A pendant caught my attention. Made from a heart-shaped curl of wire suspending a smooth bit of blue sea glass, it reminded me of the necklace Pap-pap had tucked inside my treasure box so many years ago —a beautiful thing that promised me I was beautiful as well.
I wanted to buy it for Zoey, bring it home, and say, I know I haven’t always shown it the way you needed me to, Zoey, but I love you. We’re mother and daughter. We always will be. The glass was salt-frosted and fragile, a product of struggle and uncertainty, a treasure, just as the sign said. If only a magic piece of jewelry could fix everything. When Zoey and I were together lately, words were arrows and shields, meant to wound or to defend. I wondered if it would always be this way.
The price tag on the pendant read seventy-five dollars. Not so long ago, that would’ve been nothing, but now it seemed impossibly far away.
A woman’s voice drifted through the rear doors. The conversation was one-sided, a phone call.
“No, we didn’t pass. This Fletcher guy is impossible. If there’s any way he can make things hard for us, he will. You know, that’s just what we don’t need around here —one more thing muddying up the waters. As if we haven’t had enough problems. If it weren’t for our online sales, we’d be in the tank already.”
She was on the back deck now, coming closer.
I pretended to be engrossed in looking at the jewelry so she wouldn’t think I’d been listening in.
“Well, he’s some sort of relative of Lucy Grimes, and you know she’s been wanting my building for years. They’re trying to run me out of business. Now we’ve got quote-unquote a structurally unsound wall. Fletcher found water damage we didn’t know we had and some old termite destruction he says we also have to fix. He tried to tell me the roof was probably bad, and there’s no way. But the Sheetrock is wet in the north wall and so is the wainscoting, so now I’ve got the trim ripped off and massive holes in the Sheetrock. We’re back in a holding pattern until we can get this thing fixed. You know I was counting on being up and running for the music festival, and if we’re going to survive at all, we have to be going full steam before beach week hits. I can’t believe that after everything we’ve been through, we’re still closed down. George is out of town again, taking care of another crisis with his mother, and I’m not even going to tell him because there’s nothing he can do about it from there. I want to grab Fletcher’s scrawny little neck and . . .” She stopped midsentence, coming in the door. “Hey, ummm . . . call you back later, ’kay? I’ve got someone in the shop right now.”
I turned around, pretending I hadn’t just heard the threat to Fletcher’s life. The woman crossing the room was in her sixties, perhaps, with short blonde hair, a friendly face, and a fan of wrinkles around her eyes like she smiled a lot. She had on an apron, and she was carrying a stained-glass box like the one in Iola’s closet. I couldn’t see the top of the closet box, but this one had a sea horse atop, frozen within a tangle of driftwood.
I had the strangest feeling that Iola might have stood right where I was now. Did she come here to buy boxes and other things? Had she lingered over this very display case and studied the necklaces made from mermaids’ tears?
The woman set her stained-glass creation on the coffee counter and shooed the dog off his stool. “Technically we’re not back open yet, but if there’s something in that case you’d like to see, I’d be happy to show it to you.” She shielded her mouth with one hand and winked conspiratorially, and I decided right away that I liked her. “Just don’t tell anyone. Officially we’re only taking orders through the website right now.”
I considered asking her to open the case so I could look at the blue glass pendant, but there wasn’t much point. Still, it felt good to pretend that I could still buy something, that I was just a tourist out for a day of decadently frivolous shopping. “No, that’s okay. I just stopped by to bring you this.” I grabbed the case of suncatchers and handed it to her, then explained why I was returning them. Her reaction was much like the UPS driver’s.
“Oh, Iola,” she sighed, setting the box on a plush chair. “She was such a sweet, sweet soul. One of our best customers since we opened the shop. I’ll never forget the day I first met her. My gosh, that’s been nineteen years ago now, I guess. George and I came to the Outer Banks for an empty-nest getaway, and we fell in love —with the place and with each other again.” Bracing her hands on her back, she stretched her shoulders and gave the decimated north wall a disheartened look. “This little sandbar will do that to people —so watch out, if you’re not from here. You can never really leave the Outer Banks.”
She pointed to a sign on the wall that echoed the words she’d just said, then chuckled and went on with her story. “George and I drove down to Hatteras Village to catch the ferry to Ocracoke Island on the last day of our trip, and we passed this cute gray house, right on the highway not far from the ferry landing. The whole thing just came on me like a vision as we drove by. I saw the deck out back, the workshop in the old garage building, the tables on the porch. Yellow, a voice in my mind kept saying. That house ought to be yellow. I pictured a coffee bar inside, a little sandbox for kids to play in while their moms shopped, and the comfortable old sofas so people could step in from the heat, relax, have coffee, visit, and feel at home. I didn’t say a word about it to George, other than to point out that there was a sign up for an estate sale on Friday.”
She gazed toward the sound’s quiet waters, and I shifted a little closer, the story pulling me in like a magnet tugging a compass needle.
“I thought it was a crazy whim, but that night I even dreamed about it.” Her eyes were far away now, lost in the memory. “In my dream, I walked into the yellow house, and it was filled with light. There was just this bright, bright light everywhere —so bright I couldn’t see into it.”
So bright I couldn’t see into it. My dream. My dream about Iola’s house, after she passed away. The blue room filled with light.
Sandy’s gaze met mine, her eyes the gray-blue of a quiet summer storm. “The next morning at the breakfast table, George set down his newspaper and said he’d been thinking about the house we went by yesterday, the one with the estate sale sign. He had this idea that maybe we could buy it and put a store in, live out this kind of crazy fantasy we’d always had but never thought we’d have the guts to go after for real. And then he said the funniest thing. He said he thought the house ought to be a brighter color. Yellow maybe.
“Right then, I knew. That dream of mine was a sign from heaven. We canceled our return flights and bought the place the next day. Sold two mini-storage businesses and rented our house in Michigan to a nephew, then drove ragtag across country with a motor home and a Ryder truck, like O Pioneers! We’d barely started on this place when the cutest little candy-apple-red Dodge Dart rolled up one day. Out stepped this tiny woman in lace gloves and a sun hat. She walked right up the porch steps like she owned the place.”
Sandy laughed, and I laughed with her. I pictured Iola —not the silent, unmoving shell from the blue room, but animated, a spunky little woman filled with life. The UPS driver’s friend who’d once posed in a haystack like Jane Russell.
Sandy reached down and scooped up the dog, then gave him a head noogie as he snorted happily. “It was the funniest thing, too. The first words she said were, ‘I’m glad you’re painting the home yellow. It was always yellow.’ She’d been on the island since the late thirties, and she remembered a doctor who’d originally had a medical practice downstairs and lived upstairs. She wanted to know all about what we were planning to do with the place. We sat right there on the porch, and I described this dream we had and how I was going to work on my stained glass in the old carriage house out back. How we were planning to have the shop in here, sell pieces by local artisans, and provide a space where people could come on vacation and make a craft of their own. Folks my age remember when families used to do things together on vacation, instead of everyone just wandering off to watch separate TVs and use their cell phones.”
Sandy frowned at me, and I thought of J.T. and his video games. Even when we were in the house together, we weren’t really together.
I focused on the story as Sandy went on. “Iola sat there and listened to my whole dream. That was one of the special things about her —she was a great listener, interested in people. She never talked much about herself, just listened.” Reaching across the space between us, Sandy laid a hand on my arm. For a moment, I felt Iola’s touch there. “I guess you know that about her. Are you a granddaughter or a niece?”