The Shrimp We Sold by the Bay

Before I go on to the end of that day, I will tell you the rest, because people always want to know about Lamar.

He came to the house three days later, in the middle of the afternoon. He knocked on the back door, not the front, the way family does.

I let him in. Glenn was on the couch. Lamar sat down in the chair across from him and turned his cap around and around in his hands for a while.

“The bank was going to take the dock,” he said finally. “I’ve been behind four months. I figured family would take it and not say anything. I figured you’d be the ones who’d understand.”

He looked at the floor. “That’s a sorry thing to figure. I know it is.”

Glenn did not let him off. I want to say that clearly, because some people think a Christian man has to say it’s all right.

Glenn said, “You squeezed a boat with a man laid up on it, Lamar. You squeezed my boy. You know that’s wrong. You knew it when you bought the padlock.”

“I know it,” Lamar said.

“Then make it right,” Glenn said.

Lamar paid us two and a quarter, same as everyone, for the rest of the season. He let us take full loads of ice off the chute, and he never mentioned the padlock again.

Two weeks later, at Mass, he sat in the pew right behind us, and at the sign of peace he reached forward and shook Glenn’s hand, and Glenn shook it.

I would not say we are what we were. Maybe we will be someday. That is between Lamar and the Lord and the two of them.

The other thing that happened was the captains. The next week, two of the other boats on the harbor kept back a couple hundred pounds of their catch and sold them off their own trucks on that same shoulder.

They had their wives run the scale. By the end of November there was a little row of tailgates out there most afternoons.

Lamar did not like it. But he had to raise his price a quarter to keep the boats selling to him, and by the end of the season he was paying better than anybody up or down the bay.

I heard he caught up on the note, too. I was glad for him. I really was.

But none of that was in my head on the drive home that Tuesday.

That afternoon, all I knew was that the shrimp were gone and nothing had spoiled, and my son had worked like a man, and my husband was lying in the seat next to me with the coffee can on his chest.

About halfway home, he pried the lid off. He took out the bills and smoothed them out flat against his leg one at a time, and he counted them, moving his lips the way he does.

Then he started over and counted them again, slower, all the way through.

He did not say the number out loud. I did not ask.

When he was done the second time, he did not put the money back in the can, and he did not hand it to me.

He held the stack in both hands against his chest, with the little girl’s dollar still in his shirt pocket underneath it.

On the ride home Glenn counted the money twice, and then he just held it.