The Girl Who Kept Shooting

My sister

Colleen is my older sister by three years. She married Eldon when she was twenty-two and he was twenty-nine, and for most of my life I liked him fine.

He was the kind of uncle who taught my kids to fish off the Big Bay Creek dock. He fried the fish himself on a propane burner behind the rental. He knew every tide table by heart.

But something had changed in him. I had noticed it the way you notice a fence leaning, a little more every year, until one day you realize it is about to come down.

Colleen found me on the beach after dark. The tide had gone out and the sand was hard and wet, and you could see the lights of the shrimp boats far out on the water.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I told him he has to make it right.”

“What is wrong with him, Colleen?”

She was quiet for a while. She pulled her cardigan tighter around her. “I’m not going to make excuses for him,” she said. “I’m just not going to. What he did was wrong.”

“All right.”

“But I’ll tell you this much, and you can do what you want with it. He’s not mad at Bridget. He’s ashamed. And he doesn’t know how to say it.”

Mama’s envelope

When I came back up from the beach, Mama was sitting on the bottom step of the rental house in her housecoat, with her bare feet in the sand. She had been waiting for me.

She held out a white envelope. It was one of the ones from her bank, the First Citizens in Greenwood, with the window in the front. It was thick.

“Four hundred dollars,” she said. “Get that child another camera.”

“Mama, no. That’s your grocery money for the week.”

“It’s my money and I’ll spend it how I please.” She pressed it into my hand and closed my fingers over it with her own. Her hands were cold. “Get her one he can’t drown.”

I sat down next to her on the step. We did not say anything for a while. The surf was loud in the dark, and somewhere a screen door was banging.

“Your daddy would have walked that man into the ocean after it,” she said finally.

“I know.”

“I’m glad he didn’t have to.” She patted my knee. “Go on to bed. You’ve got a drive in the morning.”