Faye, Joe, and Michael piled into Faye’s oyster skiff and followed her. They all headed to the marina where their cars waited. And where Manny waited, too.
Sometimes Faye felt like Manny enjoyed having her family as a captive audience. They saw him way too often to suit her, but they also didn’t have many other options for traveling between home and shore. She’d kept a boat slip at the marina long before he bought it. Before she met Joe, in fact. Over the years, she’d done business with Wally, Liz, Wilma, and now Manny. Based on history, she had every likelihood of outlasting Manny, so there was no point in looking for another place to keep her boat.
Short of finding a place on Alligator Point or, even worse, going around it to get to Panacea, there were no commercial marinas within a reasonable distance. The hurricane had taken the only other reasonable alternative when it destroyed Emma’s dock. Faye and Joe had steadfastly refused to keep a car parked at Emma’s house so that they could save a few bucks on slip rental and parking. It was important to them to pay their own way.
Now that Emma was getting older, Faye had begun to rethink that position. Maybe it would help her to have them around more. Also, Faye was pretty sure that Emma would agree that it wasn’t a good thing for Amande to spend too much time with Manny. These points were moot since Emma’s dock was completely gone, along with her back deck and a big chunk of her roof. The only thing keeping rain off Emma’s concert grand piano was a blue tarp that Joe and Faye had spread over the missing shingles.
Thus, for the foreseeable future, Faye was forced to make pleasant conversation with Manny whenever she took a boat to the mainland, which had been every day since the storm. She had spent a little time feeling sheepish about her dislike for him after he was so kind in the immediate aftermath of Captain Eubank’s death, but twenty-four hours had passed. She’d had time to remember why he bugged her.
And now they were at the marina and Manny was seriously bugging her right at the moment. Here he was, greeting Amande dockside with the fancy coffee she liked. Faye could feel her attitude shift instantly from, “Maybe Manny is okay,” to “This man is going to ruin my daughter’s life.”
Whenever she felt this fear, she opened her mouth and stupid came out. Today, it was, “There was some interesting college mail for you yesterday, Amande. The Ivy League must have gotten a look at your SATs.”
Amande’s withering look said You’re going to start in on me before I’ve even had my coffee?
Faye knew that she’d said the wrong thing, but she also knew that she was right. An island was no place for a young adult like Amande, especially when nobody lived there but her immediate family. Her daughter liked to tell her how much she was learning from her online classes, but a brick-and-mortar college was about more than schooling. Young people needed friends and, yes, they needed love lives. Faye was terrified that Amande would get involved with Manny just because he was single and handy.
Nevertheless, behaving like an overbearing mother was not going to stop that from happening. She really needed to get a grip.
Amande stalked away from her and disappeared into the bar and grill. Joe did his usual conflict-avoidance thing of focusing his entire attention on tying up the boat. Wondering what to do next, Faye hauled herself out of the boat, hoisted a fussy Michael onto her hip, and got him out of his life jacket. Then she noticed that Manny was still standing there. He had a second cup of coffee, and he was holding it out in her direction.
“Sorry, Joe. I’d have brought you one, too, but I only have two hands.” He reached into a pocket, then stopped himself. “I have a B-A-N-A-N-A in here, if it’s okay for Michael to have it.”
Faye had one arm around Michael, but she totally had a free hand for coffee. Feeling like the worst possible hypocrite, she reached for the cup and wished she weren’t so suspicious of the man offering it. “Oh, absolutely. He loves bananas. Thank you! And thanks for this.”
“Look,” he said, “I get it that you’re protective of Amande. I am, too. I’ve known her since she wasn’t much bigger than this guy.”
If he was hoping to establish some kind of pecking order in Amande’s heart by reminding them that he’d met her first, Faye wasn’t going to stand for it.
