Anders strode toward her and then slowed, his eyes darting from side to side. “Is Tom . . . coming?”
“Nope! This is a women-only activity.” She turned to lead Anders away from the dock and he followed. “The men catch the crabs; the women pick them. It’s all very 1950s.”
“Oh,” Anders said, and then abruptly stopped walking, eyes narrowed in concern. “You do know that I’m not a woman, yes?”
* * *
—
The Frick Island Crab-Picking Cooperative formed in the late eighties upon the FDA’s shocking discovery that the watermen’s wives on the island had—for decades—been steaming and de-shelling crabs in their own kitchens and selling plastic tubs of the unregulated meat to restaurants and grocers on the mainland. They immediately intervened and demanded rules! Gloves! Hairnets! Stainless steel sinks! And more regulations!
So a rectangular building was constructed and all the women started picking their husbands’ hauls together and enjoyed the camaraderie so much, they wondered why they hadn’t been doing that all along. They didn’t wear the required hairnets and gloves, of course, unless an FDA rep came for an inspection, which only happened twice in the forty-plus years since.
“You start with the crab like so.” Lady Judy clutched the crustacean in her left hand and a curved wooden-handled knife in her right. “First you peel off the back.”
Piper looked on as Anders made sure his recorder was pointed squarely at Lady Judy and watched intently as she narrated her quick movements, deconstructing the crab and popping the white meat into a plastic tub on the table, the same way Piper had watched when she and Tom got serious and he suggested she might want to pick his haul like the other wives. Piper dissected exactly one crab, and though she enjoyed it from a scientific perspective, she had no desire to do it again and decided to leave picking to the experts at the co-op.
Currently those experts included Steve’s wife, Jane; three other watermen’s wives; and Pearl Olecki and Shirlene, whose husbands were not watermen but whose fathers were, and they had spent their childhoods alongside their mothers picking crabs and saw no good reason to stop. The women were steadily mimicking Lady Jane’s movements, taking crabs apart with a practiced speed that had once left Piper in the same slack-jawed awe Anders was now experiencing. They barely glanced at what they were doing, instead looking at each other as they chatted comfortably about various subjects—their children (who mostly lived off the island), then the disappointing upcoming Halloween season where only one child (Bobby) would be trick-or-treating, which turned into reminiscing about holidays past, when kids would run from house to house with a sock to collect change instead of a candy.
“’Member that year BobDan came out the house with his mama’s pantyhose? Determined to get the most money as anybody.”
“He’s always been resourceful.” Shirlene beamed.
“He was tickled to death with hisself, too.”
“Yeah, ’til his mama came shrieking out the front door, realizing what he’d done. It was her last good pair.”
Chuckles peppered the air, as Piper watched Anders struggle with his first crustacean—he’d been at it for a full six minutes, enough time for Lady Judy to have dismantled four crabs. And the conversation turned to the construction of the cell tower.
“Should be done in three weeks’ time, they said. Then we can all tune in to that podcast of yours, Anders. Like a listening party.”
Piper felt Anders tense beside her and wondered if he was nervous picking his first crab under everyone’s watchful eye, like she had been.
“Three weeks? That’s what they said three weeks ago.”
Pearl frowned. “It’s the ugliest thing ever been on this island.”
“I don’t know—’member ol’ Dewey Winkins?”
The ladies howled. Piper caught Anders’s eye and he grinned.
“He tried to get his cod in every cave he could find, didn’t he?”
“Sure enough did.”
Lady Judy looked up. “He never did try it with me.”
The ladies howled even louder, as Anders dug his knife into a particularly tough part of the crab’s shell. All of a sudden it gave, and the knife slipped directly into the ring finger on his left hand.
“Holy shit!” Anders shouted.
Piper gasped.
The room fell dead silent and every pair of eyes turned toward him. He looked up, stunned, likely from both the exquisite pain in his finger and the sudden quiet.
“Sorry,” he said. “I cut my finger.”
Piper jumped up and Pearl peered over the table at the red blood dripping down his hand. “Oh, dear. That’s gonna need a stitch.”
Anders swayed a little as Piper pressed the paper towels she’d retrieved into his hand to stem the flow. “Come on.” She took his arm gently to help him stand. “I’ll take you to the doctor.”
They rushed out into the dark evening. “There’s a clinic out here?” Anders asked, as they hurried down the street.
Piper hesitated. “Not really. He’s more of a dentist.”
“A dentist?”
“Well, retired now. We used to have a real physician, but he died a few years ago. Dr. Khari kind of took his place for all medical-related issues.”
“Maybe I’ll just wait until I get back to the mainland.” They both looked at the paper towel Anders was clutching; even in the dark, they could tell it was soaked through with blood.
“I don’t think you can.”
* * *
—
Dr. Sandeep Khari had just picked up his steaming chai tea when an urgent rapping at the door nearly made him drop his ceramic cup. He pressed the pause button on the remote, the Dowager Countess’s mouth freezing in midbarb (he’d have to rewind that—he hated to miss the full effect of her quick-witted insults), and sat stock-still, mirroring the screen, hoping that perhaps whoever it was might go away.
When he first moved out to Frick Island after a long, exhausting career in the obnoxiously loud bustling city of D.C., he had hoped to live out his years in quiet solitude. He had no idea the impressive letters of a higher degree after his name would inexplicably earn him the business of any and all medical-related questions on the island—from malaise-ridden pets to reflux in babies to opinions on broken fingers and weird skin rashes—and that quiet solitude would be nearly impossible to come by.
The knocking echoed throughout the house again, more rapid this time and followed by a pleading “Dr. Khari?” Sandeep sighed heavily, put his cup down on the sideboard, and went to the door.