15. Rhodes #2
Oak Moss is the property her family has owned outside of Charleston for as long as I've known them.
There are twenty-odd acres running out to a point on deep water, one old house sitting up under the live oaks and not another thing on it but marsh and mud and oyster ground.
There's a porch all the way around, tin roof, no air conditioning worth the name.
Half the summers of my childhood that I wasn't at our place, I was on those steps eating off a paper plate.
She listens. Her free hand comes up and grips the back of her own neck.
"No, don't do that. Don't. Just tell me what's going on." A pause. "Why are there excavators parked out there? She says they've been sitting there for two days."
Whatever he says lands wrong. Her spine goes rigid, straight up, like something yanked a wire tight through the middle of her.
"When did this happen?" Her voice climbs. "When, Dad. Give me a date."
I stand there holding a folded pizza box. I don't move toward her, watching from the sink as her face comes apart in slow pieces.
"Signed. They're already signed." It isn't a question anymore. Her mouth pulls tight. "You signed something on Oak Moss, and I'm finding out from a seventy-year-old woman down the road who emailed me at nine o'clock at night?”
Her eyes are wet and furious, and she blinks it back hard, refusing to let it fall.
"No. No, don't tell me it's a good thing. Don't sell it to me." Her hand drops off her neck and closes tight at her side. "Dad, don't tell me what I'm going to love. You don't get to make the whole decision and then tell me how I'm supposed to feel about it after."
She's shaking. I can see it from here, the tremor running down her arm into her hand, the phone shaking against her ear.
"Who was in the room when this got decided? Was it just Grandbank? Was it all of you?" A breath. "Everybody but me. Great. That's just great."
Something clenches in my chest, a cold and familiar feeling of standing outside a door while the people who love you settle your life without you in the room. My body knows it before my head does, and that specific pressure builds at the top of my shoulders.
"So that's what he meant." Her voice breaks a little on it. "Come home so we can talk 'logistics.' He was going to sit me down and tell me it was already done."
She lowers the phone from her ear. Her hands won't hold still. She blinks hard, fast, staring at nothing.
I set the box down.
"Tallulah. What the hell is going on?"
"Oak Moss," she says.
She's still staring at the phone in her hand.
"They're going to bulldoze and develop our beloved Oak Moss.
There's a creek that runs through it, and at low tide the whole bank goes silver with fiddler crabs, thousands of them.
That will probably get destroyed. That's where Mama used to walk me down off the porch when I was little, and we'd sit in the pluff mud and watch the birds work the flat. "
Her voice cracks on Mama.
"That's where I learned to read water, where I figured out what I wanted to do with my whole life. That land made me. And they're going to develop it and turn it into somebody's cul-de-sac, and they didn't say one word to me. They know how much that place means to me."
Now I get why she's so upset. This isn't just a piece of property to her.
My family makes decisions like that every day. We shut down routes, move freight through a different terminal, walk away from warehouse space that no longer makes sense on a spreadsheet. You look at what something costs, what it produces, what comes next, and you make the call.
That's business.
But Oak Moss isn't a warehouse.
I look at her face, and the business part of my brain shuts the fuck up.
The land is part of it. Of course it is. She grew up there. It gave her the thing she wants to spend her life doing.
But the other part is worse. They made the decision without her.
Her father and Grandbank sat in a room and decided something they knew would gut her, then planned to hand it to her after it was finished, sealed, and signed, when there was nothing left for her to argue about. They planned to leave her no chance to ask questions or tell them they were wrong.
"They think it's a lost cause," she says. "That's the part that kills me. They think there's nothing there worth saving, because the land is receding and the oysters aren't what they need to be to justify it—"
Her voice just gives out. Her mouth keeps moving, but nothing comes, and then her face folds and the tears finally come fast and hot.
I don't decide to, but I'm there, my arms are around her, and she comes in against my chest with her hands still knotted between us. She's shaking. I feel it everywhere we touch.
She cries into my shirt, and I hold her. I hate, in a low, quiet way, that even now some part of me registers how she feels against me, the shape of her fitting under my chin. I lock it down. This isn't that. She doesn't need that from me right now.
But underneath the stillness, the other thing is already moving.
It's the Stone in me, the part that hears a problem and starts reaching for tools.
Money, lawyers, Ridge, who knows somebody in every city that's got a port and half the ones that don't. There's always a call to make, a number to move, a lever to pull.
My whole family runs on it. Fix it, handle it, make it go away before it can touch her again.
I say nothing.
I keep my hands on her, and not on the problem, and the wanting to fix it keeps roaring under the quiet.