Maybe Manny saw the thundercloud on her face, but he didn’t let on. He just kept talking. “I want the same things for her that you do. Honest, I do. She’s too smart and too hardworking to sell herself short. Any college would be lucky to get her, and she should absolutely go to one of them and get a degree. Two degrees. Three, maybe, like you. I remember taking her to the library when she was a little kid and watching her pick out books that were almost too big for her to carry. She was born to go to college.”
Faye couldn’t quite tell what the man was trying to say. Yeah, Amande was born to go to college. Any fool could see that, but nothing in his little speech said “I have no romantic interest in your daughter.” And if he did have that interest, then reminding Faye that he’d known Amande since she was a child just made everything ickier.
As she grappled with these thoughts, a stricken look crossed his face. “You think I’m…you think I want…oh no no no. No. When I look at Amande, I still see a little girl. Dirty face. Pigtails and all that jazz. I used to pretend like she was my little girl sometimes.”
Faye tried not to let her emotions show on her face. Jealousy was an ugly word for what she was feeling, but it was accurate.
“Why do you think I sold everything and moved here?” Manny asked. “When she left, there was nothing to distract me from the fact that my life was going nowhere. I looked at the losers all around me, and I knew I needed a new start. When she told me this place was for sale, I decided that it looked like as good a place as any. Business is better here, for sure, and there’s a community college right down the road. Maybe I’m not as smart as Amande, but there’s no reason I couldn’t take some business classes. And maybe some art classes for fun. Who wouldn’t want to paint this?”
He gestured at the sky, the birds, the boats, the watery horizon, everything.
“This is a place where my life can be different. And, yeah, I picked a place where I could see Amande, because I missed her. That’s all. I just missed her. And I wanted to make sure her new family was making her happy. Is any of that a crime?”
Faye didn’t know how to respond as she stood there holding Manny’s gift of coffee, but Joe did. He looked up from his task, stood up straight, and extended a hand to shake Manny’s. “I hope we’re making her happy. We’re trying.”
Faye found that she actually wanted to believe Manny. She had the coffee in one hand and the other arm was wrapped around the child at her side, but she was struggling to shift things around so that she, too, could shake Manny’s hand. Unfortunately, she didn’t manage it before she looked up and saw Amande, who was standing so close that she must have heard Manny defending himself from an accusation of being inappropriately interested in her. The fact that Faye hadn’t actually made that accusation—at least, not out loud—did not matter a bit.
The expression on Faye’s daughter’s face was a painful mix of mortification and blinding anger. She reached out, snatched Michael off his mother’s hip, and sat him on her own.
As she turned on her heel and stalked away, she spoke to nobody but him. “C’mon, Bubba. Thirsty people are out there waiting for me to bring them some water while you go play with Magda, Mike, and Rachel.” And then they had gone too far away for Faye to see them.
Chapter Twenty-One
Steering her car down winding roads to the homes of people too sick to leave the house satisfied Amande’s sense of adventure, and the massive chunks of downed trees in the rights-of-way made it all feel even more exotic. Even better, when she was out making deliveries, she was free of her mother’s fears and demands.
Michael was a cheerful kid, so he sat behind her in his car seat all the way to Mike and Magda’s house, na
rrating their journey.
“There’s a tree! There’s ’nother tree. Why’d the trees fall down, Sissy? There’s ’nother tree. Look, that lady has a chain saw like Daddy’s!”
Fortunately for them both, they enjoyed the same music, so the soundtrack for their adventures always consisted entirely of hip-hop and ’70s soul. When the occasional Isaac Hayes number surfaced from her playlist, though, Amande hit the skip button immediately, not because she didn’t like his music but because her mother did. Michael had not yet differentiated his musical tastes from his parents’, so he squawked when she did that. To keep him cheerful, she always made an exception and let the theme from Shaft play in full.
Michael was now playing happily with his best friend, Rachel, so Amande was free to listen to music that was dark. Angry, even. Today, she wanted music that sounded uglier than the way she felt inside.
