I felt the blue room tugging at me again, but I wasn’t going up there, other than to put away the mess I’d made. Not today. I’d lucked out when this visitor was only a delivery driver, but I couldn’t make that mistake again. I needed this job.
The UPS man glanced at his watch and thumbed over his shoulder. “The mailbox is stuffed full outside. It’s hanging open a little. I can run and grab it for you, if you want. I used to do that for Miss Iola Anne from time to time, especially this last year or so. She got to where she didn’t come out of the house much. I think it was hard for her to make it down the porch steps.” He indicated the eight wooden steps that led to the front walk.
I squinted at them. Iola didn’t seem to have any problem climbing the stairs in the house. She was capable of hauling drip buckets back and forth to the bathroom. She could’ve made it down those outside steps if she’d wanted to. There was a reason she had kept herself locked away here. Maybe it was just that she was afraid she’d be taken to a rest home.
Maybe there was something more.
Her boxes might tell me. . . .
“No, that’s all right. I’ll pick up the mail.”
The driver nodded, then handed over a package the size of four shoe boxes put together. Surprised by its weight, I shifted it to my hip, and both of us hovered there on Iola’s porch, not seeming to know what to say.
“Someone probably ought to open that up,” he suggested finally. “Usually when she bought stuff, she had it billed to her. She didn’t believe in credit cards —she told me that once. She had accounts with shops all up and down the Outer Banks. A couple times she gave me cash, and I dropped off payments for her, but mostly she paid through the mail, I think. Anyway, there’s probably a bill in that package. Whoever’s looking after her affairs might want to take care of it. The stores on the island are operating on a shoestring since the last hurricane. What stores made it through, that is.”
“Sure . . . I’ll see that it’s taken care of.”
“You a family member?”
“No. Just a friend.” I did feel like one at this point. A friend.
Clicking his tongue, he surveyed the Confederate jasmine and climbing roses pressing through the railings, ripe with the determined growth of a new spring. “She was a pretty lady, even at ninety years old. Had the brightest silvery-colored eyes. One time when I came, she brought out an old black-and-white photo. She told me she’d been sorting through some things and came across it. I’ll never forget her handing that thing to me and saying, ‘I was a looker, wasn’t I?’ And she was. That was quite a picture. She was posed like Jane Russell in the hay, and there was a big ol’ palomino horse nibbling on her ear. She looked like a pinup girl. I gave it back to her and said, ‘Miss Iola, you’re still a looker.’ She laughed and told me if she was forty years younger, I’d have to watch out. She was something else. I think she had stories she never shared with anyone. There was a lot that folks around here didn’t know about her.”
I set the package by my feet and leaned against the doorframe. “Did she ever tell you where she came from? How she ended up here in this house, I mean?”
He shook his head. “No, she didn’t. Every once in a while, she’d mention something —a certain kind of car she had at one time or another, or someplace she’d been, but that was about it. She always wanted to make sure she wasn’t holding me up from my work. That’s the way she was. She thought about other people first —just like getting rid of that car. She didn’t want to hurt anybody with it. She . . .” He stopped, reconsidered whatever he was about to say, then changed the subject. “I’ll sure miss Iola Anne and those banana beignets. Melt in your mouth. Like little bits of heaven.” He extended the grocery sack my way as if he’d suddenly remembered he was holding it. “Here, do something with this stuff, okay? I don’t want to look at it today.”
“Okay.” I understood, really.
After he was gone, I scooted the box farther into the vestibule so I could close the door. Then I peeked into the grocery sack, letting the scent of overripe bananas waft out.
There was an old metal recipe box on Iola’s counter. Maybe I would see if the recipe for banana beignets was inside. I’d never been much of a cook, but I’d watched Meemaw make beignets years ago, helped her squeeze the dough through the cutoff corner of a plastic bag into hot oil. I could cook them while I was cleaning in Iola’s kitchen.
