“Let’s!” I was caught in her wave of enthusiasm now.
“Sharon, come out here and meet Tandi,” she called, taking me by the arm and weaving me through piles of boxes, store fixtures, wooden crates, and stacks of mud-covered terra-cotta pottery. “My workshop is back here —my sister’s in there laboring away on some store stock right now. Of course, we had such a mess after the first storm, and then we rode out the one last fall in our house. We packed the glass and everything we couldn’t take with us and put it on shelves up high. Glass is expensive, but if it gets broken, you can still use the pieces for lots of things. Now, my workshop tools, my glass grinders, solder irons, saws, and all of that went with me. No way the storm was getting that stuff. Anyway, when they finally let us back on the island after the first one, there’d been three feet of water in the shop. We had windows and shutters blown out and driftwood everywhere and all kinds of wet papers and debris inside. When the last one came through, it was just floodwater and surge, and the shutters held out, but then I had a heart attack and my niece, Elizabeth, had to save my life. But that’s a whole other story. My son, Brad, took a lot of time off work to come down and help with repairs. So did my niece and her sweet husband. But they can’t take any more time now. Which is why you’re such a blessing.”
She left me in the doorway while she and Chum went into the smaller room, where a woman wearing soundproof earphones was leaning over a bench grinder. I gathered that this little hole-in-the-wall workshop lined with Peg-Boards, shelves, and plastic storage drawers must have given birth to Iola’s hummingbirds. On the left, a long, narrow countertop dipped slightly under the weight of power tools, scattered pliers, soldering irons, and hair dryers. Above the rainbow-spattered workbench, a tangle of power cords stretched upward like the limbs of the legendary sea kraken that Meemaw told bedtime stories about. Behind the cords, a long picture window overlooked the workbench. Now I realized that it fronted the sidewall of the store, allowing customers to watch the work in the glass shop or the glassworkers to monitor the shop. On an ordinary day when the store was open, it would’ve been pleasant back here, working and creating, watching moms in sundresses and sarongs as they shopped for baubles while their kids played around the little sandbox in the center of the store.
It looked like Sandy had a good life.
I envied the fact that she and her sister worked here together. When I was little and things were bad, Gina and I would cuddle in her bed while she invented stories about the future. One day she would have a store with tons of pretty dresses in it. I could work in her store and wear the dresses. Sandy’s reality seemed pretty close to the dream that was light-years from the life my sister had actually ended up with. The last time I’d had more than a passing conversation with Gina, Trammel had finally kicked her out after she’d shown up for a surprise visit, then stayed six months, enjoying all that life at Trammel’s had to offer.
Sandy shoulder-hugged her sister as she introduced us. Sharon was a petite, pleasant woman who looked like she could be anywhere from fifty to seventy. Other than the auburn hair, she reminded me of Sandy.
“Sharon’s been helping me to get the inventory built up again,” Sandy explained. “Between the storms and the Sandy’s Seashell Shop website taking off so well, we’re sort of cleaned out on our handmade items, especially the sea pearl jewelry . . . well, and the boxes and the hummingbirds, thanks to Iola, but now we can reinventory those. I’ll tell you, so many things were ruined when the water came through. You really can’t imagine. Everything we didn’t take with us had to be either gutted or dried out and cleaned up. Thank God for friends from church, volunteers, and all the Internet orders, or our emergency fund never would’ve been enough to get us through.”
“And family,” Sharon reminded with a sideways smirk. I had that strange sense of yearning I sometimes felt when I saw sisters the way they were supposed to be.
“Well, of course, family,” Sandy agreed, and the two of them toppled sideways, off-balance. Fortunately the room was small, and they caught themselves against a plastic organizer full of what looked like doorknobs and bits of colored glass. Through one of the hazy plastic drawers, I recognized the body of a hummingbird. No wings yet.
Why in the world did Iola want all those suncatchers? The question was strangely on my mind as I talked with Sandy and Sharon about the shop, the repair problems, their future plans, and the stores in the area. Sandy’s friends, Greg and Crystal, owned Boathouse Barbecue, in a rustic, weathered-looking building next door, and several other friends ran shops nearby.
By the time we finished the tour, checked supplies and tools, and looked at the damaged wall again, I felt at home in the place. Unlike Iola’s house, the Seashell Shop was an open book. There were no secrets here, just two women determined to cling to what had begun long ago as Sandy’s vacation fantasy.
As I started work on the wall, Sandy moved to the space behind the coffee bar, pulled out a mud-covered box with glass lighthouses on top, and began washing it off. “It’s the strangest thing, what survived the storm and what didn’t. Like this little box. The ones with the adornments on the lids are fragile, but when we came back, there this box was, sitting in the muck, fully intact. It’ll be a fun story to tell to whoever buys it.”
“Sounds like it,” I said without looking at her. I had a feeling she wanted to watch me work for a while, to see if I knew what I was doing. Chum curled up in an empty bookshelf, tracking me with drowsy eyes.
I studied the wall and took a deep breath, then reached for the moisture meter, a carpenter’s pencil, and a drywall knife. It was now or never. Time to put up or shut up. The first thing I had to do was find out how far the water damage went and where it came from. The answer to that question would tell me what kind of job I’d taken on.
I could feel Sandy quietly monitoring me as I moved along with the meter, testing the drywall on the top half and the old beadboard wainscoting on the bottom, which was no doubt original to the house. The meter went crazy, and the drywall had the consistency of chewing gum when I probed it with the knife. Even the old beadboards were so soggy, I could bend them slightly with my finger. No wonder the inspector found this so quickly. There were wicking stains everywhere, showing that the water had been working its way up the wall, not down.
“It’s been wet for a week, maybe ten days. With any luck, it won’t be moldy yet,” I said because she was clearly waiting for a report. “A few of these stains are old and might have come from the roof at some time in the past, but those are actually dry. The wet stuff is recent, and it’s generating from inside the beadboard.”
“You can tell all that?” She seemed shocked and no small bit impressed. “It’s not from the roof? And here I thought that I was going to have to hunt down the company we paid to air the place out after the flood damage and then read them the riot act. They brought in these massive dryers, sprayed for mold, and promised us that the place was sealed up tight.”
I pressed the knife through the drywall, started cutting. “Well, water wicks through drywall about six inches a day. Usually you can look at where the stain is coming from and how far it’s traveled and know about how long the wall has been wet. Are there any pipes in this wall?”
“The bathroom’s on the other side,” Sandy breathed. “We just turned the water back on in this building a couple weeks ago. There were some broken pipes outside after the storm, and we didn’t worry too much about it right away, since we weren’t open for business. It was easier to just keep the water turned off.”
“I guess that explains a few things. At least it’s clean water and it hasn’t been here all that long.”
“So then we’ve found the bright side.” Sandy leaned on the counter, giving me a wry smile. “I didn’t think it made sense that the moisture in the Sheetrock had anything to do with a roof leak. That new inspector is a dope. Either that or he’s just trying to get us to give up on the place. But he won’t win.” She brandished a long-handled bottle brush in the air, then pointed it at me like a sword. “Because we have a secret weapon. We have you.”