For the record, I did not ask to become emotionally invested in oysters. That was Beau's doing. All of it was Beau's doing.
We'd been planning this Apalachicola trip for two months, which in Beau-time means he texted me one afternoon with "what if we just went to that little gulf town" and I somehow ended up the one who booked the inn, packed the cooler, and printed a map of Market Street like it was a military operation. He contributed a vibe and a tote bag. The tote bag had a crab on it. He thought this was thematically appropriate.
We got there on a Saturday morning, which meant the farmers market was running at Mill Pond, and I will say the man has instincts, because it was genuinely lovely. Cool, a little cloudy, that soft salt-damp air that makes you feel like you're in a painting of yourself having a better life. Beau immediately bought honey from a woman named Darlene and told her she had "a real operation here" like he was a venture capitalist evaluating a pitch deck. She thanked him politely. He bought a second jar.
The bread was incredible. The pies were stacked on a folding table under a canopy and I ate half a slice of muscadine pie standing up like a feral person and I would do it again.
But here is where Beau became Beau.
Somewhere between the honey and the hand-thrown pottery, he disappeared for seven minutes and came back with the energy of a man who had received a prophecy. "The oysters are back," he said. Just like that. No preamble. His eyes were doing the thing.
I knew about the oysters — you couldn't not know, it was genuinely a big deal, five years of the bay being closed and the whole town quietly holding its breath — but I had understood this intellectually. Beau had understood it personally and was now on a mission.
"We have to find someone who's harvesting today," he said. "There's a guy. At the waterfront. The woman at the honey table said he might have some."
"She said might," I said.
"Right, so we should go now before someone else gets there."
Honey Darlene had mentioned, in a single offhand sentence, that a man sometimes sold oysters near the river. This was not a lead. This was barely a rumor. Beau treated it like a treasure map.
We spent the next hour and a half walking along the waterfront in the rising warmth — it had gotten genuinely beautiful by then, that coastal-warm that sneaks up on you when the clouds thin out — while Beau approached several strangers about oysters, two of whom were tourists who looked at him with complete confusion, and one of whom was actually a city worker doing something involving pipes and stormwater infrastructure, who was also not selling oysters.
"It's a revitalization zone," Beau explained to me, as if I hadn't been standing there when the man explained this himself.
We did eventually find the oysters. There was, in fact, a guy. He had a cooler and a folding chair and the kind of face that looked like it had seen thirty years of bay weather, and he was perfectly willing to sell us two dozen. Beau shook his hand like they were closing a deal on a vessel.
We ate them on a bench in the sun with hot sauce from my bag — I packed the hot sauce, Beau packed a second hat — and I have to tell you they were extraordinary. Briney and cold and small and perfect. Beau looked out at the water with an expression usually reserved for the ends of movies.
"This is why you come somewhere," he said.
I thought about pointing out that I had come here for the farmers market and the pie and the porch at the inn that I had booked. That he had essentially led us on a ninety-minute waterfront expedition based on a whisper from Honey Darlene. That his second hat remained unnecessary in all weather conditions.
Instead I ate another oyster.
The afternoon opened up warm and bright, the kind of weather that makes you forgive everything. Beau put his arm around me and said, "told you we should come here."
He did not say this. He said "what if we just went." These are not the same sentence.
But the oysters were back, and the bay was there, and the honey was genuinely excellent.
I let him have it.