Mom’s Lawn Chair on My Sister’s Dock

“No,” she said.

“Mom, she took everything. You’re going to run out of money by Christmas.”

“I heard you the first time, and I heard her yesterday. I am not deaf and I am not simple.” She said it gently. “I am not going to have my own daughter put in handcuffs. I carried that girl. I am not going to watch a deputy put her in the back of a car.”

“Then what do we do?”

“I want to see it,” Mom said. “With my own eyes. I want to see this lake house that’s for my care someday. Before anybody calls anybody, I want to stand on it and look at it.”

I tried to argue. I told her Denise would never invite her. I told her Denise would have a story ready.

Mom just picked up her coffee again and looked out the window at the courtyard, where a mockingbird was going through every song it knew.

“Then we will wait until there’s a door open,” she said. “There always is, with Denise. She never could stand a party she wasn’t throwing.”

Mom was right. She usually is. In the middle of June, Denise posted an invitation on Facebook.

A Fourth of July party at the lake house, a housewarming and the holiday together. Bring a covered dish and a lawn chair, it said. Fireworks over Lake Harris at dark.

She invited about sixty people. Her church, her friends from the school, Phil’s buddies from the truss plant, the neighbors on the canal. She invited me, too, in a separate message. “Come if you want,” it said. “Mom’s probably not up to it with her hip. Don’t wear her out.”

I printed the invitation at work and brought it to Mom on my lunch break. She read it twice. Then she handed it back to me.

“Bring a lawn chair,” she said. “Well, I have one.”

“Mom.”

“I’m up to it,” she said. “The physical therapist says I walk better than half the people in this building. Tell Denise you’re coming. Don’t tell her about me.”

I wrote back to Denise that night. “I’ll be there around five,” I said. “I’ll bring deviled eggs.” She sent back a thumbs up. That was all. We had not spoken since May.

My son Kyle is twenty-eight. He is a lineman for the electric co-op out of the Leesburg yard, and he has two babies of his own, Ava, who is six, and Cole, who is four.

Kyle was on call for the Fourth. Summer storms in Lake County knock power out somewhere every afternoon, and holidays are no different.

He came by my house the Thursday before and sat on my back step with a glass of tea.

“You sure about this, Mama?” he asked. “Taking Grandma out there with all those people?”

“No,” I said. “But she is. It’s her money and her daughter. Your aunt doesn’t know what’s coming.”

Kyle nodded slowly. He is like his grandfather that way. He thinks before he talks, and when he talks it counts. “If I get off before dark, I’ll bring the kids out,” he said. “Grandma’s going to want them there. Whatever happens.”

The afternoon storm came through on time, around two o’clock, the way it does every July in central Florida.

It rained hard for forty minutes and then quit. By four the clouds had moved off east, and the heat came back up out of the ground.

I picked Mom up at Lakeside Oaks at four thirty. She was waiting in the lobby in her blue blouse, the one Dad always said made her eyes look like the Gulf, and navy slacks.