Maybe I’d never seen it because I’d never looked. Maybe there was grace here, now. Maybe it was in simple things like banana beignets and a sturdy cottage waiting empty in the off-season. A box of suncatchers with a return address and a shop wall that goes rotten and a carpenter’s daughter who happens through the door. Maybe there was grace in a letter-filled shoe box.
Maybe grace was all around me, bubbling through, passing under my feet, and I’d never seen it because I’d never tried to see.
Pressing my hands to my lips, I breathed out and in, smelled dried ink and aging paper and dust.
Outside, the day was clear, the sky an endless blue, dotted with the sort of fluffy, flat-bottomed clouds that roll off the sea. The yard needed mowing again. There were tiny wildflowers blooming in it. I’d walked right past them and never seen.
The sun reemerged, and for an instant, the water of grace glimmered everywhere.
Nothing that had happened since I’d been on this island had happened at random. I’d been given shelter for my family, food to eat, work to do.
Given.
Gifts. I’d wanted to earn my own way, to do this myself, to form a new life on my own, but instead, this had been given to me. This life. This place. These letters.
This revelation.
Prayers are answered in ways we don’t choose. The river of grace bubbles up in unexpected places.
I closed my eyes, and tears pressed hard, seeped through, traced hot and sweet over my cheeks. I tasted their salt, like the tip of an ocean.
“Thank you,” I whispered. “Thank you for this.” Zoey and J.T. could be sitting in a foster shelter right now, in a home with strangers. I could be in jail, caught up in Trammel’s mess, or dead beside a bottle of pills, gone just like my mama, while my kids still needed me. I could be living in Trammel’s house, existing in a fog, in the prison of believing everything he told me about myself.
Instead, I was here.
Thank you. I wanted to write it on paper and fold it up in a box to remind myself, the next time I couldn’t see anything but mountains ahead, that where there’s a mountain, there’s always a river flowing nearby.
Ultimately the river is the more powerful of the two.
CHAPTER 14
MY NERVES WERE FLAPPING like a sheet in the wind when I pulled into the Seashell Shop parking lot for my first day of work. Overhead, what was left of a pair of cabbage palms fanned lazily in the breeze, and behind the shop, Pamlico Sound’s gentle current teased the shore, the water shimmering peacefully. Despite the welcoming scenery and the fresh shade blanketing the iron tables and the sea-blue Adirondack chairs, I felt out of place. Doubts had started to creep into my mind during the drive over, inching in the way the first bit of water breaches the walls around a sand castle. Now the waves were tumbling full force, washing out bits of my confidence with every swipe.
Ross had called before I’d left this morning. After being on a two-day beach bender, he was kicking back in one of his dad’s rental houses. This one was tucked in a little neighborhood in Duck. Three stories of porches and decks, hot tub, view of the beach over the canopy of pines. Today was perfect for sitting on the beach and watching the breakers roll in. Ross wanted me to join him, and of course I’d had to tell him why I couldn’t.
“You’re gonna hang drywall and do carpenter work?” He said it like it was some excuse I’d pulled out of a hat of completely stupid excuses.
I felt the need to defend myself. “I told you that my daddy did construction work. I helped him a lot. The shop owner is supplying the tools and materials. The job will take a little time. I have to figure out where the water came from, then get rid of everything I can that’s holding moisture, then dry out the rest so they don’t have a problem again after the work’s done.”
“You’re gonna hang drywall. What, all hundred pounds of you? How much do you weigh, anyway?”
His point was that I wasn’t strong enough to do the job, I guessed. That irked me. I’d been working since I was seven years old. Sometimes I wondered if Ross could imagine a life where daddies didn’t give their kids hot cars and surf lessons and vacations in nice beach houses and other good things. “I know how to hang drywall, Ross.” I grabbed the keys and my purse and tried to decide whether anything else was necessary. “Besides that, the pay is good.”
“You know, if you need money, all you’ve gotta do is ask,” he said like I should be aware of that already. “You don’t have to go trying to schlep drywall in someone’s shop.”
I heard Trammel in my head. Let me take care of you, Tandi. You and the kids need a friend right now. . . .
I’d ended the phone call before I could say something that was aimed more at Trammel than at Ross.
Now, as I sat in the parking lot of Sandy’s Seashell Shop, Ross’s questions repeated in my head. What if I really couldn’t do this? What if Sandy didn’t have all the right tools? What if she turned out to be picky and demanding, and I wasn’t able to satisfy her?
Ross might be right. I’d never done this kind of thing, other than helping my daddy or fixing up houses I was living in. I didn’t have any experience making sure that my work was up to someone else’s standards. Most of the houses my daddy worked on weren’t anything special. As long as the end product wasn’t atrocious, nobody cared, including my father.
Sandy, I had a feeling, would care. Her shop had the aura of a well-loved place. A special place. It was a historic building. Maybe I didn’t have any business working on it.
The front door was locked today, a Closed sign hanging crooked in the window. I had a half-second urge to bolt for home, but I’d driven here on fumes and nineteen quarters’ worth of gas. I’d found the quarters in a cracker tin in Iola’s kitchen yesterday afternoon while I was working like a banshee, cleaning and stuffing trash bags before the kids came home. I would put the money back as soon as I could, but for now it was a godsend. Zoey had needed to buy a loaf of bread last night so she could make lunches. I’d given her the last few dollar bills in my stash.
I was already trying to figure out how to ask Sandy for an advance on this week’s pay without sounding like a charity case. The likelihood of finding more coins wasn’t that good, and somehow I couldn’t help thinking of the jar Trammel tossed his pocket change into when he undressed at night. Every few days, he emptied it into a larger jar that he kept locked in a gun safe with his hunting rifles. He didn’t want to tempt the housekeeper. Or me.
Taking a deep breath, I walked around the back of Sandy’s shop. The garage door was open on the long, narrow building attached to one side of the original house.
“Hello?” I called, stopping at the edge. “Anybody in here?”
Chum answered with a wary yip, and then Sandy came out of a back room, wiping her hands on a towel. “Hey!” She smiled as she walked into the light, her cheeks round and red, shiny with sweat. “You came back! I thought you might’ve realized what you’d gotten yourself into and decided to run away screaming.”
Little did she know . . .
Before I had time to react, she was hugging me like I was her long-lost sister. We bounced back and forth while Chum yipped and did happy-dog calisthenics, jumping up and down, then dancing on his hind legs. When that didn’t get attention, he tried the opposite, walking on his front legs with his rear in the air, his nub tail wagging.
Sandy held me at arm’s length and smiled the way a kid smiles at a new toy. “I’m so glad you’re here! After you left yesterday morning, I started thinking of all kinds of things I could have you do.” She had the quality of Alka-Seltzer just hitting a glass of water, bubbling up and up and over. She looked a little like a mad scientist, too, dressed in a white baker’s apron, yellow dishwashing gloves, rubber rain boots, teal pedal pushers, and sea glass earrings. A pair of goggles formed an odd hair band on her head, pulling her short blonde strands away from her face and making them stick straight up.
Chum licked my shoe, and she nudged him away. “Chum! Stop that. No eating the help.” She patted my arms, the gloves flapping. “So here you are.”
“Here I am.” I lifted both hands, as in, Just point me toward the tools and watch me solve all your problems. The first step in being confident was looking confident. That was one good thing I’d learned from watching Trammel.
Sandy pumped a fist. “Let’s get going.”