Jay had little chance to think that morning. The first five hours at Ed’s were relentless, the patrons moody in the way a town could get when storms drew near from off the coast. Breakfast bled into lunch. In moments between moments, when his mind could settle, it lit on Ira Glass—on the strange fixation the cop seemed to have on him. It ran behind all of his thoughts, an uneasy current.
He pushed it out of mind. Or tried to. There was little to gain from worry, though it was easier to think so than to make it stop.
Not till one thirty did he catch his breath and mop the sweat from his brow. After a morning of dishwashing there was barely a dry inch on his body, still sore from his night on a bare wooden floor. He sank into a corner table, groaning, and let the plate of grilled cheese and fries he’d ordered clatter down on the table before him. Jay stared at it, nearly too tired to eat.
Who was Rumor, anyway? he wondered. What made her so anguished? What did it mean that she had “spells”?
Jay bit into the sandwich but didn’t taste it. His thoughts wound in circles all around him, till he finally remembered to breathe. If only there were someone he could ask.
But there was: Mosquito.
He set down the half-eaten sandwich and scanned the dining room for his boss. He stood and ambled toward back of house, where he found Ed ill-humored, telling off one of the other servers. Jay turned to go but the man had already spotted him. “What is it?” he snapped.
“Nothing,” Jay stammered. “I was just thinking… What do you know bout that homeless man came in last night?
Ed gave a dour look, but that was nothing new. “More’n I should,” he grumbled.
“Do you know where I can find him? I mean, if someone did want to—”
“Best not mess with it,” Ed cut in. “Used to feed him a while ago. Had to stop. Thing of it is, you show a kindness to men like that, they only keep comin’ back. Ain’t no help for it.”
Jay had plenty he could say to that, but bit down his anger. He needed to know what the old man knew.
“Sure, okay. But if I could talk to him, then—”
“What?” Ed growled defensively. “Think you can change his life? Make him want to work? Buy him a nice home? Be my guest. I done all I can for that man.” He turned to the server and scowled, daring her to say a contrary word.
Jay too held his tongue. Sighed, then walked away. Through the windows he could see moss-draped oaks stir in the wind, calling to him.
If only he could heed them. The day sat heavy on his shoulders and there were still hours left to go. He would have to find another way.
* * *
Cee Gadsden gathered up her things. Buckets, line, scraps of week-old chicken in a small plastic tub. The creek had swelled with crabs today, so both buckets were full, and anyway it was quitting time. The tide had gone slack and would soon roll out.
The boardwalk creaked as she trudged shoreward. It was near evening and the sky was pale, the kind of pale with a glow behind it. Not a radiant, summery glow, but a dull blaze under white skies. It wearied her, but calmed her as well.
She crossed the lonely road and made straight for home, the only building on Sea Cloud Way that did not seem a mansion to her eyes. She didn’t go inside, only threw the leftover scraps of chicken neck to the dogs and leaned the hand net against the rail by the back door. She set the buckets down, staring down at the jostling blue bodies inside.
How much could she eat in a week? How much could she spare?
This time of year, with crabs thick in the river, she only ever kept a week’s worth of food. Come the weekend, she could always go back for more if need be. In past years she had thrown back the rest, but that was no longer an option.
At least it was no chore—to sit by the water in her folding chair, to stare out at the bends in the marsh. To listen to fiddlers swarming up the bank. It was a pleasure, one of the few real ones she still took. Something real, something pure. A distraction from the weight of worry.
Cee packed what she could spare in the passenger seat of her grey Accord and headed for Sixty-one. Her mind drifted, mercifully free of thought. She barely noticed the old ruined house on Coffin Road, nor any other sight till she pulled into the cramped lot at Ed’s.
How often had she made that drive? Too many times. She sighed, turned off the car, and grabbed the two buckets.
Ed’s was slow, but not dead. She’d seen it dead, and she’d seen it packed in her day. Wasn’t sure if slow was a good sign or not. A slower day meant Ed might have time for her, but too slow and he might not want to buy what she had.
A young man she’d never seen before greeted her. “Hi, welcome,” he breathed, pushing a strand of hair back from his temple. “Just one?”
“Uh, no—I want to see if I can talk to Ed real quick.” She held up one of the buckets in her hands. The man glanced inside, frowned.
“I’ll see if he’s in back.”
Cee wondered who the new guy was. She hadn’t been in since late June, but still it was unlike Ed to hire new staff on a whim. Nor did the diner seem busier than normal; not a single patron glanced up her way as she waited at the bar. It bugged her. She drank in their brisk, carefree air and felt her displeasure grow. She;d never liked this place: its acrid smell, the ghost of the old guard embedded in glossy wood tables and walls. There was something else in it, though, that unsettled her more. Touched closer to home. An air of impermanence, maybe.
