The Shrimp We Sold by the Bay

I started to wonder if I had just spent seven hundred dollars on coolers to watch my husband’s shrimp die on a highway.

Then I saw our neighbor’s car turn in. Glenn was laid out flat in the back seat with his knees up.

Our neighbor’s boy got out and set up the folding cot in the shade beside the truck bed, where the sun could not reach.

Then the two of us helped Glenn walk the ten steps from the car.

He moved like an old man, and it broke my heart a little to see it.

He was fifty years old, with that gray goatee he grew the year Tate was born, wearing a faded green T-shirt that he had owned since before Tate could walk.

He lowered himself onto the cot one inch at a time, breathing through his teeth.

When he was down, he let out a long breath and looked up at me. “Well,” he said. “Look at you.”

He held up the coffee can. Inside was the retail license in a sandwich bag, and forty dollars in quarters from the car wash, and a roll of small bills he had taken out of his sock drawer. “For change,” he said. “You can’t sell shrimp if you can’t make change. I can do that lying down.”

I knelt by the cot and kissed his forehead, which I had not done in the daytime in front of anybody in years.

He smelled like the house and like his coffee. “You stay down,” I said. “You hear me? If you get up, I’ll put you back on that couch myself.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. And he grinned.

That was when the first car stopped.

It was a little tan sedan, and it pulled onto the gravel slow and careful, the way older women drive. A woman got out with a cane in one hand and her purse in the other.

She had white hair pinned up, and reading glasses on a chain, and a cardigan even though it was already eighty-five degrees.

I knew her. Everybody in Palacios knows her. Opal Mikeska taught fourth grade at the elementary school for thirty-four years. She taught me. She taught Glenn.

She taught Tate, the last year before she retired. She is seventy-four years old, and she still corrects your grammar at the post office.

“Jodie Kocurek,” she said, reading the sign through her glasses. “Is that you out here on the side of the road?”

“Yes, ma’am, Mrs. Mikeska,” I said. Some things you never stop calling a person.

She looked at the coolers. She looked at Glenn on the cot in the shade, and at Tate standing by the scale with his arms still red from the ice.

She looked a long time at Glenn. She had heard about his back. Everyone had heard.

“Why aren’t these at the fish house?” she asked.

I did not want to say it. I did not want to stand on the side of the highway and tell the whole town my husband’s cousin had squeezed us.

That was family business. So I only said, “The ice house was closed this morning, Mrs. Mikeska. We needed to sell them today.”

She looked at me over her glasses the way she used to look at a boy who said his dog ate his homework.

She did not believe a word about the ice house. But she let it go, which is the kindest thing a schoolteacher can do.

“Ten pounds,” she said. “Heads off. I’ll freeze some and make a gumbo with the rest on Sunday after Mass.”