THE SHALLOWS

Chapter 9: Cold Tadpole

The last of it went at eight-forty.

By ten to nine Quinn had the chairs up on the tables and was wiping down the lowboy. One tray left in it, and nothing on the tray but ice, two squeezed lemon halves, and a thin red line at the front lip where blood had run down.

Sold out. She wrote the day's number on the pad by the register and looked at it for a while. It covered the fish, the gas, the insurance she paid in pieces every month, and the help she was going to have to hire before the fall. It did not cover her.

The ice machine was the only thing still running in the back. It ran all day, every day. The Shallows didn't sell drinks — not a can, not a bottle, not a glass of iced tea — and every morning she filled the bin anyway, because fish on ice would hold and fish without it wouldn't.

She killed the lights, checked the back door twice the way you do, and went out through the alley, which smelled like fryer oil and low tide.

Outside it was still ninety degrees at nine o'clock at night. Bellhaven in late August held the heat in the pavement and gave it back all evening.

She walked home with her apron in her bag.

The porch light was on, and Toby was on the other side of the screen door holding a cup with both hands, the way you hold something you've been told not to drop.

"Auntie Quinn." He pressed his nose against the mesh. "I saved you this."

She got the door open and crouched down to his height. The cup was clear plastic and sweating, with a fat straw stuck through the lid and pale pieces drifting at the bottom in something that wasn't quite juice.

"He wouldn't drink it," her mother said from the kitchen. "Nadine brought two home at dinnertime and gave him one of them. He carried his around for two hours telling everybody you were tired."

"What is it?"

"Cold shrimp." Her mother turned the burner down under nothing. "It's a sweet soup."

Quinn had never heard of it. "Cold shrimp."

"There's no shrimp in there," Toby said. He had the cup back against his chest and he was checking it, seriously, the way he checked whether the little clock in the hall was still working. "Why is it called cold shrimp?"

Four years old, and it was the right question. Quinn looked at her mother, because her mother was the one who answered questions in the kitchen.

"I don't know," her mother said. "That's always been the name."

So Quinn got her phone out and looked it up, standing in her own front room with her apron still in her bag. She read the first two answers. "Because they're shaped like shrimp," she said. "The little ones. Fat at the head, thin at the tail."

Toby held the cup up in front of the porch light and looked at it for a long time. Whatever he was seeing, it wasn't a shrimp.

"It doesn't look like a shrimp," he said finally. "It looks like tadpoles."

"Tadpoles," she said.

"White tadpoles." He nodded at his own verdict. "It should be called cold tadpole."

And there was no argument Quinn could make, because when she looked at the cup, that was exactly what was in it.

"Half for you," she said, "half for me." She tipped half of it into a glass and handed it over, which made it official. "Deal?"

"Deal."

She drank from the cup standing up. Cold and sweet and soft, and there was nothing in it to chew, and it did more for her than the number on the pad had.

"It's cold in my mouth," Toby announced, and finished his half in four long pulls on the straw.

Then he looked at hers. She let him have one more pull, and then the cup was done.

"Cold tadpole," he said.

"Cold tadpole," she agreed.

"Teeth," her mother said. "Then bed."

He got as far as the hallway and came back. "Auntie Quinn. Cold tadpole."

"I heard you the first time. Teeth."

He went.

Her mother wiped the counter, which was already clean. "You closed early."

"We sold out."

"Mm." The rag went around the same square of laminate twice. "How much."

"It was a good day."

"That's not what I asked."

"It was a good day, Ma."

Diane put a bowl of rice in front of her with a fried egg on top, the yolk still loose, and a spoon of the soy sauce she kept in the kitchen and never put out on the tables.

"Then eat something."

Quinn ate standing up. Her mother wiped the clean counter and said nothing else, and Quinn didn't either, and the egg was still hot when she got to the bottom of the bowl.

· · ·

Her fan made the same three sounds in the same order it had made all summer.

