The Second Canopy on the Beach

Hilda pulled the first stake out of the sand like she was pulling a weed, quick and without looking, and the whole corner of my canopy dipped toward my mother’s head.

I was kneeling at the cooler with a jar of pimento cheese in one hand. By the time I stood up she had the second stake out, and the frame was already folding.

Not two minutes before, she had come over the dune with her kids and her own canopy bag and looked at our spot. “This isn’t going to work,” she said. “Ferrell and Zoe can’t be out in this sun.”

“Put yours up and we’ll share,” I told her. “There’s room for everybody.” She didn’t answer me. She just set her bag down and reached for my stake.

It came down slow, the way those pop-up canopies do when nobody is holding the legs. The top sagged, then the side bar caught Mom across the shoulder and rested there like a hand.

One leg bent at the slider joint as it went. It made a sound like somebody stepping on a soda can, a flat little pop that I can still hear if I think about it.

Mom put her hand flat to her chest. She did it the way you would steady your glasses, only her eyes were wide, and her other hand went to the tank clipped to her chair.

Somebody behind us said, “Whoa, now.” I never did see who. It was a man’s voice, older, from one of the umbrellas a few yards up the beach.

I lifted the frame off my mother and held it in the air. It was not heavy. It was just in the wrong place, the way so many things were that morning.

“Your mother can sit in the car with the air on,” Hilda said. She was already shaking out her own canopy, a white one still creased from the box. “My kids can’t.”

She said it to me, not to Mom. She did not raise her voice. That was almost worse, how ordinary it sounded, like she was telling me where to park.

My name is Flora. I was forty-seven that June. I work as a diesel mechanic at the county school bus garage outside Wilson, North Carolina, and I have for nineteen years.

I am telling you that so you understand I am not a person who freezes. I have pulled an injector on the side of Highway 264 in sleet.

But I stood there holding that bent canopy and did not say one word to my brother’s wife, and I want to tell you why, because it is the reason for everything that came after.

Mom has pulmonary fibrosis. She was diagnosed three years ago and has been on oxygen for two. Her lungs are stiff now, like an old leather glove left out in the rain.

When people raise their voices around her, she gets winded. It is not drama. Her breathing speeds up to match the room, and her numbers drop, and once they drop it takes her a long time to bring them back.

So I didn’t fight Hilda for the spot. A shouting match on a crowded beach was not going to give Mom shade any faster, and it might have cost her the whole day. That was the whole of my thinking.

I set the bent canopy down in the sand behind Mom’s chair. I knelt in front of her, put my hand on her knee, and looked at the little pulse meter clipped to her finger.