The Shrimp We Sold by the Bay

I opened the first cooler and scooped the shrimp into a clear gallon bag with my hands, cold and gray-white and clean, the ice falling off them.

Tate hung the bag on the brass scale. The needle settled right on ten pounds. That was fifty-five dollars.

Opal paid with three twenties out of a little coin purse.

Glenn counted five dollars back out of the coffee can from where he lay, and held it up to her, and she bent down to take it from his hand.

She held onto his hand a second longer than she needed to.

“Glenn Kocurek,” she said, “you were the worst speller I ever had and the politest boy. You get well.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Glenn said, and I saw his eyes go bright.

Opal put her shrimp in the back seat on a towel.

Then, before she got in, she took out her phone and dialed, standing right there in the gravel, and I heard her say, “Lacy, it’s me. Get your purse. Jodie and Glenn are selling shrimp on the highway by the harbor, and I want you to get here before they’re gone.”

Lacy is her younger sister. She is seventy-one. She came in twenty minutes in an old white car, and she bought fifteen pounds, and then she called her daughter, and her daughter called the church office, and I do not think I can tell you exactly how it went after that, because it went fast.

By ten-thirty there were six cars on the shoulder. By eleven, there were trucks parked down the gravel almost to the bend. Men in work boots on their lunch break from the plant up the road.

Women in church clothes. A man from Houston pulling a boat trailer who said he had driven past and seen the sign and turned around a mile down.

Tate ran the scale. I ran the coolers. Glenn ran the money. That is how we did it all morning.

I would scoop a bag and hand it to Tate, Tate would weigh it and call out the number, and Glenn would call back the price from the cot like an auctioneer before the customer could even reach for a wallet.

“Six pounds, that’s thirty-three,” Glenn would say. “Eight pounds, forty-four. Twelve and a half, that’s sixty-eight seventy-five, call it sixty-eight.”

He has always been fast with numbers. He used to do the scale tickets in his head before Lamar’s man could punch them in.

People bent down to pay him. They had to, because he was lying flat. And something happened that I did not expect. They stayed and talked to him.

They asked about his back. They told him about their own surgeries, their husbands’ surgeries, their mama’s hip. A line of people kneeling and squatting beside a cot on a highway shoulder, visiting.

One woman from the church brought him a cold bottle of water from her car.

A man who had worked on the crew boats with him twenty years ago brought him a pillow from his truck and tucked it under Glenn’s knees without asking.

Glenn just lay there and let them, which is not like him at all.

Around eleven-thirty, a little girl about six years old came up holding her grandmother’s hand.

She stood by the cot and stared at Glenn for a long time with her finger in her mouth. Then she asked him, very serious, “Are you sick, mister?”

“My back’s broke a little,” Glenn told her. “But it’s fixing.”