The Morning Mom Finally Saw the Ocean

“For the shells,” Emma said. “So they don’t cut your feet. I used my own money.”

I watched my mother try to say thank you and not be able to. So she just kissed the top of Emma’s head and got on the bus.

Mom took the window seat. I took the aisle. The bus pulled out past the grain elevator just as the sky started to go gray in the east, which was the direction we were going, and Mom put her hand flat on the window like she could feel the ocean through it already.

It is two long days on a bus from our county to Myrtle Beach, with one night in a motel outside Nashville.

The ladies had a system, and the system was Phyllis. She had a cooler of ham sandwiches and pimento cheese sandwiches under the front seat, and she had a box of hymnbooks from the choir room. She had a list of who took which pills at what time of day.

Somewhere in Missouri, Phyllis stood up at the front of the bus and announced “Shall We Gather at the River.” Mom sang it beside me in a voice I had not heard since I was a little boy in the pew next to her. She knew every word without the book.

“Your father liked that one,” she said when it was over. “He said it was the only hymn with any water in it.”

Before she dozed off, she told me about the hailstorm year. She told me things I never knew. She told me Dad had already bought the bus tickets that spring, before the hail, and had to call and get the money back.

“He sat at that kitchen table and cried,” she said. “Your father. I only ever saw him cry twice. That was one, and the other was when Randy was born.”

“Not when I was born?”

“You were born in the middle of wheat harvest,” she said. “He didn’t have time.” Then she laughed and patted my hand, and that was when she fell asleep.

At a rest stop past Asheville, I got off the bus and called Randy. I do not know why. I think I thought it was not right for him to hear it from someone at church.

“Where are you?” he said. “Your truck isn’t at the shop.”

“North Carolina. I’m taking Mom to the ocean. We’ll be at Myrtle Beach tonight.”

There was a long silence on the line. I could hear a combine in the background, the big Case he had bought used the year before. Fall harvest had started on his milo.

“You paid for that,” he said. It was not a question.

“I did.”

“With what?”

“With what we had, Randy.”

Another long silence. Then he said, “Well, I hope she likes it,” and he hung up. I stood by the bus for a minute looking at my phone. Then Phyllis rapped on the window and pointed at her watch, and I got back on.

We got in after dark the second night. The motel was across the road from the beach. When Gene opened the bus door, the air came in heavy and damp and smelling like salt and something else I did not have a name for.

And you could hear it. Even across the road, even with the traffic. A long low roar, coming and going.

Mom stood on the bus steps with her purse over her arm and listened.

“Do you want to walk over?” I said. “We could just look.”