“That’s not very charitable.” A few visual daggers flew in Bink’s direction. “There’s history,” she whispered to me. “But some people need to get over it.”
I glanced at my watch, deciding that a three-dollar roll of trash bags would do for now. I’d figure out the rest later. No way I was charging cleaning supplies on the church’s bill here. I could just imagine the round of questions that would bring on. As much as Iola deserved to have someone defend her, I was not the one. If word got around that I was working in that house, these people would be all over me.
“Nice talking to you.” I grabbed a box of trash bags off an endcap, then hurried to the front counter.
Bink was in no rush to ring me up. It took him forever to slide off his stool. “Tell that young fella of yours, if he’s around in the summer once the rental places fill up on the island, there’s work for him here.” He was all smiles again. “When the tourists move in, Jeremy can always use help filling orders and getting boxes packed for deliveries. Those people like their groceries waiting on the steps when they get to their cottages, don’t they, Jeremy?” Bink nodded toward a teenager coming in the door —tall, thin, with his hair dyed black. Two gold earrings and a gold nose ring glimmered in the sunlight.
“Yeah,” Jeremy answered without really looking at either of us. His shoulders slumped as if, given the choice, he wouldn’t be noticed at all.
The boy with the black hair. The one whose father had left the family after the storm. The envelope I was just about to reach for, the fifty dollars I’d been trying to convince myself it’d be okay to keep because the kids and I needed it, was for him.
I knew what it was like for a family when the father walked out. There were bills to pay and no one to pay them.
I opened my wallet and handed Bink the money for the trash bags. All I could think was, There goes a gallon of milk. Six boxes of macaroni and cheese. A jar of peanut butter . . . But with the food I’d carried back to the cottage on my way to Bink’s, we’d be okay for a while.
I had the strangest urge to touch Jeremy’s arm as he slipped by, quiet and dark like Iola’s house cat. I wanted to look into him and say, I know. I know it’s hard, but hang in there. I hope your father wakes up one day and sees how much a kid needs his daddy. And when your high school English teacher says you’re smart enough to really do something with your life, listen to her, okay?
I didn’t tell him any of that, of course. One thing I’d learned growing up was to mind my business and let other people mind theirs.
But for some reason, today, as I passed by Jeremy’s vehicle out front, it seemed right to slip that envelope from my back pocket and drop it onto the seat of the rusted-out truck that Iola had described in her letter.
Maybe that money would do whatever she hoped it would do.
Maybe, if she was watching right now, she’d be happy that her envelope had been delivered after all.
I felt good as I started across the parking lot —like the day was worth it, beyond just putting food in our bellies and keeping a roof over our heads. Beyond just surviving. I pictured Jeremy finding that envelope, opening the flap, looking around, and wondering if an angel had dropped it into his car.
Maybe an angel had. I guessed I had Iola and her crazy old house to thank for that. It’s not every day you get to be someone’s angel.
A smile pulled from deep inside me for the first time in recent memory —the real kind of smile, not the kind you paste on to keep up a front. The sky was clear, just the barest upsweeps of white clouds rising over the sound. Hen scrat, Pap-pap had called them. Hen scrat and fillies’ tails make lofty ships carry low sails. I remembered that now. He’d pointed out the wispy, low-hanging clouds to me all those years ago when we were here on Hatteras. I could feel his whiskery chin on my hair as he leaned down and stretched an arm over my shoulder, aiming a finger and tracing the contour of the vapor in the sky. When they come early in the day like that, it means there’s wind and weather ahead. The hens are scratchin’ up little dust puffs in the sky and the fillies are on the run, so their tails are long, see? My granddad used to tell us that on the shrimp boat.
I saw the hen scratches and fillies’ tails then, and I thought of the wild Spanish mustangs that still ran free up north in Corolla, their tails trailing behind them as they bolted down the beach. I imagined my grandfather on a shrimp boat with my great-great-grandfather, who knew the sea and lived by it.
They’re pretty, I said. I thought Pap-pap would like that, and he did.
Yes, they are, Tandi Jo. He stood beside me then, bracing his hands on his overalls, smiling at the sky and watching the clouds. I felt like I was pretty too. Like I was special because Pap-pap took the time to teach me things.
“Looks like you’re having a good day.”
The voice caught me by surprise, and I glanced down to see the guy who’d mowed the lawn at Iola’s house. He was walking from Mosey Creek with mason jars full of murky water sloshing in each hand. Paul . . . The last name wasn’t coming to me right off. Ch . . . something. Chastain, maybe.
A boat passed by in the marina behind Bink’s, the motor vibrating the air, so I didn’t feel the need to come up with something to say until the sound had died.
By then, Paul was at the edge of the parking lot with his jars of water. He lifted one so I could get a better look. “Science class,” he explained. “I teach part-time at the school and do contract work for the park service in the afternoons.” He set the jars on the tailgate of his pickup. He had a kayak instead of lawn mowing equipment in the back this time. “Few drops of that stuff, you’ll find all kinds of things to look at under a microscope. Bacteria, viruses, protists. Things that fundamentally influence the ocean’s ability to sustain life.”
“Well, when you put it that way, it looks like more than just dirty water.” I flashed a smile, and then I wished I hadn’t. I didn’t want him to think I was coming on to him. With the divorce papers left behind for Trammel, and Ross in my life now, I wasn’t looking for any complications. Aside from that, a guy wearing camp shorts and a shirt covered with flamingos playing jazz instruments doesn’t exactly scream, sexy. Still, I felt so good today I couldn’t contain it. I felt clearheaded and like I’d done something really . . . right, for once.
He quirked an eyebrow underneath his floppy fishing hat, as if he wondered what I was thinking, then adjusted the stampede string that ran through a wooden bead under his chin. “Dirty water doesn’t get enough respect.”
“It’s good that it has you to defend it, then.” I laughed as he turned to put the lids on the jars, his long, thin fingers twirling the rings into place with surprising finesse. The man could handle a mason jar. Maybe that came with the territory, science teaching.
“I didn’t realize you were J.T.’s mom the other day until I saw the kids drive up in Rowdy’s Jeep.” Setting the jars in a crate stuffed with hay, he hooked a leg over a corner of the tailgate. A flip-flop dangled loosely from his foot as he threaded his hands together and rested them, like we were going to have a sit-and-whittle together. “I have J.T. in class. He told me you were living in a rented place, but he didn’t say where. He doesn’t talk much.”
Guilt needled, poking little holes in my blue-sky day, letting in the gray behind the paper-thin good feeling. There was a time when J.T. was such a chatterbox, I’d send him to the store with Trammel’s housekeeper just so I could pop a pill and sleep the day away. I wasn’t even sure when the surgery pain stopped or when J.T. changed or when the pills became a mechanism for dulling a different kind of pain. That was the worst part of it —I just woke up from the haze one day and realized I’d been elbowing the kids away for so long, I didn’t even know who they were or who I was.
“He’s in a phase,” I told Paul. What else can you do but make an excuse when you can’t tell the truth?
“He does his work,” Paul said, and I was relieved. I was afraid he would ask me to explain J.T., and I couldn’t. “While he’s back there drawing dragon slayers and Pokémons, or whatever those things are he doodles in the margins of his papers, he is getting the material.”
“He’s into Zago Wars.” That much I did know.
“Has some interest in oceanography, too,” Paul offered. “He was down here the other day when I was cast netting, and he had quite a few questions about the things I pulled out of the water. That’s more words than I’ve gotten out of him in a month and a half of class.”