The crabs arrived at ten in the morning in two wooden bushel baskets, still alive and furious about it, and Skyler Dawes watched from the kitchen window as the delivery man carried them around the side of the house to the deck.
She could hear them. That was the thing nobody told you about blue crabs if you had never been near a live bushel. They made a sound, a dry clicking and scraping like a hundred people tapping their fingernails on a table at once, impatient for something. Her mother used to say they were arguing about who got to go into the pot last. Her mother used to say a lot of things like that, in the kitchen, with a dish towel over one shoulder and a knife in her hand and a pencil behind her ear.
"Skyler. Away from the window."
Celeste did not look up when she said it. She was standing at the island with her laptop open beside a seating chart, a phone in one hand and a pen in the other, and her hair was already done even though the party did not start until five. It was her forty-fourth birthday. She had been telling people for a month that she was not doing anything big this year, and then she had hired a caterer from Kent Island, rented two long tables and white folding chairs, ordered three dozen Maine lobsters to be flown in, and arranged for a raw bar with a man who would shuck oysters in a striped apron for four hours. The crabs were the only local thing. "People expect crabs," she had said on the phone to someone last week. "It's Annapolis. You have to do crabs or they think you're from Virginia."
Skyler moved away from the window. She was eleven, small for it, with her father's straight dark eyebrows and her mother's habit of standing very still when she was thinking. She went to the refrigerator, because it was ten in the morning and she had not eaten breakfast, and she opened it carefully, so the door would not make the sucking sound.
"What are you doing?"
"I was going to get a yogurt."
"Those are for the dip." Celeste still did not look up. "Everything on the top two shelves is for tonight. You know that. Your things are on the bottom."
The bottom shelf held a bag of baby carrots, half a block of orange cheese wrapped in its own torn plastic, and a jar of grape jelly with a crust around the lid. Skyler looked at it for a moment. Then she closed the door, quietly, and went to the pantry.
The pantry had a lock on it now. It had been there since August. It was a small brass hasp with a combination padlock through it, the kind you would put on a gym locker, and Celeste had installed it herself one Sunday afternoon with a cordless drill while Skyler's father was out on a ship. When he came home three days later and saw it, Celeste had told him, in a soft voice, in the bedroom with the door almost closed, that she was worried. That there had been some incidents. That she had found wrappers. That she had read about this, about children who had lost a parent and started hiding food, and that it was a control thing, a grief thing, and that the experts said you had to create structure. Skyler had been sitting on the hallway floor outside with her back against the wall, and she had heard all of it, and she had heard her father say, after a long pause, "Okay. If you think it helps." And then he had said, "I just don't want her to feel punished." And Celeste had said, "Of course not. Grant. Of course not."