She lay on her back with the lights off and the phone above her face, and the app — which had clearly made a decision about her at some point in the last twenty-four hours — gave her cold shrimp.

*Cold Shrimp: The Drink That Owned This Summer.*

*Two Dollars, Ten Minutes, Nothing Fancy.*

*The Cold Shrimp Recipe Everybody Is Copying Right Now.*

The same bowl in a different kitchen, over and over. Some of the videos were shot on a phone propped against a jar, which she preferred. She watched the water in the pot go from cloudy to clear.

And then, because an app that learns keeps going, she got a bowl of something green.

*Pandan Cold Shrimp. Four Ingredients. You Will Not Believe the Color.*

The leaves went into the blender with water and came out the color of a lawn in June. When the drops hit the ice water they set into little commas, and the woman on the screen poured it all into a glass, and the green sat on top of the white in a way that looked like it cost nine dollars instead of two.

Quinn watched that one twice.

At three o'clock that afternoon a man at table four had asked if they had anything cold to drink. Not beer, he said. Anything. She'd told him water, and been embarrassed about it, and brought him a glass with ice and a lemon slice on the rim to make it look deliberate. He'd eaten a whole plate of eel rice in a ninety-degree room and drunk the water down to the ice.

It wasn't the first one this summer. It was just the first one she'd remembered on purpose.

She said it out loud in the dark, quietly, so it wouldn't carry down the hall.

"Pandan cold shrimp."

It sounded like a joke and looked like a photograph, and it would cost her almost nothing. The Shallows was going to have a drink.

She wasn't going to make it the way the video made it, though. The videos could tell her what the parts were — leaves, water, starch, heat, the pushing through the holes in the ladle. The parts weren't the dish. The eel rice had taught her that. Steam it, glaze it, put it back over the fire, glaze it again, again, until the skin came up gold. Nobody had handed her sister that plate and nobody was going to hand her this drink either. She would stand in her own kitchen and get it wrong as many times as it took.

She set her alarm for six and turned the phone face down.

· · ·

At seven she was at the market, and the market was already losing the argument with the heat.

She went down the produce row twice. Lemongrass, Thai basil, bitter melon, a whole wall of tomatoes going soft before the weekend. No pandan. She looked in the two stalls that carried anything you couldn't get at the supermarket, and then at the one that sold nothing but greens, and then she smelled it.

Green, and sweet, and a little like vanilla if vanilla grew out of the ground. It came out on the steam from the breakfast window at the front of the market, where a woman with her hair pinned up was working two burners and a steamer at the same time.

Under the glass: rice cakes stacked in a green row, pancakes rolled thin and folded over themselves, a layer cake in slabs, all of it the exact green of the video she'd watched twice the night before.

At the end of the counter, in a plastic bin, lay bundles of long leaves tied with string.

"Is that pandan?"

The woman looked up. "That's pandan."

"How much for all of it?"

"All of it." The woman looked from the bin to Quinn and back. "That's for cakes."

"I'll take all of it anyway."

She paid what the woman asked, which was too little, and she didn't argue about it.

The pandan had come from her son, who went up to Cordell for school and came home one holiday with a cake in his bag. Nobody in Bellhaven sold pandan then, so she'd learned to cook with it, then to grow it behind the house, and now half the market came to her window for the smell.

"Can I buy from you every week?" Quinn said. "However many you can pick."

The woman wiped her hands on the towel at her waist. "How many can you take?"

"More than this."

"For a bakery you don't look like a bakery."

"It's a restaurant. The Shallows. Down on the pier side."

Quinn typed her own number into the woman's phone and rang it once. Her phone buzzed in her bag. Now she had the woman's. The card taped to the register read Nora Louie, and under it, in ballpoint, a number that wasn't the one she'd just saved.

Nora dropped the leaves into a bag and set it on the counter between them, and looked at it, and then at Quinn.

"And what are you going to do with pandan leaves?"