The Shrimp We Sold by the Bay

She thought about that. Then she reached in the pocket of her shorts, took out a crumpled dollar bill and put it in his coffee can. “For your back,” she said.

Her grandmother started to apologize, but Glenn shook his head at her.

He held that little girl’s dollar bill out flat on his chest for a long while after she went. He did not put it in with the others.

He folded it and put it in his shirt pocket, and he kept it there the rest of the day. I did not say anything about it. I could not have.

I said a prayer out there around noon, standing at the tailgate with my hands in the ice. Nothing fancy. Just thank you.

Thank you for Opal and Lacy and Augie, and for the little girl, and for my boy, and for my husband lying in the shade where I could see him. Then I went back to scooping.

We sold the first ten coolers before noon. Then fifteen.

Tate kept count by tipping the empties upside down in the grass, and the row of upside-down coolers kept getting longer, white and blue in the sun, and every time he tipped one over somebody in line clapped a little.

At twelve-fifteen, a truck I knew came down the highway from the direction of the fish dock.

It was Lamar’s pickup. He drives into town for lunch at the same café every day at a quarter past twelve, and he has done it as long as I have known him.

Glenn always said you could set a clock by Lamar’s stomach. He had to drive right past the harbor to get there.

I saw the truck slow down. I saw it pull off onto the shoulder behind the last car in my line, maybe sixty yards back, and stop with the engine still running.

He sat there with the windows up. I could not see his face for the glare.

Glenn had seen it too. He did not sit up, because he could not, but he turned his head on the pillow and looked at that truck for a long time.

Then he turned back to the line and said to the next woman, “Seven pounds. Thirty-eight fifty, ma’am.”

Lamar got out of the truck. He stood beside it with one hand on the door. He looked at the line of cars and trucks down the shoulder.

He looked at the row of empty coolers in the grass. He looked at his cousin on the cot, laid flat out with people kneeling beside him to pay.

Then the passenger door of his truck opened, and his dock hand got out.

I knew him well. He had worked Lamar’s dock for six years and run the hoist for our boat three or four hundred times.

He was a quiet young man, about Tate’s age, who sent half his pay home to his mother. I had always liked him.

He stood beside Lamar for a second, and they said something to each other that I could not hear.

Then the dock hand closed his door, put his hands in his pockets, and walked down the shoulder past every car in the line, all sixty yards, right up to my tailgate.

He did not get in line. He did not need to.

The people in line saw where he came from and who he left standing by the truck, and they stepped aside for him, every one, without a word.