The Prayer Box, page 24
Zoey and I drove home without saying much. I tried talking to her about going back to school tomorrow. She went into avoidance mode.
“Not tomorrow. It’s opening day.” A desperate look slanted my way, her bottom lip unconsciously pooching out in a pout, then trembling a little. “I’m caught up on all my homework, anyway.” Paul had been helping by gathering Zoey’s work and sending it home with J.T.
I caved. “Okay. One more day. But, Zoey, you’re going to have to face this. You can’t let other people decide your life for you. Who cares what Rowdy and his friends say about you or think about you? Other people’s judgment doesn’t have any power unless you offer yourself up for trial, so don’t.”
Zoey blinked and looked at me like I had two heads. That last part didn’t sound like anything that would’ve come from my mouth. It was a quote directly from one of Iola’s letters—a bit of parting advice from Sister Marguerite. Something I was trying to remember. I’d been offering myself up for trial my whole life, determining myself by what my parents said about me, whether men wanted me, whether the wives in Trammel’s circle accepted me. It had never even crossed my mind that I had a choice in the matter.
Remember that you are God’s, not theirs. Sister Marguerite’s final words to Iola as she walked through the gates of the orphanage for the last time.
I wrote it down that night and tucked it into my box. Please help Zoey to see that she isn’t theirs.
Thunder was rumbling outside when I closed the box and went to bed. I was tempted to sneak over to Iola’s house to check the drip buckets, but that would only lure me into staying. I’d been keeping close to the cottage since Zoey’s illness, just making sure the running-away idea didn’t resurface. With Ross still stuck out of town, it was easy to hang around home without it being obvious to Zoey.
I hadn’t given much thought to the fact that I wasn’t really sorry Ross’s mechanical problems had delayed him a few more days. I was afraid to analyze the reasons for that too deeply, but the question nagged as I closed my eyes and went to sleep, bone-weary but happy.
Just before dawn, I woke to the sound of a bird singing outside the window. I lay awake, listening, looking into the misty morning haze, the beginnings of a perfect day. After all our hard work, I’d prayed that it would be.
This day, the bird singing, the blushing sky felt like an answer.
In committing these prayers to you, I have come to see the answers in everything. Words from Iola’s letters, now tucked in the closets of my mind. By asking the questions, I’d begun to see answers in the simple things that happened each day—like a pile of driftwood left stacked behind a building. Zoey’s birthday was coming up. I hadn’t even thought of that when I’d started the box for her.
I took a blanket and a cup of coffee and went out on the porch, watching as fingers of morning sunlight stretched through the loblolly pines and touched the wet grass, outlining each strand in a silver hue. Just out of sight beyond the salt meadow and the trees, the marina came to life as fishermen rigged their nets and crews made ready for the day. Metal rang against metal. Motors rumbled. Tires grated against gravel. On the road, Geneva Bink passed by in her golf cart. She waved at me as if we were old friends, and I waved back with my coffee mug.
Closing my eyes, I rested my head on my knees, lulled by the music of early morning. Was it possible for life to really be this good, this peaceful? For everything to be so beautiful all at once?
Thank you. Everything in my soul was whispering it.
“I guess our big prayer worked.”
I opened my eyes and J.T. was standing in the doorway, blinking drowsily under a bad case of bedhead.
“Guess it did. It’s a perfect morning.” I purposely didn’t look toward Iola’s house. I didn’t want to be reminded of the problems with it. Not today. Instead, I stood, fanned out my blanket, and folded J.T. in for a hug. Then we walked backward through the door like a pair of clumsy dancers. “We’d better get ready, huh? Paul said if you wanted to come to the Seashell Shop with me this morning, he would pick you up there and give you a ride to school.”
“Awww, man!” J.T. complained, and I was surprised. Usually he wanted to go anywhere with Paul. “Why can’t I stay home from school like Zoey?”
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.
“Can’t imagine where you get all that energy, but go for it. The only way I’m moving from this spot is if things get crazy inside, or the sun goes down and the mosquitoes get bad . . . unless, of course, the concert lets out at the music fest and everyone comes here for coffee. Which they probably will. Better get your workshop time in while you can.” Sandy gave me a conspiratorial look. She knew why I wanted workshop time, of course. “We’ll just sit here and hold the deck down, won’t we, Zoey?”
“Mmm-hmm,” Zoey answered with a weary smile. Fortunately she didn’t look like she wanted to go to the workshop with me. “This morning was crazy. Is it always like that?”
Sandy nodded. “During the season, it is. The rest of the year, it’s just locals wandering by for coffee and us girls working in the shop or curled up by the fireplace.” She backhanded Zoey’s arm lightly. “You’ll see this winter.”
