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“But he’s got a point,” said Angie. “What do we gain by going back to where we were?”
“We get another chance. Like Thomas Edison, when he was trying out different materials for lightbulb filaments.”
Angie looked doubtful. “Didn’t it take him, like, a hundred tries?”
“More like a thousand,” Flo said.
“A thousand?” Angie’s face fell. “You think it’s worth it? I’m not sure the results are going to be all that illuminating.”
I smiled at the bad pun — there were few things I liked better than bad puns, except worse puns — but Flo looked peeved again. “Never know unless we try.”
“Maybe not even then,” Angie replied.
“Maybe not even then,” Flo agreed. “But somebody went to some trouble to hide this. If I can, I’d like to find out why.”
Peevish or not, I decided, Flo was good people. “Angie and I are about to grab some lunch,” I said on the spur of the moment. “You want to go? Stu — Agent Vickery — is meeting us there. Bringing a criminologist friend, too. Why don’t you join us? Angie says the place is really special.”
“Can’t,” she said. “Got two forgeries to work on after this. Thanks, though. Where you going?”
“Shell’s,” said Angie, smiling, then raising a shushing, “top secret” finger to her lips.
“Ah, Shell’s,” said Flo. “That is someplace special.”
Chapter 9
What I held in my hand was halfway between bone and flower: cold and hard as stone, but scalloped, sinuous, and lustrous. It was beautiful, in a rough-hewn way, but at the moment my fear was trumping my aesthetic appreciation.
Angie and I were lunching at the Shell Oyster Bar — better known to the locals as “Shell’s”—and it was indeed special, in its own sort of way. Shell’s was a ramshackle little café on Tallahassee’s south side, just across the proverbial tracks. The parking lot was small, which was just as well, since the restaurant itself could seat only about thirty people. I glanced around the interior. The linoleum on the floor and the beige paneling on the walls looked forty years old, and half a dozen of the acoustic ceiling tiles were stained and sagging from roof leaks. “You picked this place for the ambience, right?”
“I picked this place because it’s the real deal. Great oysters, reasonable prices, and no fancy airs.” She was right about the lack of airs: the customers who jammed the place were eating directly off cafeteria trays, drinking beer straight from the can, and wielding flimsy plastic forks. I didn’t actually mind the ambience, despite my sniping comment. What I minded was the oysters. I felt moderate concern about the eleven raw ones glistening on the plate the waitress had set on the table between Angie and me, and I felt high anxiety about the twelfth oyster, the runt of the litter, which I had slowly lifted toward my mouth as Angie watched.
“I don’t know about this,” I said.
“Oh, come on. You spend half your time up to your elbows in bodies and gack, and you’re scared to eat an oyster?” She looked simultaneously amused and appalled.
“The difference is, I don’t put the gack in my mouth,” I pointed out. “I ate a raw oyster once a long time ago, and all I can say is, I haven’t felt moved to eat another one. Chewy and slimy, that’s what I remember — like a cross between gristle and a loogey.”
“Eww, that’s disgusting.” She grimaced. “Clearly that was not an Apalachicola Bay oyster you had. Probably some inferior product from the Chesapeake or the Pacific Northwest.” She spooned a dollop of horseradish from a tiny paper cup onto the largest of the oysters, squeezed a lemon wedge over it, and then plucked the shell from the plastic tray and waved it in my direction. “Look, this is a thing of beauty.” The oyster quivered moistly beneath the fluorescent lights. Angie raised the shell to her lips and tipped it up, slurping slightly as the oyster slid into her mouth. She chewed a few times and then swallowed. “Yum.” She beamed. “You better move fast, or you’ll lose your chance. There’s only ten more on the plate.”
“And this is it? This is all we’re having for lunch? A dozen raw oysters?”
“Maybe not.” She shrugged. “We might need two dozen. I’m kinda hungry.”
As Angie reached for another oyster, I noticed a thin, faint line on the side of her index finger. “How’d you get that scar? Mind my asking?”
