The Morning Mom Finally Saw the Ocean

“Is Grandma going to the ocean?” she said.

“Maybe,” I said. “If we can work it out. It would mean we don’t go to the lake this year.”

Emma thought about it. She is a serious girl, more like her mother than me. Then she said, “Grandma needs somebody to hold onto in the waves. She doesn’t know how they work.”

“Do you?”

“I’ve seen them on TV. They knock you down if you’re not holding onto somebody.”

Phyllis runs the church office at First Methodist three days a week. She is in her seventies, and she has been organizing the fall bus trip for something like twenty years. She keeps the sign-up sheet on a clipboard and she knows everyone’s blood pressure medicine.

“Matt Ostrander,” she said when I walked in. “Is somebody sick?”

“No, ma’am. I want to sign Mom up for the trip. And me with her.”

Phyllis took her glasses off and looked at me. Then she put them back on and opened her drawer and took out the clipboard.

“Your mother has had her name half written on this sheet three different times,” she said. “I’ve watched her pick up the pen and put it down again. You’ll want a single room for yourself, then. That’s extra.”

All in, with my single room, it came to $2,740 for the two of us. I wrote her a check right there on the counter. My hand did not shake, but my stomach did a little, because that was most of what we had.

I told Mom that Sunday, after Randy had gone home. I waited until it was just her and me on the back step, shelling the last of the garden beans into a dishpan.

“I signed us up,” I said. “For Myrtle Beach. You and me. It’s paid.”

She stopped shelling. She held one bean in her fingers for a long time.

“You did what?”

“It’s paid, Mom. Phyllis has the check. We leave the twenty-first.”

She started to cry first. Then she started to argue. She said I could not afford it and I had children to think of, and what about my job, and what would people say. I let her go through all of it.

Then she wiped her eyes on her sleeve and said, “I’ll need a swimming suit. I haven’t owned a swimming suit since 1966.”

“You don’t have to swim. You can just stand in it.”

“Well, I’ll need something to stand in it with,” she said, and she went inside and came back out with a notepad and a pencil and started a packing list right there on the step.

She did not tell Randy. I did not tell Randy. I am not proud of that part, but I knew what he would say, and I knew Mom would fold her napkin and change her mind.

The bus left the church parking lot at six o’clock in the morning on the twenty-first of September. It was still dark. There were thirty church ladies standing around in jackets with their suitcases, and the driver, Gene, was loading the luggage underneath, and someone had brought a thermos of coffee big enough to wash a calf in.

Kelly and the kids came to see us off. Emma hugged her grandmother for a long time and said something in her ear that I did not hear. Mom laughed and patted her cheek.

Then Emma handed her a plastic grocery sack. Inside was a pair of rubber water shoes from the farm store in town, the kind kids wear at the lake.