A truck passed by, and Zoey didn’t have to answer. I knew without looking at her that the idea of still being here by winter was almost more than she could stand.
The problem consumed my mind as I worked in the glass shop, lightly sanding the latest coat of varnish on Zoey’s treasure box, then adding a new coat, watching it flow over the bits of glass and mother-of-pearl tucked into the network of cracks created by the sea and the sun. Like the beach glass, the wood was more beautiful because of its journey, because of the things it had been through. Holding it up to the window, I watched the light press through the cracks, gathering the colors of glass and mother-of-pearl.
Inside the perfect shells is dim,
It’s through the cracks, the light comes in.
My life was like that box. The best things in all the imperfections. A college girl’s unexpected pregnancy—a daughter who was almost a young woman now. A failed relationship I thought was love—a son who wanted to grow up and be a sea turtle researcher. A frantic flight from Texas—a hiding place by the sea. A healing place. A house filled with an old woman’s clutter—prayer boxes in a closet.
The journey itself was the architect of the wood. The interior would never be fully dark because the struggle had cracked it, providing an avenue for the light.
Impulsively I grabbed a sawdust-covered notepad and pen from the workbench, wrote the story of the box next to a black-and-white etching of the lightkeeper’s house at Currituck. I told about Pap-pap and the box he’d built for me, how much it had meant, and why I’d made this one for Zoey. I told her that she was beautiful and treasured and that I loved her in a way for which there were no words.
Hold the box up to the light, I finished. See what happens to the cracks. Some of the hardest things you go through will teach you the most. Don’t let other people tell you who to be, Zoey.
You are loved just the way you are.
Happy fifteenth birthday,
Mom
When I was finished, I tore out the paper, folded it, and put it in my pocket. When Zoey’s box was ready, I would tuck it inside for her to read.
The chime went off overhead once, then a second and a third time, alerting me to the fact that the front end was busy again. Tucking the driftwood box high on a shelf to dry, I hurried off to join the crew.
An hour whirled by in a rush of coffee, souvenirs, sandwiches, soup bowls, and jewelry sales. Kids played in the sandbox while women in sarongs and sundresses shopped, tried on straw hats, experimented with the necklaces and earrings, and picked out T-shirts for people back home. Men sat on the sofas and watched TV or pulled out laptops and iPads to check e-mail or monitor the stock market. The deck outside drew a crowd again, now that there was a break between concerts. Sandy’s desserts and sandwiches were selling like hotcakes, and other customers carried plates over from Boathouse Barbecue next door.
Sandy asked Zoey to bicycle down to Burrus Market for an emergency bread run. “You’re a lifesaver,” she said as she tucked money into my daughter’s palm. “Watch out for the traffic. And don’t get distracted, smiling at some cute boy. You’ll run into a signpost like one of my shopgirls did last year.”
“I won’t.” Zoey smiled and rolled her eyes as she slipped out the door, temporarily too busy to be depressed.
Three more groups came in as soon as she was gone. In the flurry of human activity around the coffee counter, I was eventually aware of someone watching me. I looked up, scanned the crowd, and suddenly there she was, a blingy bandanna tied around her platinum-streaked hair, her tall frame willowy and alluring in a white sundress and cowboy boots. My mouth fell open. I froze. She smiled at me. She’d been waiting by the display of quirky shell art near the door—waiting for me to notice her.
My sister.
She smiled now, swept across the room as if there were no one else in it. Circling the end of the coffee bar, she opened her arms, exposing the tiny vine of red roses tattooed on the inside of one wrist. Her voice came in an excited squeal—“I found you!”—as if we’d been playing some sort of game and she’d unearthed the winning card.
I stood with a pot of hot tea in hand. Protection, a barrier. I blinked. Blinked again, had the odd thought that perhaps I was still sitting on the blue chair out back, rocked to sleep by the lull of the water. Only dreaming. She couldn’t really be here.
How? Why?
An impatient wag of her head instantly reminded me of Zoey’s teenage angst. “Well, give me a hug, stupid! I drove all this way. I had to get a hotel in Buxton last night because I didn’t have a clue where to find you. Have you got a place? All Zoey mentioned was that you were working at Sandy’s Seashell Shop. So you’re a coffee lady now? Seems like kind of a step down from living on the hacienda with Dr. Strangelove, Little Sis.” Heavily cloaked lashes lowered, a smirk lifting her ruby mouth on one side. The skin below her blue eyes was smooth and tight. She’d had some minor nip-tuck since I’d seen her. Wonder who’d paid for that? A boob job, too. They were larger and . . . evident. Well-displayed in the sundress.
