Chapter 8: Mud

Luc had never once called me baby.

Not in seven years.

I held the phone and looked at the pink seed scattered across Mémère's parlor floor.

"The vault's fine," I said. "I moved it up the hill before the surge. Every jar."

The ice machine behind him dropped a load of ice.

Luc didn't say anything for two full seconds.

"You moved it."

"Me and Etienne. In milk crates."

"Well," he said. "Look at you."

"Look at me."

"Good girl, Jo. I'll see you when the causeway opens."

He hung up.

Behind me, the mattress creaked.

Etienne was up on one elbow, watching me, wide awake.

"Insured," he said.

"Insured."

"He's going to file a claim on seed he's already sold."

"He's going to file a claim on seed he already stole," I said, "and then sell it again."

I started picking the pink seed up off the floor one by one.

He got down beside me and helped.

The causeway opened on Friday.

Before that, the island dug itself out alone.

The water went back to the marsh and left everything it touched brown.

Brown mud on the shell roads, brown lines on the barn walls three feet up, brown silt in the greenhouse over the benches where my seedlings had been.

The aging barns held.

The oak barrels sat in their rows under their salt crusts.

The bottling house lost half its roof.

Lise's café lost all of it.

I found her standing in the middle of her dining room on Thursday morning, looking up at the sky.

Her "GO AWAY STORM" plywood was in a tree across the road.

"Well," she said. "It's an open-air concept now."

"Lise."

"Don't. If you hug me I'll cry and I don't have time to cry. I've got a walk-in full of shrimp that's going to turn by tonight."

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