Gussie looked at the water, which was greenish brown and full of light, and at the string going down into it.
He always comes, though.
"Mrs. Bennet," Tadeo said, "are you the one that's coming Wednesday?"
"I was supposed to be."
"Coralie said you didn't want to come when Lysander was here. She said you would be mad." He looked at her sideways. "Are you mad?"
"I'm a lot of things," said Gussie. "Right now, mostly, I'm interested in whether there's a crab on that line."
There was. He felt it at the same moment she said it, and his whole body went rigid with concentration, and he began to pull, slowly, so slowly, hand over hand, his tongue between his teeth, and Gussie held her breath without meaning to, and up out of the brown water into the light came a blue crab, a big one, clinging to the chicken neck with both claws and an expression of total betrayal.
"NET," Tadeo shrieked. "NET NET NET."
Gussie grabbed the long-handled net that was lying on the dock and swept it under the crab just as it let go, and caught it, and the two of them stared into the net at the furious blue thing with its claws up, and Tadeo said, reverently, "That's a number one jimmy."
"Is it."
"That's the best kind. That's the biggest kind. Lysander!" He scrambled to his feet, holding the net out in front of him like a torch. "LYSANDER! We got a jimmy! Mrs. Bennet and me got a JIMMY!"
And Gussie, still sitting on the dock, turned around and looked back up the boardwalk toward the house, where on the screened porch at the top of the twenty-two stairs a tall old man had risen out of a chair with a cane in one hand and was standing at the screen, very still, looking down at her across the marsh grass and twenty-six years.
It is a strange thing to watch your whole family find out you are standing in their back yard.
Tadeo's shriek had carried, and the screen door on the porch banged, and then banged again, and Gussie, getting up from the dock in stages with one hand on a piling, saw them arrive at the porch screen one by one like figures coming out of a cuckoo clock. Sunita first, in a sundress, with a spatula in her hand, who saw her and put the spatula over her own mouth. Then Ramsay, in a Bengals T-shirt and swim trunks, who saw her and simply stopped, the way a man stops when he walks into a glass door. Then Zinnia, who did not stop at all but came straight down the twenty-two stairs at a pace that made Gussie's heart leap into her throat, and across the yard, and down the boardwalk, and hit her grandmother at roughly the speed of a small car and held on.
"You came," Zinnia said into the brim of the hat. "You actually came. You drove."