Maybe I would. It couldn’t be that hard. When the kids came home, I’d have something special waiting in the cottage. Something homemade, smelling of cooking and love. We could sit down and eat the sweets, laugh and lick the powdered sugar off our fingers. Zoey and I could talk without yelling, the three of us acting like a family for once.
I could freeze a batch for the UPS man, call him and let him know to stop by when he had a chance —I had a surprise for him. A last little gift from Iola.
I’d turned toward the kitchen before I remembered the package. I’d promised the driver I would make sure the bill was taken care of. Aside from that, I was curious about what was inside.
The keys in my pocket worked well enough to slit the tape, and I folded back the thick cardboard flaps, revealing layers of soft white tissue paper with glitter infused. Underneath, the box was divided into a beehive of small cardboard cells, two dozen in all, and in each one, something strangely familiar.
Tiny wings of colored glass, a soft twist of ribbon, a gold ring, brass bells. I slid my fingers into one of the cells, pinched the tip of a wing, wiggled the tiny hummingbird into my hand. Cupped in my palm, it was surprisingly heavy, the body made of molded metal, the wings and the passion vine formed from delicate stained glass.
“What did she plan to do with you?” I whispered, holding the bird up and looking at it eye to eye. “Who needs two dozen suncatchers?”
The paper price tag twisted back and forth on a string, a flash of gold alternating with white. Forty-five dollars . . . times two dozen suncatchers . . .
“Over a thousand dollars’ worth of stained-glass doodads.” I caught the tag with my fingers, turned it over so that I could read the gold label on the other side, but I didn’t need to. I knew what it would say.
Sandy’s Seashell Shop
An Ocean of Possibilities
CHAPTER 11
I DAWDLED IN THE FIELD of salt meadow hay, watching a pair of river otters frolic in a slough lined with saw grass and spike rushes. In the parking lot at Bink’s, the cab of Paul Chastain’s truck was empty. I was hoping to catch him as he came out —to just happen to be passing by with the ladder problem in mind and happen to see him there and happen to ask if I could borrow one of the ladders that I’d seen in his pickup the day he came to mow.
I looked down at the bundle in my hand. The beignets, still warm, had soaked through and made three round grease stains on the napkin I’d wrapped them in. Bringing them was a stupid idea. They were a dead giveaway that I wasn’t strolling by Bink’s at random. But it also seemed like, given the ugly parking-lot scene with Ross, some sort of apology was due. Paul was a nice guy, and he didn’t deserve to have Ross giving him the stiff arm just for talking to me about J.T. and turtle camp.
The front door opened at Bink’s, and the bright colors of a Hawaiian shirt caught the sunlight beneath the overhanging porch. I hurried on to the parking lot as Paul exited the store backward, still talking to someone inside. When he turned around, there I was, passing by his truck.
“Well, hey!” he said, his lips spreading into a smile as he came closer. He had something pinned between his teeth —the stick from a sucker —and he was talking around it, a bulge in his cheek. If he thought less of me after our last meeting in the parking lot, it didn’t show.
“Hey.” I was smiling back before I knew it. Something about a grown man not ashamed to carry on a conversation with a sucker wadded in his cheek was funny. “How’s the crab hunting?” There were buckets in the back of his pickup again —at least a dozen this time. “You planning on feeding an army or just doing science experiments on a larger scale?” I pointed to his cargo.
He shook his head. “Working today.” Setting his drink on the tailgate, he tipped one of the white plastic pails so I could see into it. There were plugs of grass inside.
“Weeding gardens?” I took a guess. He didn’t look like he was dressed for garden work. Today, he had on a pink-and-green shirt with frogs on it, camp shorts that might have been camo-colored once but were bleached to pale tones of cream and peach, and heavy rubber hiking boots. His freckled legs were sunburned in streaks where he’d apparently missed with the sunblock, and a foldable camp-style shovel hung over his shoulder on a nylon strap. All in all, he looked like a cross between a mountain climber and a Captain Kangaroo character.