Mom’s Lawn Chair on My Sister’s Dock

Halfway out, Mom squeezed my arm. “Your daddy fished this lake,” she said, very quietly. “Every Saturday he could get away. He would have liked this dock.”

It is a long dock. Maybe a hundred feet, out past the cypress trees to the open water. It took us a long time to walk it.

I could feel forty people watching our backs the whole way, and I could hear how quiet it had gotten behind us.

At the very end, Mom stopped. She looked out over the lake, toward Leesburg, where the town water tower stood up small on the far shore.

She took a breath of the lake air, and I saw her shoulders let go.

“Set it up right here, honey,” she said. “Facing the water.”

I unfolded the chair. The bent arm creaked the way it always has.

I set it square in the middle of the end of the dock and held it steady while Mom lowered herself down into it, her cane across her knees.

Then she turned the chair a little, with her good foot, so she was facing the house instead of the lake. So she was facing the lawn, and the forty people, and her daughter.

Denise came down the dock by herself. She had put the plate down somewhere.

Her face was white under all that red hair.

Behind her, nobody on the lawn was talking. Phil had turned off the grill. He was standing with the spatula still in his hand, looking at his wife’s back.

“Mom,” Denise said. She stopped about ten feet from the chair. “What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be out in this heat. Lori, what are you thinking, bringing her out here with her hip?”

“Lori didn’t bring me,” Mom said. “I brought me. Lori drove.”

“Mom, this isn’t the time.”

“I think it is.” Mom folded her hands on top of her cane. “You invited sixty people to see your lake house. I’m one of them. I’m the one who paid for it.”

Denise’s mouth opened and closed. Behind her, on the lawn, I saw a woman put her hand to her mouth.

The dock was a long way from the house, but the lake was dead calm, and sound carries over water. Everybody heard it.

“Mom, please,” Denise said, much quieter. “Can we go inside and talk about this? Just us?”

“We could have talked in March,” Mom said. “You came to see me four times in March, at the rehab and at Lakeside. You brought me a magazine and a pecan pie. You never said a word.”

Denise did not answer. Her eyes were filling up.

“You told Lori this house was for my care someday,” Mom said. She looked around her, at the dock and the cypress trees and the tin roof shining up on the lawn. Then she looked back at her daughter. “Well, it’s someday. Here I am.”

Denise sat down. Not on anything. She just sat down on the dock boards, right where she was, in her white sundress, and put her face in her hands.

I have never seen my sister cry in front of people. Not at Dad’s funeral.

Not when she lost a baby, the year before she had her son. She is the one who holds it together. She was not holding anything together now.

“We were going to lose the house,” she said into her hands. “In Tavares. Phil was out of work four months, and we were four payments behind, and the bank sent the letter. I couldn’t tell anybody. I couldn’t tell you.”