“Stabilizing frontal dunes and valuable boundary areas.” He cleared his throat and deepened his tone to give the words an exaggerated importance. “The park service doesn’t pay me to crab hunt.”
“Oh, I see.” I pressed a hand to my chest, pretending to rethink my earlier question. I remembered now. He’d said he worked part-time for the park service.
Shrugging, he lifted his palms into the air. “If a crab trap or a fishing line happens to fall into the water while I’m in the performance of my duty, well, I can’t exactly help that, now can I?” One of the buckets rattled, and he cast a wry, one-sided smile my way, a little twinkle in his caramel-brown eyes.
“Well, I suppose not.” I stood on tiptoe, and he reached for the bucket to show me. “I guess you keep the crab traps and fishing lines all baited, just in case one slips into the water . . . accidentally.”
“They work better with bait on them.”
I peeked into the bucket. Crawdads. “Looks like there’s a problem with crawdad seines slipping out of the truck too, huh?” I knew all about seining crawdads. We’d lived on a canal in east Texas once. I remembered walking along the bank with Daddy, helping to pull the seine, netting up dinner.
Paul lifted his hands, palms up, his shoulders rising. “Darnedest thing, really. What slips out usually depends on where you’re working. I was over in the Tidewater today, just down from a crawfish farm, and those seines get rowdy when there’s a mudbug hole nearby. When a net wiggles off into the water, what can you do but pull it back out? Learned that from my dad. He was a county sheriff down in Alabama, so he rambled around in the backwoods a lot.”
“I take it there were also a few fishing poles and a crawdad seine or two in the back of the sheriff’s car.” I caught a whiff of banana beignets and noticed that Paul was giving the napkin a curious look.
“I do come by it honestly,” he admitted. “You know what they say about the seines of the father . . .” He blinked slowly, holding back his lopsided Tootsie Pop smile, waiting for the pun to work.
“Ohhh . . . that was bad.” The joke pulled a groan from me, but I found myself thinking about Paul’s father, wondering what kind of man he was and trying to imagine him. Was he redheaded and fair skinned, like Paul? I pictured him a little like Andy Griffith, with little boy Paul in the Opie role. I had the strangest urge to ask Paul about it —to sift out a scene of boy and man walking down the levee in the summer grass.
Instead, I somewhat awkwardly handed over the napkin with the beignets.
“Ooooh,” Paul appraised appreciatively as he unfolded the napkin and examined the sugar-dusted contents. “These look a whole lot better than crawdads. Can we work a trade?”
“I wanted to thank you for being so good to J.T., and . . . I have a favor to ask.”
“Okay . . . shoot,” he replied, as in, Whatever it is, I’m there, but he didn’t look at me. He was busy comparing the beignets and deciding which one to eat first. I wondered if he’d forgotten that he had a lollipop in his mouth. The thought seemed to occur to him at the last minute, and he quickly extricated the Tootsie Pop, then dropped it into one of the buckets.
I got around to my original reason for being there. “I was wondering if I could borrow that tall ladder you had in your truck the other day.” He gave me a curious look, and I quickly added, “There isn’t anything like that around the cottage, and I need one for a day or two.”
“Don’t imagine Iola did much ladder climbing at her age.” He sampled one of the beignets, closing his eyes and smiling as he chewed. “Ohhh, man, these are heaven. I’ve had some good beignets, but these are top-notch. What’s in there? Bananas?”
I nodded, an unexpectedly light, airy sensation fluttering through my chest. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cooked anything that wasn’t from a box, but it’d felt good to take the supplies from the UPS driver and create something warm and fresh. Sort of a new beginning from an old ending. A rebirth.
I had a feeling Iola would’ve liked that. Maybe she was rubbing off on me a little. Iola . . . and Sister Marguerite. It felt good to do something good for someone else. To add a few deep-fried droplets of kindness to the world. A little act of service. Is it possible that all service is worship? The words were still in my head.
