I blinked, surprised. “No . . . just . . . well, a friend, sort of. My kids and I happened to be staying in her rental cottage when she passed away. I’m helping with some things.”
Sandy studied me as if she were trying to piece something together in her mind. There was a strange look of recognition in her eyes. I wondered why, but she didn’t offer an explanation. “Well, life has a funny way of working out, doesn’t it? You’ve brought my little birdies back, and I do appreciate that. After these last two storms, every dollar counts, I can promise you that. There’s so much damage the insurance companies won’t cover —all this malarkey over what’s wind damage and what’s flood damage. Don’t even get me started. Water is water, no matter where it comes from.”
A truck rattled by outside, and the dog started barking, his high-pitched yips echoing off the walls. “Chum, stop that!” she scolded, then set him down. We watched him run zippety-dog circles around the shop, his feet spinning out as he rounded the corners, toenails clicking wildly on the uneven wood floors.
“Iola was my first customer, you know,” Sandy added when the dog finally disappeared out the back door. “A week after she first walked onto our porch, she came back with a glass box that had been in her family. Some of the panels were cracked, and she wanted me to repair it, so I did. The next thing I knew, she was ordering an eight-thousand-dollar stained-glass window for an old Catholic boarding school in New Orleans. I thought I was going to fall down and faint right there. I’d never even attempted anything that big, but we did it. George and I drove it down to New Orleans personally and presented it to the Mother Superior. That was quite a moment. The window was a replacement for one that had been destroyed by vandals. The nuns had been living with a piece of plywood over the opening for sixty years. Iola wouldn’t even let us tell them who’d commissioned the work. They sent us pictures after it was installed, along with some bits of glass from the original piece. The photos of the altar with the light coming through that new window were something to see, I’ll tell you. I made two cute little shadow box frames from the scrap glass and gave one to Iola. The other one used to hang on the shop wall that’s such a mess now. I guess the frame is somewhere out to sea right now, taking a world tour. You wouldn’t believe how much water came through this place during the hurricane two years ago.”
“I’m really sorry.” I meant it. I understood, in more ways than I could possibly say, what it was like to have your life floating in pieces.
“Well, you know what, you just pick up and go on,” Sandy offered cheerfully, taking a hummingbird from the box and letting it dangle on a string. “Everything happens for a reason. We’ll put these little guys right there in the bay window, and they’ll bring customers in like they always do. People love our hummingbirds.” She measured the suncatcher against the window, her lips pursed to one side. “That is, if we can ever get this place past inspection.” Casting a glance at the damaged wall, she rolled her eyes heavenward. “Lord knows how we’re going to accomplish that in the next week, with George tied up in Michigan. If we don’t get the wall fixed, according to the inspector, it’ll be another month before he can make it back down this way.”
Words went through my mind and found a voice before I even had time to think about them. “I could fix it for you. The wall, I mean.” It wasn’t normal for me to blurt out something like that. I’d always been careful of what I said to people, and after years of having Trammel correct everything that came out of my mouth, I was even more so. “My father was a finish carpenter —well, he did all kinds of construction, really —and my grandfather was an insurance adjuster. He inspected a lot of places with storm damage and flood damage. I helped him write up estimates for repairs and that kind of thing. I went on jobs with my father, too, whenever he needed an extra pair of hands. And I’ve fixed up quite a few houses over the years. I know drywall.”
I waited for her to nicely thank me and send me on my way, but instead she threw her hands in the air, sending the hummingbird on a wild circular flight. “I knew it! I knew it. I knew there was a reason my little birds ended up in your hands, and you ended up here today. Praise be! You tell me what you need in tools and materials, and I will either gather it up or go buy it at Home Depot tonight. When can you start and what do you charge?”
Within five minutes, I had become the new official handywoman at Sandy’s Seashell Shop. I walked out the door stunned and a little scared, minus the weight of the hummingbirds and the weight of the world.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, the carpenter’s daughter had become a carpenter herself.
CHAPTER 13
THE HOUSE WAS eerily quiet as I carried the stepladder and the broom upstairs. There was a sense of anticipation. It floated on the air, a dust suspended. I breathed it in, exhaled, felt it swirl around my skin.
The ladder had been waiting on the porch when I’d gotten home from Hatteras Village. Paul had dropped it off earlier than I’d expected, but it was only a six-foot stepladder. A note had been tucked beneath the hinge, apologizing for the fact that Paul’s grandmother had loaned out the taller ladder to a neighbor. He would try to get it back in a couple days and bring it to me, if the short ladder wouldn’t do the job. He’d also included an offer at the end of the note: I’m not exactly a Wilt Chamberlain, but I’ve got a longer reach than you. Call me if you think I can help.
He’d written his number at the bottom. I couldn’t call anyone, of course, so after the UPS man stopped by for his beignets, I’d grabbed a broom from the utility room, hoping against hope that I could somehow tip the glass box into my hands, catch it, and come down the ladder without . . . well, killing myself, for one thing, and shattering the box into a million pieces, for another. I could picture several ways this could go wrong. The dumb idea meter was already going off in my head as I climbed the stairs.
The feet of the ladder scratched the wall as I turned on the landing midway up. The plastic caps over the metal corners left a tiny red streak on the paint. I winced, suddenly aware that I was off task again. Now that I’d gotten the work at Sandy’s, I would have to finish up in Iola’s house. I couldn’t keep spending hours in the blue room rummaging through boxes, reading her letters.
But this house, the turret room upstairs, had a hold on me, and I couldn’t shake it. Iola’s boxes, her stories, that singular glass box, the dream about the light, wouldn’t let me go.
I wasn’t looking for Iola in those boxes, I knew. I was looking for myself, for the answer to the question I’d been asking and avoiding for years now. How do you finally move beyond the past? How does anyone? Would I always be, deep inside, that little girl hiding behind the sofa while bottles broke against the walls and voices thundered and fists flew and doors slammed? Would I always feel that, if others looked at me —really looked —that’s what they’d see? Someone worthless? Someone who couldn’t fix anything, including her mama and daddy? Would I always be suffocating inside the mask of trying to find proof that I was good enough, that I was worthy of loving?
But Iola seemed to have found peace within herself, despite the rejection in her childhood and the pain in her life. How do you cast aside a word like anathema, instead of slipping into it like second skin and living in it forever?
The blue room was impossibly quiet as I entered, the only noise the creaking of the closet hinges, the awkward bumping of the ladder against the sidewall, the rustle of the dry cleaner’s bags. The ladder caught the sleeve of the fur coat and lifted it as if there were an arm inside, waving.
The rubber-tipped legs wobbled as I climbed upward, passing rows of Iola’s boxes, feeling the pull of each one. What might be inside the wooden tea box from China, the cigar box from Cuba, or the heavy wooden one with the faded imprint of a ship on top? What other treasures, like the little rosary that was now sitting on the night table beside the bed? What secrets? What stories?
A slip of cold air came from nowhere and teased the back of my neck, trailing like fingers over my skin. My shoulders shimmied, causing the ladder to dance on uneven feet. I caught my balance on the third step from the top, bracing the broom against the wall. Overhead, the glass box rested precariously, still well out of reach. The ladder was shorter than I’d thought, in comparison to the ceiling. I had a bad feeling this wasn’t going to work.