The Shrimp We Sold by the Bay

He took his wallet out of his back pocket. “Five pounds, Mrs. Kocurek,” he said, loud enough to carry. “For my mama. She asks me every week why I never bring her any shrimp home from the dock. I tell her it all goes to the buyers.”

I scooped him the five best pounds left in that cooler. Tate weighed it out. Five pounds, even. Twenty-seven fifty.

The boy handed Glenn thirty dollars, and Glenn counted back two fifty in quarters and a dollar bill, slow and careful, and put it in his hand.

“Tell your mama hello from us,” Glenn said.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “I’m sorry about your back, Mr. Glenn.” And then, quieter, just to Glenn, “I’m sorry about the rest of it too.”

He walked back up the shoulder with his bag of shrimp. He did not get back into Lamar’s truck. He kept walking, past it, toward the harbor, and Lamar stood there and watched him go.

Nobody in that line said a word to Lamar. Nobody pointed or shook their head. They did not have to.

Every person on that shoulder knew he owned the fish house, and every one of them could see his cousin lying on a cot selling shrimp from a coffee can. That was all the consequence there needed to be.

Lamar stood there for a long minute. Then he looked straight at me, and I looked back at him. I did not smile, and I did not frown.

I just looked at him the way you look at family. Then I went back to scooping shrimp for the next woman in line.

When I looked up again, his truck was gone. He did not go on to the café. He turned around in the gravel and went back toward the dock.

We sold the last pound at ten minutes to two.

It was a man in a hard hat from the plant up the road, on his way home from a double shift, who bought the last six and a half pounds and the ice with it, and said his wife would think he’d lost his mind.

Tate tipped the thirtieth cooler upside down in the grass. The people still standing around clapped for real that time.

Augie, who had driven over sometime after noon and was leaning on his truck, put two fingers in his mouth and whistled, and Tate turned red to his ears.

Nine hundred pounds at five and a half is four thousand nine hundred fifty dollars. Lamar’s dollar and a half would have been one thousand three hundred fifty.

Take out the coolers and the ice, about a thousand dollars between them, and it was still near three times what he had offered, and we still owned thirty coolers.

But I did not know any of that yet, not exactly. I had not counted.

Glenn had the coffee can, and he had been making change all morning, and the bills had been going in and coming out so fast I could not have guessed what was in there.

Tate and I loaded the empty coolers back into the truck.

Our neighbor’s boy came back with his car to drive Glenn home, but Glenn shook his head. “I’ll ride with my wife,” he said. “It’s eight minutes. Lay the seat back, son.”

So Tate laid the passenger seat all the way back and we eased Glenn in, one inch at a time, and propped the pillow from the crew boat man under his knees.

Tate rode with the neighbor boy. And I drove us home slow down the highway with the bay going by blue and flat out the window.