The Shrimp We Sold by the Bay

“Not today,” I told Lamar. “But thank you for telling me straight.”

I did not slam anything. I did not raise my voice. I have learned that the angrier a man wants you to be, the quieter you ought to get.

I just told Tate to keep the hatch closed and the hose running cold seawater over the top of the ice, and I climbed up onto the dock and walked past Lamar to the truck.

Our pickup is a silver half-ton with two hundred thousand miles on it and a cracked windshield. I sat in the cab with the door open and called the house.

Glenn answered on the second ring, because he was lying on the couch with the phone on his chest, waiting to hear how we did.

I told him everything. The padlock, the price, the half load of ice. I heard him breathe out long and slow on the other end.

Glenn is not a man who curses, but I heard him say his cousin’s name in a way I had never heard him say it, not once in twenty-two years.

“I can call him,” Glenn said. “Let me call him, Jodie.”

“And say what?” I asked him, gently. “You’ll call, and he’ll say a dollar and a half, and then you’ll have said ugly things to the only buyer on the bay. You’ll still need him next year and the year after. Let me do this my way. I’m not going to fight him.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

I looked out the windshield at the harbor. The other boats were coming in one by one, outriggers up, gulls wheeling behind them.

And across the road I could see the highway running right past the harbor, with that wide gravel shoulder where people pull off to look at the boats.

“Glenn,” I said, “do you still have the retail license?”

He was quiet for a second. Then he laughed, a short, surprised laugh, the first one I had heard out of him since the surgery. “It’s in the kitchen drawer with the boat papers. I renewed it in August. I always renew it, you know that.”

He did. Years back, Glenn had gotten a retail fish dealer’s license so we could sell a few hundred pounds off the boat to people in town around Christmas and Lent, when everyone wants shrimp for gumbo.

It cost a little every year, and every year I told him we hardly used it, and every year he renewed it anyway.

“Then I’m going to sell them myself,” I said. “Off the tailgate. I’m going to buy coolers and ice, and I’m going to ice them right here on the dock, and I’m going to park on the highway and sell them.”

“At what?”

I did the math in my head the way you do when you have kept the books for twenty-two years.

People in town paid six and seven dollars a pound at the seafood counters for shrimp that had been frozen and shipped. Mine had never seen a freezer.

“Five and a half,” I said. “Headless. Fresh off the boat.”

Glenn was quiet again. Then he said, “I’m coming down there.”

“You are not. The doctor said.”

“The doctor said no riding in a truck any longer than I have to,” he said. “It is eight minutes from the house to the harbor. Jodie, I’ve been lying on that couch staring at a ceiling fan for eleven days. Let me come help you. I’ll lie down. I won’t lift a thing. I promise you.”