He opens the ice house at four

Ice is ten cents a pound if you're buying it in bags, which is what the weekend people pay. By the ton it's thirty-four dollars and Ladner hasn't moved that number in four years. He could. Pass Christian went up twice. The Gulfport ice house is condominiums now with a gate across the lot.

There's no other ice this side of the bay.

He opens at four. His daddy opened at four before him so the building's been doing it longer than that, but Ladner himself it's twenty-two years. Big door on a chain. Office in the back with a space heater running from about November into March, the little square kind with the orange bars. Mr. Coffee in there older than my middle girl.

I'm there at ten of. Denise sets the thermos out at night so I'm not banging around the kitchen at three looking for it.

Nine years we've drank a pot of coffee in that office. I couldn't tell you how it started. I was early one morning and it was cold and he had it made.

He don't talk. You can sit in there twenty minutes with the heater ticking and neither one of us says a word.

There's four or five boats icing out of that plant in the winter, more like nine in the summer. Everybody sees everybody's truck in that lot. Mine's been in it at ten of four for nine years and nobody has ever once said anything about that.

The lot's oyster shell.

The boat's fifty-eight foot, steel, built in Bayou La Batre in 1981. Note's at the bank, two thousand nine hundred forty a month. My brother's name is still on the documentation. Junior's been gone since 2014 and changing the paper is six hundred dollars and a lawyer, and the Coast Guard has never asked me one question about it.

A wrap went bad on the winch in '98 and took two fingers off the left hand and put me into the rail going the other way. I laughed when it happened. They tell me that's what shock does. Hip's been wrong since, so I take a ladder a foot at a time now like an old man.

My mother sits front row at Fatima and has since before I was born. She asks me about Ladner's knee when she sees me.

It was February. The twelfth or the thirteenth, I'd have to look. Diesel was three eighty-eight at the fuel dock that morning. It's four and a quarter now.

We'd had the pot. He got up to go start the conveyor and on the way past my chair he put his hand on the back of my neck. Four seconds, about.

Then he went out and started it.

I laughed. I sat there till the pot was gone and then I went and got my ice like always.

That week we were on 21-25 count and the dock was paying a dollar ninety a pound, which is nothing, it was two fifteen in October and everybody said it was coming back up. Out on the water it's the try net every half hour and whatever comes over the rail. Fuel for a two day trip runs me around four hundred and ten if I don't go past the Chandeleurs, and I don't go out there anymore since the boy on the Miss Charlene tore a wheel up in a norther and sat two days on the radio waiting on somebody to come get him. Take the boy's share out of it and then the ice and you're back at fuel again.

Next morning I was there at ten of four.

Coffee was made. He asked how'd we do. I said fair, lot of small. He said the conveyor bearing was going.

We did that every day through March and nobody said anything about anything.

In April I put Junior's boy on as a striker. Trey. Big as a door. He started coming in the office with me and then there was three cups on that desk, and Ladner talked more to him in a month than he'd talked to me in nine years. Saints mostly. Whether they'd keep the coach.

Trey went to Ingalls in July for the welding. Thirty-one an hour with his overtime and they carry his insurance. I told him go, and I meant it.

You don't run the heater in August. He puts a box fan in the office door turned to face out, and that pulls the cold off the floor of the plant and into the room with you.

One morning in June I had a thing I was fixing to say and the phone went off on the desk. Man about a compressor. By the time he hung it up I had my ticket in my hand and I was out in the lot.

Since March I've taken an extra half ton I've got no use for. Half a ton is seventeen dollars. Call it ninety trips, it'll be a year in February. That's fifteen hundred dollars of ice, near enough, and fifteen hundred is real money with the note at twenty-nine forty.

Denise keeps the ice tickets in a shoebox on top of the dryer for the woman who does our taxes in Gulfport. Sunday she had them out on the table in two piles and asked me was Ladner charging by the ton or by the bag now, because the weights didn't run even. I told her he'd changed how he writes them. She's got the box back up there.

Last week he asked did I want the extra. I said yeah, same as always. He wrote it on the pad.

Denise asked me back in the spring was I sick. I said no. She leaves a plate in the microwave and I eat it standing at the counter most days before I go lay down around six in the evening. The youngest one had a baby in October so there's a swing in the front room now and you have to go around it to get to the hall.

Kayla deals cards at the Beau. Second shift. She gets in about the time I'm getting up, and some mornings we're both in the kitchen and she asks me is it cold out and I tell her it's cold out.