“It was Iola’s recipe.” I slanted a glance toward the store, thinking of the last time I’d been in there, the way Bink had sneered and crossed his arms when Iola’s name was mentioned. How could anyone dislike the sweet little woman who made beignets for the UPS driver?
“I thought I’d heard she was from down in New Orleans, so I guess it makes sense —beignets,” Paul mused. “When I passed through the church office a few days after she died, they were talking about her final arrangements. That was how I knew she’d left the house to the church and what gave me the idea of dropping over to do the mowing.”
“Is that where she was buried —New Orleans?” It bothered me that I didn’t know. That I still hadn’t heard a thing about her funeral. It seemed like she deserved something more than to just . . . disappear.
“I think so. Brother Guilbeau said she wanted to be buried in some kind of family plot.”
“Oh.” A sense of loss struck me suddenly, and the scent of beignets, beach grass, and crawfish turned cloying. I had the urge to tell Paul about the closet, the boxes, the shelf dangling fourteen feet in the air. By my count, the glass box teetering on the broken shelf had probably been placed there just last year. By a woman in her nineties, with no ladder.
I backed away instead of sharing the story. “Anyway, a ladder loan would be great.”
Paul pinched a beignet between two fingers, held it up, and admired it from all angles. “Sure. I’ll stick the ladder in the back of the truck tonight, then drop it by tomorrow after I’m done at the school. I only have classes through the morning —helping to fill in for a teacher who’s taking care of a sister with cancer. Anyway, ladder deliveries are no problem. Is noon soon enough? Otherwise, I’ll run it by in the morning.” He toasted me with the beignet, then popped it into his mouth. Smiling, he murmured, “Mmmm.”
My blue mood lifted like a cloud rolling offscreen in fast-motion video. “I’ll bet your mama loves you.” I imagined a dinner table scene —the happy mom, the friendly fishing dad, and redheaded Paul, all gathered around a big platter of crawfish, rice, and garden-fresh vegetables, a little dog sitting patiently on the floor waiting for someone to toss a crumb his way.
“Yes, she does.” He nodded, then popped the last beignet into his mouth and noisily licked his fingers. His mama hadn’t emphasized manners. He seemed like the type who would’ve grown up with brothers, a family filled with men, where table manners and fashion choices meant nothing.
He was giving me a curious look now, probably wondering what I was thinking.
“Well, okay, thanks. Noon’s fine for the ladder. I appreciate the loan. If I’m not there when you come by tomorrow, could you just leave it on the porch?” I needed to keep the schedule loose in case Ross called, and I also had the box of suncatchers to return to Sandy’s Seashell Shop. If Iola’s estate ended up suspended in some kind of legal battle, they might never get paid for that box.
“Sure. No problem. You mean the porch of the main house or the bungalow?”
There was that funny word again, bungalow. And why had he mentioned the main house? Did he know I was working there? Maybe Brother Guilbeau had told him. . . .
The school bus whirled around the corner, then stopped at the edge of Bink’s parking lot and let off kids. J.T. wasn’t among them, and neither was Zoey. I hoped that meant they’d ridden home with Rowdy, but still, we needed to talk about the two of them running all over the place without letting me know. That talk probably wouldn’t go well even with the beignets, but last night, thinking even for a few hours that I might never see my kids again had awakened me from the sleep of my own life. Something had to change between Zoey, J.T., and me. The more time I spent with Iola’s boxes, the more I could see what a mess we were.
I answered Paul’s question, then said good-bye and hurried off across the salt meadow to get back home before the kids made it there with Rowdy. With any luck, I’d still have time to lock Iola’s house, bring the beignets over to the cottage, and set us up for an afternoon snack and a family conversation, instead of a shouting match.
But when I reached the cottage, Zoey was on her way out the door with her backpack over her shoulder and a towel under one arm. She had on short shorts and a flowered tank top I’d never seen before. She was all legs and curves. At a glance she could’ve been eighteen instead of fourteen.