“It’s okay, Mama.” Teresa leaned over tenderly, holding a teaspoon of sugar. “Do you want your coffee sweet today, or just plain?”
“Oh, sweet is best.” Callie turned her attention to the cup. “And with cream. That kind that tastes so good. Yes, yes, that’s it.” She supervised the alteration of her coffee, then lifted the cup to her lips, the liquid trembling inside. Setting the cup back on its napkin, she took a breath of the salt air, smiled at me, and said, “Now, tell me again who you are, sweet pea?”
Teresa changed the subject, and the talk at the table turned to shop issues and insurance forms. I excused myself after a while. All of a sudden, I wanted to hurry back to Fairhope and see if I could sneak over to Iola’s house for a little while before the kids came home.
CHAPTER 15
THE STORM I’D SEEN brewing over the sound when I’d left the Seashell Shop passed with little more than a sprinkling of rain, leaving the sky clear again. The sun was streaming through the kitchen window of Iola’s house when I walked in.
A new worry had started nagging me on the drive home, competing for space with the fact that I hadn’t worked up the guts to ask Sandy for an advance on my pay. The new problem was more complex than the question of how to come by some gas money. The soggy mess at Sandy’s had only made me realize what was probably happening inside the walls and ceilings in Iola’s house. Mold, wood rot, deterioration. The annoying guy from the county had been more spot-on than he knew. The place needed attention, and soon, if it was going to be saved. It was only luck that a heavy rain hadn’t fallen in Fairhope since I’d been watching the house. Unusual luck, for the Outer Banks.
The roof needed to be repaired or replaced. Walls need to be opened and dried, mold sprayed or removed. How soon before the church would be looking at those issues? Should I point it out to Brother Guilbeau? Bringing in other people would mean giving up the house for myself. I hated the idea of interlopers almost as much as Iola seemed to have hated it. What if they found the boxes? What if there were other secrets here —things I hadn’t discovered yet?
What if, given the issues, the church decided to just lock up the place and let nature take its course? What if, by pointing out the problems in the house, I actually helped to bring about its destruction?
You’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do to take care of you. Advice from my sister, a few days after she’d finally turned eighteen and left behind a group foster home she hated. Nobody’s gonna do you any favors, Baby Sister . . . Gina couldn’t stand the fact that, by then, the Lathrops had brought me into their empty-nest home. I didn’t want to leave their little horse farm to move into an apartment with my big sister, and Gina found that irksome.
I needed to come up with a solution that would make things better in Iola’s house, not worse, that would honor her devotion to this place. There had to be a way.
But for now, I had no choice other than to think as I worked. It was time to summon up some energy and attack my second job for the day.
In the last hour before the school bus was due, I cleaned like a crazy woman, filling trash bags with expired food, old bread wrappers, bits of used foil, and hurriedly piling them by the bayberry hedge out back. When I finished the food, I attacked the stack of periodicals beside the pantry, grabbing a handful off the top of the four-foot pile.
A newspaper slid off the stack and landed by an empty plastic tub at my feet. I glanced at it, caught a photo of a shrimp boat marooned broadside in a parking lot. A family posed in a picture next to it. A tall, coatrack-thin man, a woman, five kids —little stairsteps, each carrying something. A new backpack for school, a bright-pink winter coat, a stack of children’s books, an art pad and pencils. The oldest boy was sitting on a new bicycle with the tags still hanging from the handlebars. School supplies were piled in the parking lot around them.
I squatted down next to the plastic tub, set my handful of newspapers in it, picked up the one from the floor.
Below the photo, the caption read, Outer Banks Hope Auction swells, thanks to anonymous donor. The article was about an online auction that had raised over a million dollars for storm victims in the Outer Banks. An unnamed benefactor had contacted the producers of a cable television show, Attic Treasures, and offered to donate a rare Tiffany Magnolia lamp if an auction could be arranged to benefit the families displaced from their homes. I read the local coordinator’s description of the online auction:
“In particular, she requested that a portion of the money be used to provide school supplies and clothing for the children, and that part of the money be used to help families like the Dawsons, whose shrimp boat was deposited in a parking lot during the storm. Like many families, the Dawsons are having difficulty with insurance claims following the storm, and they lack the resources to hire legal help. With the funds and publicity from the auction, we will be able to help the Dawsons and several other local families to settle with their insurance companies and begin rebuilding their lives.
“It just shows how many people out there really care. From the time the producers of Attic Treasures contacted us asking if we would provide a local base for the project, it grew like wildfire. People were donating things from all over the place —family heirlooms, weeks in time-share vacation homes. A car dealer in Michigan donated two new cars. A group of Mennonite women in Texas donated a half-dozen handmade quilts. And the bidding was phenomenal. I couldn’t get things on the auction site fast enough.
“Because of the publicity, we’ve had numerous legal firms come forward and offer to represent insurance claims for Outer Banks families, pro bono. It’s all thanks to that original Tiffany lamp. When something that rare and valuable suddenly comes onto the market, people sit up and take notice all over the world. It was a fantastic newsmaker. The lamp itself raised almost $500,000. The funniest thing about it is that it arrived here on a UPS truck. I thought the UPS driver was going to pass out the next day, when I told him what was in that package he’d delivered.”
The article ended with a photo of the lamp’s buyer, a businessman from Japan, holding his new treasure. I recognized the lamp immediately. In the blue room upstairs, there was an empty night table, and just across the bed sat the mate to that Tiffany Magnolia lamp.
“The cat scratches his back on that thing,” I breathed, and all I could think was, Five hundred thousand dollars, five hundred thousand dollars. Anonymous donor . . . “Holy cow.” I sank onto the floor, let the newspaper rest against my legs, and looked up at the ceiling. “That was you. You did this.”
Outside, a bird trilled, the sound cheerful and bawdy and raucous. I heard Iola chuckling, pleased with herself for having pulled it off.
Through one lighthouse, you guide many ships. Iola’s words whispered in my mind.
Was she thinking of the Tiffany lamp, even as she wrote the letter, even as she poured out her thoughts on paper and tucked it into her prayer box?
Show this old lighthouse the way.
Or was the idea an answer to the prayer?
“You found a way,” I whispered, and I felt Iola there in the kitchen with me. The woman Sandy had described. The one who drove to the Seashell Shop in her little red car and marched up the steps —vital, alive, a hand pressed over a mischievous smile, her eyes twinkling. “You found a way,” I said again and laughed along with her.
The rivers of grace swelled around me, rushing wild, filling me with strength, with determination. If a ninety-one-year-old woman could rally support all the way from Japan to save a North Carolina shrimper’s family, I could find a way to save this house. I would find a way.
“It’s not impossible,” I said and then blushed a little, but the words were sincere.
I took the newspapers out of the bin and set them back on the stack, flakes of instant oatmeal floating down like snow. Maybe Iola had kept those papers for a reason. Maybe there were clues in them. Bits of her story.
Chewing my lip, I considered the problem of what to do next. Maybe tomorrow I could pack the newspapers into the empty plastic bins and store them upstairs in the closet with the prayer boxes. It wasn’t really a solution —I was supposed to be removing clutter, not just relocating it —but at least it would make the kitchen look better.