“How’s it going?” he asked, seeing she was almost finished.
“Good. I’m almost done here. Anything else for dinner?”
“I have some homemade bread that I was planning on.”
“Homemade?”
“From a neighbor,” he said as he put the pail in the sink. He started the faucet and began to rinse the crabs, holding them under the water, then letting them scurry around the sink while he rinsed the next one. Allie picked up her cup and came over to watch him.
“Aren’t you afraid they’ll pinch you when you grab them?”
“No. Just grab ’em like this,” he said, demonstrating, and she smiled.
“I forget you’ve done this your whole life.” “New Bern’s small, but it does teach you how to do the things that matter.”
She leaned against the counter, standing close to him, and emptied her cup. When the crabs were ready he put them in the pot on the stove. He washed his hands, turning to speak to her as he did so.
“You want to sit on the porch for a few minutes? I’d like to let ’em soak for a half hour.”
“Sure,” she said.
He wiped his hands, and together they went to the back porch. Noah flipped on the light as they went outside, and he sat in the older rocker, offering the newer one to her. When he saw her cup was empty, he went inside for a moment and emerged with another cup of tea and a beer for himself. He held out the cup and she took it, sipping again before she set it on the table beside the chairs.
“You were sitting out here when I came, weren’t you?”
He answered as he made himself comfortable. “Yeah. I sit out here every night. It’s a habit now.”
“I can see why,” she said as she looked around. “So, what is it you do these days?”
“Actually, I don’t do anything but work on the house right now. It satisfies my creative urges.”
“How can you …I mean . . .”
“Morris Goldman.”
“Excuse me?”
He smiled. “My old boss from up north. His name was Morris Goldman. He offered me a part of the business just as I enlisted and died before I got home. When I got back to the States, his lawyers gave me a check big enough to buy this place and fix it up.”
She laughed under her breath. “You always told me you’d find a way to do it.”
They both sat quietly for a moment, thinking back again. Allie took another sip of tea.
“Do you remember sneaking over here the night you first told me about this place?”
He nodded, and she went on:
“I got home a little late that evening, and my parents were furious when I finally came in. I can still picture my daddy standing in the living room smoking a cigarette, my mother on the sofa staring straight ahead. I swear, they looked as if a family member had died. That was the first time my parents knew I was serious about you, and my mother had a long talk with me later that night. She said to me, ‘I’m sure you think that I don’t understand what you’re going through, but I do. It’s just that sometimes, our future is dictated by what we are, as opposed to what we want.’ I remember being really hurt when she said that.”
“You told me about it the next day. It hurt my feelings, too. I liked your parents, and I had no idea they didn’t like me.”
“It wasn’t that they didn’t like you. They didn’t think you deserved me.”
“There’s not much difference.”
There was a sadness in his voice when he responded, and she knew he was right to feel that way. She looked toward the stars while she ran her hand through her hair, pulling back the strands that had fallen onto her face.
“I know that. I always did. Maybe that’s why my mother and I always seem to have a distance between us when we talk.”
“How do you feel about it now?”
“The same as I did back then. That it’s wrong, that it isn’t fair. It was a terrible thing for a girl to learn. That status is more important than feelings.”
Noah smiled softly at her answer but said nothing.
“I’ve thought about you ever since that summer,” she said.
“You have?”
“Why wouldn’t you think so?” She seemed genuinely surprised.
“You never answered my letters.”
“You wrote?”
“Dozens of letters. I wrote you for two years without receiving a single reply.”
She slowly shook her head before lowering her eyes.
“I didn’t know . . . ,” she finally said, quietly, and he knew it must have been her mother, checking the mail, removing the letters without her knowledge. It was what he had always suspected, and he watched as Allie came to the same realization.