Looking at the damage left by the hurricane broke Amande’s heart. It made her feel helpless, useless. There was no quicker way to become a hero than to hand a bottle of water to a Floridian who had been without air conditioning for a July week, but Amande didn’t want to be a hero. She was looking at a torn-apart world, and she wanted a different one.
She didn’t want to live in a world where thirteen-year-olds died when the car they were riding in slammed into a fallen tree. She didn’t want to live in a world where a person’s worth was measured by a piece of paper from a university. She didn’t want to live in a world where people who worked all day and all night at two jobs—three jobs, maybe—couldn’t afford a comfortable life with a few small pleasures. She didn’t want to live in a world where good and gentle men like Captain Eubank met ugly deaths.
Amande didn’t reach Jeanine Eubank’s house until midday, because the captain’s sister lived as far from the Crawfordville supply pickup site as it was possible to be while still being in Micco County. This was her first food-and-water run to Miss Jeanine, because it had taken all this time to clear the country road leading to her house from a horizontal forest of fallen trees.
She wasn’t sure what she would say to Miss Jeanine. This was the first time she’d seen the old lady since her brother died. It wasn’t that Amande had no experience with grief. She’d lost the grandmother who raised her when she was only sixteen. She remembered her empty certainty that nothing would ever be right again. It was just that she had no experience with comforting other people who had lost loved ones.
As she pulled into the driveway, she saw that Miss Jeanine’s roof was littered with heavy tree limbs, and whole sections of shingles were gone. If Captain Eubank had lived, he would have taken care of those things for his sister. Amande knew that her parents would find a way to come help her. That made her feel better, but only a little.
The thing that kept Amande awake at night was the sheer mindboggling scale of the disaster. Her parents could help Miss Emma and her neighbors and now Miss Jeanine. They could keep helping people, one after another, and they would. People were counting on the government and insurance companies and charities and churches. All those institutions should come help, and maybe they would, but Amande saw a lot of people shaking their heads at the thought.
They’d lived through hurricanes before, and they knew how things were. Micco County was sparsely populated. The hurricane was “only” a Category 3. The news channels had already moved on to something new and fascinating. The weather channels were reporting on the next hurricane, which had drawn a bead on the Texas coast. Nobody remembered that there were people still digging out from the last one.
Even cheerful Emma expected to be forgotten. Amande had heard her say, “We have to presume that we’re on our own. It has happened before and it will happen again,” as she handed Amande’s parents money to buy tarps for the roofs of people who couldn’t afford them.
And what about these trees lying flat or leaning precariously against each other? If they were in the road or on somebody’s house or in somebody’s yard, then yeah, somebody would get rid of them. But what about the ones lying in the woods, their rootballs reaching for the sky? They would stay right where they were for years and years.
Most days, Amande was pretty sure she was a grown-up, then she found herself smack up against something like this old woman who had lost her cherished brother. She wanted so much to help, but she felt overwhelmed and awkward. Truthfully, she felt like a little kid.
A massive pine tree had crushed the full length of the front porch of Miss Jeanine’s lifelong home. Yes, it was a blessing that it had missed the house itself by two feet—maybe less—but that didn’t take an old woman’s memories into account. Amande knew how much time she’d spent on the porches of the big old house on Joyeuse Island, sitting with Michael on her lap, or playing rummy with her parents, or just enjoying the breeze while she killed time playing stupid games on her phone.
A fallen tree couldn’t take away Amande’s memories, but it would break her heart to see those old boards splintered. How much worse would it feel to lose a porch if, at the very same time, you lost the brother who had sat there with you?
Amande decided she’d better stop thinking about that stuff. Otherwise, she was going to start crying, and that wouldn’t help her street cred as a grown-up at all.
