Page 149 of Rhodes

The marsh is silver under a low winter sky, and the wind coming off the water has enough bite to make me pull my coat tighter around me as I cross toward the shed.

Dale, the foreman Grandbank put on the restoration in August and who has not taken a full day off since, is already there with a clipboard tucked under one arm.

“You didn't have to come out here on the holiday,” I tell him.

He glances up. “This is my happy place. Plus, I really want to talk to you about what we're dealing with.”

“That doesn't sound good.”

I step inside behind him. The shed smells like damp wood, mud, and old shell, the same way it always has. There are new racks along one wall now, part of the work we approved over the summer, and three pallets of bagged shell sit near the far door waiting for the next placement.

Dale taps the top sheet on his clipboard. “Our shell supplier is tapped out. Our last orders took most of what they had stockpiled, and they can't fill the next one.”

I exhale, frustrated. “Surely they aren't the only source between here and North Carolina. Charleston goes through enough oysters to pave the city with shell.”

We grow oysters, but that doesn't mean we keep the shell. Ours leave our farms whole and come back into the world one restaurant, oyster roast, and recycling bin at a time. Getting enough clean, cured shell back in one place for restoration is a completely different business, and apparently a scarce one.

“I've called twenty places from Jacksonville to the Outer Banks,” Dale says. “I can piece together the quantity, but not from one supplier. That means separate loads, separate schedules, and more freight. We lose the bulk pricing and make the whole job harder to control.”

“How short are we?”

“Right now we don't have enough to do half of the build on the East side. And that isn't even considering the West bank.”

I take the clipboard from him. He has quantities written in the margin beside the January and February work windows. I run my finger down the numbers, already doing the math.

“What about the place outside Beaufort?”

“Called them. They're too small.”

“The supplier Marion used last year?”

“Already committed through spring.”

“There was another one north of Savannah.”

“Raw shell. We'd have to cure it, and unless we build something to do that, we can't for the quantity we need.”

I hand the clipboard back and walk toward the pallets.

“So we don't need a shell supplier. We need several.”

“That is our only option right now, but you'll be spending twice as much getting it here.”

I turn. “What's the actual deadline?”

“If we want to stay on the winter placement schedule, I need the first delivery here by the second week of January.”

“That gives us a little time, but not much.” I tap the pen on my lip as I think this through. “What if we pull from farther north and consolidate somewhere before it comes down?”

“You planning to open a trucking company over break?”

“No, but there has to be somebody already doing regional loads who can combine them.”

“Maybe.”

We spend another twenty minutes going through what he has already tried. By the time I leave the shed, I have six names in my phone, two notes to call Marion, and one supplier outside Wilmington that might be worth chasing if I can figure out how to make the freight cost work.

Six months ago, anything going wrong at Oak Moss felt like another hand closing around my throat. Now it's just a problem with numbers and a deadline. I can work with those.