The Beach Trip Nora Was Left Out Of

The Chain Of Paper Loops

Nora had been counting down to that beach trip since March.

My father announced it at Easter, standing at the head of my mother’s table with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. A house on the Alabama Gulf, big enough for the whole family under one roof, the way his own father had never managed. He wanted pictures of five generations of Lindgrens on the sand. He did not say who would book it, because in seventy-three years he has never had to.

I booked it. I always book it. I keep the books for the Maple Grove Co-op Grain Elevator out on Route 6, I have the card that never gets declined, and my father calls me the family wallet, which until this summer I took as a compliment.

The house was seven nights in the second week of July, five bedrooms, a white porch, blue shutters, rocking chairs facing the water. The company, Sandpiper Cove, took $2,160 up front, with the balance of $4,320 set to charge at check-in to the card on file. My Visa. I also put $410 down for my mother’s seventieth birthday dinner at the seafood place on the pier, the one she had seen on a cooking show, the one with the hush puppies. Nora asked what a hush puppy was, and I told her it was a fried ball of cornmeal that was not at all a puppy, and she laughed until she got the hiccups.

That was how the seashells started. She had a library book about the ocean, and she began drawing a shell in the square of every Saturday on the kitchen calendar, a spiral, a scallop, a striped cone. When she ran out of Saturdays she started on weekdays. Then she made a paper chain, yellow loop, blue loop, one for every morning left, and hung it over the sink. She tore one off every morning before she would let me pour her cereal.