By three o'clock the deck had been transformed. The caterers had spread brown paper over the long tables, the way you were supposed to for crabs, and set out wooden mallets and paring knives and rolls of paper towels and little cups of melted butter and cider vinegar. There were tall glass vases of white hydrangeas down the middle, which Skyler thought looked strange next to the mallets, like a wedding where someone had told the guests to bring hammers. The raw bar man had set up under a canvas canopy at the end of the dock, on a table full of crushed ice, and he was laying out oysters in rows, Chincoteagues and Choptank Sweets and some from Massachusetts with names like towns. Two big steel pots sat on propane burners at the edge of the lawn, and a third pot, for the lobsters, was already ticking with heat.
The house sat on Back Creek, which fed into the Severn, which fed into the bay. It had been Skyler's grandparents' house and then her mother's, and her mother had grown up on that dock, catching crabs with a chicken neck on a string and a long-handled net. There was still a cleat at the end of the dock with June scratched into the wood beside it in a child's careful capitals. Skyler went and looked at it sometimes. Nobody had sanded it off, maybe because nobody had noticed.
At three-thirty Celeste came out to inspect, in a green silk dress and gold sandals, and found Skyler sitting on the bottom step of the deck stairs.
"There you are. I need you upstairs by five, and dressed. Not the leggings. The blue thing. And when people arrive you say hello and then you can take your plate up to your room."
"What plate?"
Celeste looked at her as if the question were rude. "I'll make you something. Chicken nuggets. You like those."
"I was going to eat crabs," Skyler said. "Dad said."
It was true. Her father had said, last week, on the phone from the pilot station at Cape Henry, "Save me a seat at the crab table, Sky. You and me. We'll show these people how it's done." Because her mother had taught her to pick crabs when she was five years old, sitting on a phone book on a chair, and she was faster at it than her father was, and they both knew it, and it was a joke between them that he pretended to be outraged about.
Celeste's face did something complicated. "Your father," she said, "will be very busy tonight. These are my guests. My friends. Some of them are very important to me, and some of them are people your father needs to know, for his career, and I need this evening to go well. I need you to understand that. Can you understand that?"
Skyler did not see how a dentist and two women from Celeste's tennis club were going to help her father climb up the side of ships. But she nodded.