“Celia,” Ed croaked in a high voice as he appeared behind the bar, nodding briskly. “I see you got something for me again.”
“You know I do.” Her words were bold, confident, but she felt none of it. Ed grimaced and shook his head, frown lines deepening.
“Damn it, you know I can’t just take scraps off anyone walks in here. This ain’t a juke joint. I got an account with Crosby’s, you know—they give me more than just buckets, and for less. You know I lose money if I take from you.”
“I know it, Ed. You do what you gotta do. Just like me.”
The old man eyed her, angled his jaw. She didn’t blink. Finally he gave a grudging nod.
“Jay,” he called. The young man reappeared. “I’ll give you the normal rate for two bushels of number threes. Jay, take the buckets. Haul ’em back to Shem and tell him to put ’em on ice.”
Cee said nothing as Ed retreated. She would have thanked him, but it would only make him surlier.
“Number threes!” She shook her head. They were bigger than threes, or some were. She peered sidelong as the young man took the buckets and started to leave, then halted. He turned, looking her sheepishly in the eye.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to pry…did Ed call you Celia?”
“Cee’s my name,” she said warily.
He looked her over again as if sizing her up, or trying to decide something. “What?” she drew back.
“Nothing, I’m sorry. I just…I think I might know your brother. Mosquito?”
Cee frowned deeply, almost glared.
“It’s nothing sketchy,” he rushed to say. “He brought me out to Coffin Road last night. He came in because of—because of Rumor.”
That was different. She’d suspected the worst at her brother’s mention, but that was different. No telling what Mosquito might be up to, not till he showed up at her door for a meal and a night or two on the couch, and that was rare enough. But that girl—she was the one thing Cee could trust him not to hold cheap.
The young man must have seen her features soften. “Name’s Jay,” he said. “I’m trying to find him…I wanted to ask what he knows.” He frowned. “She seems troubled. Do you know why?”
Celia shook her head. “Sorry, honey child. Yeah, I know Rumor. And she knows me pretty well. She’s about the only ear I got to talk to these days, but she never crack teeth about herself much. You want Mosquito for that.”
“So where I can I find him?”
Her brows rose. “I can’t say where he is—I don’t know. Probably no one knows but him.”
Jay frowned and nodded. He slipped into the kitchen with the buckets, appearing moments later with her money. She took it, flinching when their hands almost touched, and folded the bills. She held her clenched hand to her breast.
“Sorry honey,” she said, turning to leave.
She shuffled to the edge of the lot outside and climbed into her Accord. Cee winced, looking down at her palm as her fingers clenched and unclenched. The line of her mouth slackened. What did the new man know about Rumor? No more than she did, she guessed.
But if Mosquito had really come to him when the girl needed help? Well…he couldn’t be all bad.
She started the car and drove east down Sixty-one, eyes lighting on the worn-down weeds on the roadside. She missed the summer when they were tall, thick, luxuriant—a thing that no one, she was sure, gave thought to but herself. She drove slower. Cars slipped into the oncoming lane to pass her when they could. People had so little time for anything, but time was what you made of it.
To an extent, of course. There were moments when time pressed in on her, made it hard to breathe, demanded things she wasn’t sure she had to give.
* * *
Though she’d sworn to never again set foot in the South, Cee had returned to the Lowcountry after five years in Pittsburgh, when her mother got cancer. The house had felt hollowed out in her mother’s wake, and even more when her father followed soon after.
It was a sorry place to live. Sad and old, a shack compared to the new developments all around it. They hadn’t been here when Cee had left, but she wasn’t surprised. The land her family once owned had been sold off, bit by bit, and now rich white people lived where she’d once played.
She used to hate it, this house on Sea Cloud Way, so near the plantation where her foremothers once worked. Their sweat, blood, and tears were literally in the soil, mingled with the spittle of sharecroppers and overseers. Her eyes could only see the cruelty of the past.
Living up north, though, she’d found that cruelty had followed her, though people hid it better—especially from themselves. Cee had missed home. She’d tried to shake it off—deny it—but it clung to her still, a cobweb caught in her hair. When she finally came back she felt her lungs open again after years of holding her breath.
It was hard with the land values jacked up now, having to sell spare crabs to save for the property tax. But that was true everywhere here these days, and even worse on the islands.
There was nothing for it, though. They were carved into her heart, the marsh and the river. They wandered in her blood. The light of evening in the Spanish moss, the crepe myrtle’s smooth limbs and tiny sprigs of white like lace. The snapping of shrimp in the river at low tide. All beauty in the midst of decay.
Cee was home again. Her resentment hadn’t died, perhaps never would, but it was worn away now by time and water, by the soul of the place itself. Worn to a dull ache. She was home again, and home in this world meant taking bad with the good, finding peace amidst near constant struggle.