She paid no attention to the fact that there were two cars in the driveway, a sky-blue 1990s Cadillac and a new gray SUV, when there was only one person living in the house. She knew that people sometimes got attached to cars and kept them around. As it turned out, the second car didn’t belong to Miss Jeanine. It belonged to her guest, a woman named Greta Haines who answered the door when Amande knocked.
Ms. Haines shook Amande’s hand with the excessive warmth of somebody trying to sell her something. “Thank you for being so good to my friend Jeanine,” she said. “I just couldn’t stand to think of her out here all by herself, so I drove out to check on her as soon as the road was clear.”
She ushered Amande into the dining room, where a big display of fruit cut to look like a bouquet of flowers sat on the long maple table. Next to it sat a basket of fancy cheeses wrapped up in cellophane and two bottles of wine, one red and one white. Amande looked at what she herself was carrying—bottled water, raisin bran, dry milk, and a few cans of tuna—and wondered why she’d bothered to drive all the way out there. Greta’s gifts were fancier and finer. More exciting, for sure.
Miss Jeanine was sitting in an upholstered chair tucked in a corner, beside a window with cardboard covering two busted-out panes. A third woman sat next to her in an identical chair. After a couple of false starts, Jeanine was able to struggle out of the chair.
She tottered toward Amande on spindly legs. “You are so lovely to bring me food. And water! I never thought I’d want to see more water after the hurricane filled most of my house right up. But you can’t drink floodwater, and I’m pretty thirsty these days. Now you’ve brought me water to drink, and my cell phone has service again. I think I’ll probably get my electricity back in time to keep it from dying, and that’s a good thing. Things are getting better every day.”
Amande was at a loss. This woman had lost her brother and her house was falling apart around her ears. What was she supposed to say to her?
She went with a cliché, saying “I’m so sorry for your loss.” Then she kicked herself for not thinking of something better.
It was hotter inside the house than outside, so steamy that Amande could hardly breathe. The curls around Miss Jeanine’s face were damp with sweat. Her thinning hair was almost as gray as the captain’s had been, but with a beige tinge that made Amande think she’d once been blond.
This made Amande realize that she didn’t even know what color the captain’s hair had been when he was young. He’d gone gray before she met him. It felt weird that she didn’t know that. She looked around the room for pictures of him and saw none. The house smelled of must and mold, so the odds were good that any photos Miss Jeanine
had owned were ruined by the storm.
The dining room might be the only livable portion of the entire house, because it looked like Miss Jeanine had moved her entire life there. Plastic bags overflowing with clothes were lined up along the walls. Assorted china knickknacks on the sideboard had been shoved aside to make room for a pile of canned food and a can opener.
Miss Jeanine pointed at the canned goods and said, “You can unload the things you brought right there on the sideboard, Amande, and I thank you so much for them. I’m keeping food in here until there’s a solid roof over the pantry again.”
Leaning hard on her cane, she gestured toward a chair at the dining room table, inviting Amande to sit next to Greta. When her guests were settled, she sank back into her chair.
“I’m so sorry. I forgot to introduce you to Cyndee Stamp.” She gestured at the woman in the chair next to hers. “She’s a friend of Greta’s, and she’s a tree contractor. I just love meeting women who do things that people said weren’t for me when I was a little girl—women like your mother, Amande, and her archaeology business. She impresses me a lot.”
This made Amande very proud, and also a little bit resentful that her mother couldn’t leave her alone when she wasn’t even in the room.
Jeanine was still talking about the good old days, which didn’t sound very good to Amande. “I don’t think my parents thought about what the life they chose for me really meant. When I didn’t marry, I lived here with them. I earned my keep by taking care of the house and garden, because they were afraid to think of me on my own. We were happy—very happy!—but what did they think was going to happen to me when they were gone?”
The idea of being so vulnerable and dependent horrified Amande.
“I guess they knew that dear, sweet Edward would step into their shoes. They just had no way of knowing that he would pass before me or that he wouldn’t have children to take me on as their burden. Times were different for women then, and I’m so glad to see things change.”
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