Every Pontoon on the Cove Flew One

Willa stepped across from her boat onto mine while the whole cove was idling at the mouth, waiting for the horn.

She did not say good morning. She walked straight to the back rail, put both hands on Brady’s flagpole, and pulled it up out of the clamp.

I was at the helm with one hand on the throttle, holding us in line. It was nine in the morning on the Fourth of July and already warm, but the air on the water was cool enough that I had my coral cardigan on over a white sundress.

“Willa,” I said. “What are you doing?”

She did not answer me. She held the pole across her knee and yanked the flag off it. The top grommet tore straight out of the canvas header with a sound like a zipper, and the brass ring went skittering across the deck into the carpet.

“It looks like a rag, Selma,” she said. “The paper is shooting the whole line from the point. Every family boat matches this year. I told everybody that in May.”

She dropped the flag on my bench seat like it was a wet towel. Then she set the bare pole down beside it, stepped back over the gap onto her own pontoon, and told Carter to pull up two lengths so the bunting lined up.

That was all of it. It took less than a minute. I want to say that plainly, because in my head it has stretched out to an hour, and it was not an hour.

It was one woman, one flag, and about thirty boats watching.

Our son Drew saw it. He was ten, and he was riding in the parade on his uncle Carter’s boat that year because Carter had promised him he could work the horn.

He was standing at their front gate with the horn cord in his hand, and his face went white.

Here is what I did not do. I did not fight her on the water in front of half the cove, with my boy watching from the next boat over.

I had buried his father fourteen months before. Drew had seen enough grown people come apart. He was not going to watch his mother do it in a boat parade.

So I picked the flag up off the seat. I shut the motor down to idle and let the boat drift a little out of line, and I gathered it up against me, stars on top.

I would fold it properly later, the way Brady’s dad had taught me on his dock years ago.

I stood at the rail of our silver pontoon holding it against my chest. Behind me the whole line of decorated boats sat rocking in the wake, crepe paper and balloons and bunting, red, white and blue from one end of the cove to the other, and I did not cry. I was proud of that later.

Carter looked over from his helm at Willa. He is a big quiet man who runs a backhoe for the county, and I have heard him raise his voice maybe twice in fifteen years.

He did not raise it then either. He just said her name once. “Willa.” She would not look at him.

Then he did something I will always love him for. He pulled his boat out of the line, which she had numbered and drawn on a map and laminated, and he idled across to me with Drew, and he put my son over the rail into my boat without a word.

“Go on back to the dock,” he said to me quietly. “I’ll finish it. I’m sorry, Selma.”

I said thank you. I pushed the throttle up and turned for home, and behind us the horn at the point went off, and the parade started without us.