Nothing would change as long as the huge fans, which she could hear from the parking lot, were drying out the interior. A week, at most, she’d been told, before the mess could be cleared. A week.
She hoped God would forgive her for sitting through Reverend Morrison’s sermon while her mind played through scenarios of what her next steps should be. It had been a particularly long service, this being Palm Sunday followed by the congregation’s monthly Sunday Dinner.
A reasonable person would be working her business plan, trying to find a way to recoup from the devastation. Instead, she was fixated on the who and why of that devastation. She knew she wouldn’t be able to swallow a single mouthful of the food being served after service at the monthly Sunday Dinner served in the Fellowship Hall. Thankfully, Aunt Fredda had been too busy with problems of her own to notice her niece slipping out before grace was said.
Aunt Fredda’s explanation that, according to Jarius, a stray dog he’d taken in had eaten the pound cake she had baked for the dinner had been met with smirks and rolled eyes by her friends in the Ladies’ Auxiliary of St. James A. M. E Church.
A smile tugged at Carly’s mouth. Only she knew that Jarius’s punishment for stealing the cake was to mow his mother’s one-acre plus yard for the next month with an old-fashioned push mower!
Judge Wiley owned and kept ready a pair of push mowers, to be used by panhandlers who occasionally came to her door asking for a handout. She offered them work. Her rules were simple.
“I pay eight dollars an hour. And I know how long it takes to mow my yard because I’ve done it. Fifteen-minute breaks for every hour of work. I provide lunch. You don’t finish on time, you don’t get paid.”
Carly smiled. She admired her aunt, who knew who she was and exactly how she fit into both her working and community lives. Living in one place all one’s life offered that kind of stability. Something Carly had never wanted. She’d only known movement. Her parents both worked for the State Department, her father as a Foreign Service Cultural Affairs Officer. She’d lived in Washington, D.C., Haiti, Buenos Ares, and Italy, among other places. It was at one of those European postings that she’d been approached about modeling. If she’d stayed in Fort Worth, she doubted she would ever have gotten that chance.
But things changed. While her parents, now stationed in Tokyo, never tired of the adventure, their youngest daughter was ready to stop and take stock at home.
Flawless was to have been her rootstock for beginning a new life and finding a way to belong again in her hometown. But that dream, months in preparation, went up in smoke. At the moment, she didn’t know how, or if, she wanted to recover. That fact made her very sad, and very angry.
She thumped her fist lightly on the steering wheel, talking aloud to herself, as usual, to help her process her thoughts. Which, not surprisingly, resettled on the list in her pocket. She didn’t have to think hard to image what everyone in her life would say about it.