He glanced around. “Can you leave?”
“Mercy, yes,” I said. “I don’t get more’n a boxful every couple hours.”
We walked the board planking to where the skiff was tied. He handed me down into the bow as if I were a lady. Then he jumped into the stern and took up the pole. He stood there in his petty officer’s uniform, tall and almost shockingly broad-shouldered and thin-hipped, his cap pushed slightly back, the sun lighting on the patch of reddish hair that showed. His eyes were bright blue and smiling down at me, and his nose had mysteriously shrunk to fit his face. I realized that I was staring at him and that he was enjoying it. I looked away, embarrassed.
He laughed. “You haven’t changed, you know.” If he’d meant it as a compliment he couldn’t have failed more. He himself had changed so marvelously over the past two years, surely something should have happened to me. I crossed my arms over my chest and held my hands tightly under the protection of my upper arms. They scratched like dry sand.
“Aren’t you going to ask me about myself?” I had the feeling he was trying to tease me about something. I didn’t like it.
“Well,” I said, trying not to sound irritated. “Tell me where you been and what you saw.”
“I think I seen every island in the world,” he said.
“And you come home to the purtiest one of all,” I answered.
“Yeah,” he said, but his focus blurred for a moment. “The water’s about to get her, Wheeze.”
“Only a bit, to the south,” I said defensively.
“Wheeze, open your eyes,” he said. “In two years I’ve been gone, she’s lost at least an acre. Another good storm—”
It wasn’t right. He should have been more loyal. You don’t come home after two years and suddenly inform your mother that she’s dying. I don’t know what he saw in my face, but what I actually said was, “I guess you been to see the Captain already.”
“No. That’s why I came to get you. So we could go see him together like we used to.” He shifted the pole to port side. “I guess he’s gotten a lot older, huh?”
“What would you expect?”
“Crabby as ever, huh?” he repeated, trying to make it sound like a joke, to tease me out of my mood.
“He’s nearly eighty,” I said, and added, “I leave the skiff at the slip now. It’s handier than the gut.”
He nodded and steered toward the main dock.
“Miss Trudy’s death took a lot out of him, didn’t it?”
He was beginning to annoy me as much as he had when he was a chubby boy. “I wouldn’t say that.”
He squinted down at me. “Well, it did, you know. Caroline and I both remarked on it. He was never the same after that.”
“Caroline,” I said, so anxious to change the subject I was even willing to speak of my sister’s good fortune, “Caroline is at a music school in New York City.”
“Juilliard,” he said. “Yes, I know.”
We were at the slip now. I wanted to ask how he knew, but I was afraid to. So I jumped out and tied up the skiff, next to where my father would tie the Portia Sue. He shipped the pole and climbed out after me.
We walked without talking down the narrow street. When we got to our gate, I stopped. “I’d like to change my clothes before I go calling.”
“Sure,” he said.
I carried a pitcher of water to the washstand upstairs to bathe as best I could from the basin. Below I could hear Call’s new deep voice rumbling in reply to my mother’s soft alto. Every now and then a staccato interjection from my grandmother. I strained to make out the words but couldn’t through the door. When I put on my Sunday dress, which I hadn’t worn for almost two years, it strained across my breasts and shoulders. I could hardly bring myself to look in the mirror, first at my brown face and then at my sun-scorched hair. I dampened it with water and tried to coax it into a few waves about my forehead. I slopped hand lotion all over my hands and then on my face and legs, even my arms and elbows. It had a cheap fragrance, which I tried to fool myself would cover the essence of crab.
I nearly stumbled on the stairs. All three of them looked up. My mother smiled and would have spoken—her mouth was pursed with some encouraging comment—but I glared her into silence.
Call stood up. “Now,” he said. “That is an improvement.” It was not the encouragement needed at that moment.
My grandmother half rose from the rocker, “Where you going with that man, Louise? Huh? Where you going?” I grabbed Call’s elbow and shoved him toward the door.
He was laughing silently as the voice followed us out onto the porch. He shook his head at me, as though we were sharing a joke. “I see she hasn’t changed, either,” he said at the gate.