He heard the boards creak and turned around. He had brown hair that the sun had already started to lighten at the ends and a face that was mostly freckles and eyebrows. He looked at Gussie, at her sun hat, at her good sandals, with the frank, scientific interest of a child who has been told not to talk to strangers but has decided that a woman in a hat that big cannot reasonably be a stranger.
"Are you here to rent the house?" he said. "Because we're already renting it."
"I know," said Gussie. "I'm the one renting it to you."
He considered this. "Are you Miss Searcy? She has a braid."
"No. My name is Mrs. Bennet."
"That's Lysander's name," the boy said, surprised. "Are you his wife?"
"I used to be," said Gussie. "A long time ago. Before you were born. Before your mother was born, probably."
"Oh." The boy took that in, filed it somewhere, and moved on in the way children do, as if a whole marriage could be set on a shelf like a jar. "I'm Tadeo. I'm catching a crab. Well, I'm trying. You need chicken necks. Ramsay got me chicken necks. They're disgusting." He held up the line, where a pale piece of meat dangled from a string, and Gussie laughed out loud in spite of herself.
"May I sit down?"
"It's your house," Tadeo said reasonably, and scooted over.
She sat down on the dock beside him. It took a while. He waited without comment, which she appreciated, and when she was settled he showed her how to lower the line slowly until you felt the bottom, and how to wait, and how to pull it up very, very slowly when you felt a tug, so slowly, he said, that the crab doesn't even realize it's going up, it thinks it's having lunch and then it's in the air.
"Who taught you that?"
"Lysander. He used to crab when he was a kid. In Maryland. He said his dad taught him and his dad was mean, but he was good at crabbing, so Lysander said you can get good things from people who aren't good." Tadeo frowned at the water. "My mom's having an operation. On her back. In Asheville. That's why I'm here."
"I heard. I'm sorry she's having a hard time."
"She has a disc," Tadeo explained. "It's squishing a nerve. She's a CNA at the nursing home and she lifts people all day and her disc got squished. She's going to be okay. The doctor said. But she can't pick anything up for six weeks, not even me, not even groceries, and she was going to have my Tía Lupita come from Texas, but Tía Lupita broke her ankle at a quinceañera. So Lysander said I could come to the beach with him. He asked my mom. He asked her a lot of times. She said no like four times, and then she said yes." He pulled the line up an inch, felt nothing, let it down. "He comes to my school when there's a thing for grandparents, because mine are in Mexico. He has to sit in the back because of his machine. Not the machine, the machine's at home, but he gets tired. He sits in the back. He always comes, though."