Remembering Blue by Connie May Fowler

Author:Connie May Fowler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307416537
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

I’m sitting on my front porch writing by the light of a candle. I don’t want to flip on the lamp—it’ll draw bugs and, also, I can see the lights of the trawlers better in the dark.

Nick is out there among them. From my vantage point, he and The Lucky Miss B are just one more distant glow in the crowd. It’s a funny thing, how that old ugly ship and my sweetie are turned into starlight.

The shrimp have been running real strong. So much so that at the end of every week we’ve been able to make a payment on the new boat. By the time the trawler is in the water, I want her paid for, free and clear. I hate owing anybody money. That’s something I’ve learned about myself. It surprises me, my conservative attitude regarding finances, but I suspect I’ll thank myself for it one day.

I wish Nick didn’t feel compelled to help the captain every afternoon. I know he’s right. The boat will be finished sooner and we’re saving money by him helping (that, alone, should make me happy), but we barely see each other. It’s odd, I’ve never before physically ached just because I wasn’t around somebody. Maybe I ought to start going with him. Maybe I could be useful.

Lillian says the new boat has less to do with Dem and more to do with Nick wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps. He worshiped the ground his daddy walked on—those are her words, not mine. But I bet she’s right. Nick wants a boat as fine as the one his father died on. He wants to make his father proud.

The migrating butterflies didn’t arrive in their usual numbers this fall. Everybody says so. Chalk it up to last year’s hard winter, I guess. Spring’s numbers were down, too, according to Beth and Maya. Maybe we’ll have a mild winter. The ghost crabs haven’t left the beach yet. Rhea says that’s a sure sign of a cold snap, when the ghost crabs disappear.

Lillian stood on my porch in a pink matching shorts set, her exasperation with my lack of gardening skills evident, her silver hoop earrings glinting in the hard afternoon sun, and said, “I’m going to get you some mushroom compost for this lousy excuse of a backyard and we’re going to turn it into something.”

I shook my head and pointed at Nick’s junk piles seething in the Indian summer heat. “I can’t plant anything until the mess is gone and Nick is working too hard for me to nag him about it. He already told me he didn’t want me touching anything back there. He says some of that stuff is worth money.”

“Hah!” Lillian folded her arms in front of her and tapped her tiny, sandal-shod foot. “That’s what men always say when they don’t want to clean something up.”

I looked at her little defiant face and thin-lipped smile, trying to determine if she knew what she was talking about. “Really?”

She daintily pushed a strand of graying hair off her temple.

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