Mom’s Lawn Chair on My Sister’s Dock

Her white hair was done. She had her dark wooden cane in one hand and her purse on her lap.

With my short dark blonde hair pinned back, I had on a red, white and blue striped top I bought at Bealls for the occasion.

Mom looked me over and said it was very patriotic. I put her folding lawn chair in my trunk next to the deviled eggs.

We took Highway 27 south out of Leesburg and then turned off on a county road that ran along the lake. The pastures were steaming from the rain.

Denise’s street was a dead end of old block houses along a canal. Cars were parked on both sides, all the way down, pulled half up into the grass.

Somebody had put little American flags along the edge of the yard, stuck in the dirt every few feet.

I parked four houses down. I got Mom out of the car the slow way, her good leg first, my arm under hers.

Then I got her chair out of the trunk and tucked it under my other arm.

We walked down the street together, her cane on one side and me on the other. It took us a while. Nobody noticed us at first.

The party was on the side lawn and out back, and there was music playing from somebody’s truck, and Phil was at the grill with a spatula.

The house was just like the pictures, pale yellow with a new tin roof that still shone.

The lawn ran down to the canal, and from there the dock went out straight and long, through a stand of cypress trees, to where the canal opened up into Lake Harris.

The lake was calm after the storm. Flat as a plate, and the color of tea where it was shallow, and bright where the late sun hit it.

The cypress trees stood up out of the water at the edges with their knees poking up around them.

There were maybe forty people on the lawn. Women in sundresses and shorts. Men in fishing shirts and ball caps.

Covered dishes on two folding tables under a pop-up tent.

We came around the side of the house, and that was when Denise saw us.

She was standing on the lawn with a paper plate in one hand, talking to two women from her church.

She had on a white sundress, and she had dyed her hair red again, the bright copper red she has been wearing since she was forty. She looked very pretty.

She stopped talking in the middle of a word. The plate tipped a little in her hand. She did not move. She just stood there on the grass and watched us come.

I did not stop. Mom did not either. We went right past the tent and the tables and down the slope of the lawn to the head of the dock. People were turning to look now. Somebody turned the music down.

“Hey, Miss Helen,” somebody said, uncertain. It was a woman from Mom’s old Sunday school class. Mom nodded to her and kept walking.

The dock was wooden, gray and solid, wide enough for two. I could feel it give a little under our feet.

Mom held my arm with her free hand. Her cane went tap and then tap on the boards. I carried the lawn chair against my hip.