When the sun went down over the Gulf, Wade wiped his hands, walked out to the end of the dock, and came back with a waterproof bag from his boat, and said Uncle Carl had asked him to wait until everybody was here, and he unzipped it, and Brenda stood by the fryer with her Coors Light and her six car washes.
Out of the bag came papers, and a folded chart of the Gulf, and a set of keys with a float on them. And Wade laid it all out on the newspaper next to the shrimp.
My son had not just been running his granddaddys rusted boat. Quiet, over three years, he had bought two more boats, and the licenses to go with them, and he had built a little fleet supplying shrimp straight to restaurants from New Orleans to Mobile, cutting out the middleman his granddaddy always cursed. The papers showed what it earned. It earned more than Carls six car washes put together, and Carl, who does the family books in his head, went pale reading it.
My son did not stay on the same rusted boat because he could do no better, he built a whole shrimping business on the foundation three generations laid, and the boy who smelled like diesel and shrimp heads had quietly become the biggest independent shrimper on this stretch of coast.
But that was not why Carl had asked him to wait. The keys with the float, Wade slid those across to Carl and Brenda. Wade had bought back the old family camp on the bayou, the one the family lost in Katrina, the one Brenda grew up in before she married up and moved away from all of it. He had fixed it up. And he was giving it back to the whole family, Brenda included.
Brenda, who had just called him a diesel-smelling failure, looked at the keys to her childhood home and could not get a word out. Wade said, Aunt Brenda, you used to catch crabs off that dock as a girl. I figured the family ought to have it back. Come out anytime.
She cried. Carl shook Wades hand and held it a second too long. And my son, forty-one, third generation on the water, just took another basket of shrimp out of the grease, because the tide does not care about toasts, and somebody has got to catch the dinner, and on this coast it is proudly, richly, still him.