The Week At The Gulf

The week

I will not pretend it was all a postcard. It never is.

The middle boy got a jellyfish sting the second day and we poured vinegar on it off the kitchen counter and he was a little hero about it by supper. Hannah got a sunburn on her shoulders because I lost track of her for one hour and I felt terrible. There was a tantrum over a dropped ice cream cone that I will remember on my deathbed.

But I am telling you.

We built a sandcastle the size of a card table, all nine of us, and the tide took it the first night and the kids cried and then we built a bigger one.

Earl taught the boys to throw a cast net off the little dock and they caught nothing for two days and then they caught a mess of mullet and you would have thought it was gold. He showed them how to fold the lead line over their arm and let it go with a flick of the wrist so it opened into a circle on the water. The oldest got it first and crowed about it so loud a man two docks down laughed and tipped his hat.

Kim and I shelled shrimp at the kitchen sink and talked about things we had not talked about in years. Her marriage. My mother. Whether I was scared of dying, which she asked me straight out, and I told her the truth, which is that mostly I am scared of missing things like this.

Jeff did come, the way I told him to. Drove in Wednesday night, fourteen hours, red-eyed, and stood in the doorway holding Rosie asleep on his shoulder. He stayed through Sunday morning. The first time he walked Rosie into the water, holding both her hands, letting the little waves run up over her feet, she screamed and laughed and screamed again, and Jeff looked back up the beach at me with a face I had not seen on him since he was a boy.

“She’s not scared of it,” he called up. “She’s not scared of anything, Mom.”

“She gets that from her grandpa,” I called back. Earl, in the folding chair, lifted his coffee without opening his eyes.

One night the power flickered off in a thunderstorm and all seven children ended up on the big bed with a flashlight, telling each other ghost stories that were mostly about a ghost who was also a dog. I stood in the hall and listened to them and did not turn the lights back on even after the power came up.

Every morning that week started the same. Earl was up first, before any of them, and he would carry his coffee down to the water in the gray light and stand at the edge with his pants rolled up to his knees. By the third morning the children had figured out his schedule, and one by one they would slip out in their pajamas and go stand beside him, watching the gulls work the shallows. I watched it from the porch. Seven little figures in a row beside the old man, all facing the same water, the sun coming up pink behind them. He would hand each one a shell he had found before they woke, like it was nothing, like he had just happened to have it in his pocket.

The oldest girl, Hannah, started keeping her shells in a Folgers can she found under the sink. She made Rosie the keeper of the smallest ones, the little pink coquinas no bigger than a fingernail, and Rosie carried them in a jelly jar all week and would not let anybody touch them without asking.

We said grace every night at that crowded table and every single night a different child wanted to say it, and every single prayer thanked God for the beach and for the cousins and one night, out of Rosie, “and for Grandma’s soft lap, amen,” and I had to leave the table for a minute.