The Prayer Box, page 16
After the storm, all are equal. All wanting. All needing. All in need of the water of grace from one another and from you.
I think on these things, and the tides are multiplied. They flow over me, stronger and more potent than the tides of destruction. The debris of anger, of desperation, seeps away, little by little. A tiny stone and then another. A mountain moving. Moved by all that is right.
There is so much good. So much grace. So much pouring into the river. A quiet water, this river of grace. Its work done in ways that do not seek attention. Yet it is there. Always there.
A shrimp boat rests in a parking lot not far away. You have seen this, of course. Such a strange thing. I would ask your help for the shrimper. His home is lost. There is a family to feed, the humiliation of moving children to a public shelter, meals taken from a canteen truck. The starting of a new school year, the holidays just months away, and they have nothing.
You know this man, I am certain, as you know each of us. You are always mindful.
And then I wonder, am I to think of a way to aid this neighbor? Is this why I have seen him today? Can these tired old hands still cup the water, pour it out? This old body that creaks and groans with small efforts, can it yet serve?
I think to myself, What can I do?
Then I look at this bit of paper, the one I have grabbed up because it was close at hand when I set about writing to you. I run a finger over the margins, touch the printed images. What does a lighthouse do? I ask myself. It never moves. It cannot hike up its rocky skirt and dash into the ocean to rescue the foundering ship. It cannot calm the waters or clear the shoals.
It can only cast light into the darkness. It can only point the way.
Yet, through one lighthouse, you guide many ships.
Show this old lighthouse the way.
Your loving daughter,
Iola Anne
I stared at the page, my finger tracing a path over the lighthouses and back. I skimmed the last words again.
Outside the window, the sun slid behind a cloud. A chill walked through me, and I felt someone over my shoulder, watching as I intruded again on Iola’s private things—thoughts that were never meant to be shared with the world.
I couldn’t imagine her kind of life—the kind in which there was an underground river, the water of grace beneath even the most horrible events. The kind of life in which she saw the divine in everything.
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.”
“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?”