She looked puzzled until she saw where I was looking; then, in the space of a few seconds, her face shifted through half a dozen expressions: amusement, wistfulness, sorrow, anger, confusion, peace. “I nearly chopped off my finger when I was ten,” she said. “My sister Kate — she was seven at the time — was trying to cut down a tree. She was flailing away at it with a hatchet, but not really doing much beyond bruising the bark. So I took the hatchet from her and said, ‘Here, let me show you how to do it.’ I put one hand on the tree, for balance, I guess, and reared back and took a whack. Lucky for me I just caught the edge of my finger with the blade. An inch higher, and my coworkers would be calling me ‘Stumpy.’ As it was, I got off with just a few stitches.” She traced the scar with her other index finger, smiling slightly. “God, I haven’t thought about that in years. ‘Here, let me show you how to do it.’ Famous last words, huh?” She shook her head. “We were so close when we were kids. I was so protective of her. How the hell did I let her down so badly? How’d I let her get in so far over her head?” She jabbed at her eyes with the flimsy paper napkin. “Dammit.” She set the empty shell down on the tray.
I set mine down, too. “I’m sorry, Angie.” Mortified by my clumsiness, I stared down at the oysters pooled in their brine. “I didn’t mean to remind you of it all over again.”
She shook her head. “It’s okay. How were you supposed to know? Besides, I don’t want people tiptoeing around, walking on eggshells for fear they’ll say something — who knows what—that might remind me of Kate. I’d hate that.” She fingered the scar again. “This is my reminder of an adventure, a story we shared. It’s a souvenir I’ll carry on my skin for the rest of my life. Like a tattoo, carved by a hatchet. How cool is that? But it gets invisible to me, and I forget it’s there. So thanks for reminding me. I’m glad you asked.”
“Me, too, then.” I looked up at her, no longer mortified. “I won’t tiptoe.” An unexpected wave of memory and emotion washed over me suddenly — a rogue wave that hit me almost hard enough to capsize me — and I turned away.
“What? I thought you promised not to tiptoe.”
“I did. I won’t.” I turned back toward her. “I know what it’s like when people tiptoe around you. Makes you feel invisible but also hugely conspicuous at the same time.” She waited. “My father killed himself when I was three.”
Her eyes widened, and she nodded once, very slowly. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
I shrugged. “I don’t actually know much about it. He’d invested heavily in the commodities market — soybean futures or pork bellies or something; I don’t know what. Not just his own money, but a lot of money for other people, too — friends who wanted in on what was starting to look like a sure thing. And then the price went into free fall and he lost everything. He went into his office and shot himself.” I shrugged. “That’s about all I know. We never talked about it. That was the one unspoken rule at my house growing up: don’t talk about it; tiptoe around it. ”
“Did your mother remarry?”
/> “She did. Actually, she married my dad’s brother, my uncle Charlie.” I smiled. “Charlie was a fine man. Treated me like a son. I thought of him as my dad; I called him Dad. Although…” I hesitated again. “The older I get, the more I miss my father; the more I wonder what kind of relationship I could have had with him. It makes me feel a little disloyal to Charlie, but I miss my father.”
“Nothing disloyal about that,” she said. “There’s room in a heart for a lot of people. I’ve got another sister, Genevieve — the oldest — who’s still alive. Would I have more love to give Genevieve if I didn’t still feel love for Kate? I don’t think it works that way. I think it works the other way around — I think I’ve got a bigger heart for Gen because of Kate. And I bet you’ve got a bigger heart for Charlie because it’s growing to take in more of your father. Loss can make you smaller, or it can make you bigger. Just depends on what you do after it.” She dabbed at her eyes, then looked at the ruins of her napkin and laughed. “God, they really do need better napkins at this place.”
I lifted my paper cup of iced tea. “Here’s to getting bigger, not smaller.”
She reached for her cup, but didn’t lift it. “You mean that?” There was a mischievous gleam in her eye.
“I do.”
“Let’s see about that.” Letting go of the cup, she lifted another oyster from the tray and held it toward me. “To getting bigger, not smaller.”
“Uh-oh,” I said. “There’s no graceful way out of this for me, is there?”
“The best way out is all the way in.” She grinned.
I studied the remaining oysters. My inclination was to reach again for the smallest. Instead, I forced myself to take a big one. I spooned on a dab of horseradish and squeezed a lemon wedge over it, as I’d seen Angie do, and then — for good measure — sprinkled a dollop of cocktail sauce on top. I lifted it by the edges, careful not to slosh the brine. “To bigger, not smaller,” I said, clicking my oyster shell against hers. I brought the shell to my lips, feeling the roughness of its outside against my lower lip and the pearly smoothness of the inner shell against my top lip. The shell was cold from the bed of crushed ice in the platter. As I tipped the shell slowly, the brine — salty, lemony, and tangy — trickled into my mouth.
