Don’t remind me. “Oh no. Somebody as smart as you shouldn’t miss school. Ever.”
J.T. skewed his brows, one up and one down, tipping his head back against the circle of the blanket to look at me. “Does that mean I’m smarter than Zoey . . . because she’s skippin’ . . . ?”
“That means you’re not skipping school.” I tweaked the end of his nose. He was such a great kid. How could I have ever left him to shift for himself for hours and days on end, his best friends the characters on some video game? “And Zoey’s only getting off one more day. And that’s only because Sandy might need her. We have to make sure the shop has a smooth opening day.” In the bedroom, Zoey was moving around. The bed squeaked as she rolled over, probably flopping onto her stomach and covering her head with the pillow to shut out our noise.
“So if Sandy needs me when we get there this morning, can I ditch school? We used to ditch all the . . .” J.T. gathered the answer from my expression. “Sheesh. Okay.”
Sheesh. He’d gotten that from Paul.
I ruffled his hair with the blanket, and it stood on end, clinging to the fabric. “Go get ready. Let’s see if we can beat everyone else to the Seashell Shop.”
But by the time we finally dragged Zoey out of bed and made it to the shop, Sandy was already there, bustling around the interior, checking and double-checking and triple-quadruple-quintuple-checking everything. The rest of us filed in one by one, and when Paul stopped by to pick up J.T., everything in the store was practically glistening —every candle, seagull statue, bit of shell art, and piece of jewelry placed, polished, and arranged to perfection. J.T. had even raked the surface of the sandbox to idyllic smoothness. He and Zoey had arranged the toys so that the play area was just waiting for kids to wander in and discover a mini wonderland while their mothers shopped.
“Whoa,” Paul said when he stepped in the door. “This place looks awesome.” He crossed the room and bellied up to the coffee bar, where I was working on Sandy’s massive stainless steel warmer. It wouldn’t come on, and we’d decided it might be the switch. It was our first hitch of the day. “What’s a guy gotta do to get a cup of coffee around here?”
“Just ask.” I smiled over my shoulder at him. Today he was wearing baggy cargo pants with a dress shirt that looked a size too big. The pants were burnt orange and the shirt was kelly green. He’d topped off the ensemble with a tie that had beakers, test tubes, and a chemistry joke printed on it in bold letters: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate. The tie was red.
“What?” He lifted his hands innocently when he caught me studying the outfit.
I wondered if he really had a mother somewhere, and if so, did she know how her son was dressing? “You look like a giant carrot.”
Frowning, he tipped his head forward and studied himself. Clearly the vegetable scenario hadn’t occurred to him. A shrug and a wink testified to the fact that he really didn’t care. “It’s all part of my magic.” He added a goofy smile, and I stifled a laugh in the crook of my elbow.
“It’s working, isn’t it?” he asked.
“In its own special way.” Turning back to the coffeemaker, I realized how natural it had become to joke around with Paul. He was like the nerdy-but-fun brother I never had, the coolest of all possible grown-up friends for J.T. I couldn’t imagine what we’d done to get so lucky.
I fixed his coffee without having to ask how he liked it. I didn’t realize I’d done that until I was handing him the cup. He blew noisily over the surface, then sipped and looked at me with a little foam mustache on his lip. “Perfect.”
“Sandy’s been training me. I’m going to help around the shop for a few weeks until she gets her new teenage help up to speed.” I grabbed a napkin for Paul’s coffee mustache, then leaned across the bar to hand it to him. “Here.”
Craning away from me, he looked at himself in the foggy antique bar mirror. “I might want to keep it. I’ve never been able to grow one of these.”
I laughed. “It spoils the whole Peter Pan thing. You’ll lose your boyish charm.” I was strangely aware of Sandy watching us from across the room. Maybe I was annoying her by goofing around. She was seriously uptight this morning.
“Well, if you put it that way.” Paul turned his face side to side, admiring the mustache in the mirror before reluctantly dabbing it away.
“You’re such a goofball.”
“I try.” Grabbing a lid for his coffee, he pushed off the bar. “C’mon, J.T., let’s get going. It’s bad when the teacher’s late for class.” Taking another sip of his coffee, he smiled at me over the cup just before turning away. “Knock ’em dead today.” His eyes met mine as he saluted me with his coffee, and I felt warm all over.
The feeling stayed with me through the morning, although there wasn’t much time to focus on it. The weather was beautiful, and based on all evidence, Hatteras, even in its current shell-shocked condition, was still Hatteras. The road through the village and down to the ferry landing was crowded with cars, bicycles, and pedestrians strolling from shop to shop and enjoying the activities offered in outdoor booths and the giant tent in front of the Hatteras Village Welcome Center. Sandy’s Seashell Shop was wall-to-wall, the deck filled with tourists. Merchandise and coffee were walking out the door as fast as we could ring it up. Zoey got a crash course in operating the cash register, and Sandy offered her an after-school job if she wanted it.
When business finally hit a lull in the afternoon and Sandy’s teenage help showed up, the rest of us walked outside and sat on the deck, gazing toward the water and listening to the music wafting over from the ferry landing. Overhead, cabbage palms fluttered gently against a wispy sky that stretched toward the edge of the world. I could see why sailors had once thought they would fall off into nothingness when they reached those watery horizons.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you that a woman called for you yesterday when you were out in the glass shop working.” Sharon rolled her head my way but didn’t lift it from the chair. If a customer happened to come by and the teenagers couldn’t handle it, I wasn’t sure any of us would be able to get up and tend to business. I’d thought fixing walls and mucking horse stalls was hard work, but today really took the cake. Dealing with people’s needs for hours on end was both exhausting and exhilarating.
“For me?” I couldn’t imagine who would be calling me. We hardly knew anyone here. It could be somebody from the school checking on Zoey. I hadn’t told them I was working at Sandy’s, but word might’ve gotten around.
Or maybe someone from the hospital trying to track me down about the bills? That idea was a black cloud in an otherwise-perfect day. I’d been trying not to think about the hospital bills. With my handywoman paycheck from Sandy, I’d finally gained a little breathing room, but I had a feeling that the hospital bills would eat that up and more.
“Did she say who she was or what she wanted?”
Sharon blew strands of auburn hair out of her eyes. “Didn’t say. I told her you’d be here today and that we’d be having our grand reopening. She wanted to know our hours and whatnot. I got the impression she might come by.”
“Huh . . .” A muscle contracted in my neck, the tension slowly moving down my back, like a ratchet tightening a cable from one end of my body to the other.
“Well, guess she didn’t come by today,” Sandy added. “Or else she got lost in the crowd, whoever she was.”
Suddenly I felt like I couldn’t sit there another minute. “I think I’ll go out back and work in the shop while things are quieter around here, if it’s okay.” Zoey’s box was almost done. Paul and J.T. had combed the beach, picking up tiny bits of mother-of-pearl and sea glass from deposits of shell hash so I could inlay the cracks in the wood. They’d even found a good-size piece of pale-blue sea glass —rare for the Outer Banks, where the force of the waves broke shells and other treasures into tiny shards before leaving them on the shore.
Just one more coat of lacquer, and Zoey’s box would be ready to give to her. If I could get Sharon or Sandy to help me with the piece of sea glass today, I would make a pendant to go inside, like the one Pap-pap had given me. Maybe when the negative came at Zoey as she struggled through her return to school, the mermaid’s tear necklace would remind her of how precious she really was.