The Second Canopy on the Beach

Ninety-one. Not great, not terrible. On a good day in her own recliner she sits at ninety-three or ninety-four on two liters.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Flora. I’m fine. Don’t make a thing out of it in front of all these people.”

“I’m not making a thing, Mom,” I said, though I could feel my jaw so tight it ached.

“You’ve got your mechanic face on,” she said. “The one you get when a bus won’t turn over and the whole route is waiting on you.”

I almost laughed. Instead I stood up and moved her tank closer to her chair, where it had been sitting in the shade a minute before and was now sitting in the open sun.

The oxygen company tells you to keep the tank out of direct heat. I had read that line twice before we left Wilson at six that morning.

Behind me, Hilda had her canopy up in about four minutes. I will give her that. She was quick and she knew what she was doing, and the white top snapped tight in the breeze off the water.

She set it right where mine had been, in the exact flat spot by the dune walkover that I had walked the beach to find at a quarter past eight.

Then she called her kids. “Ferrell, Zoe, come get your sunscreen.” Ferrell was nine that summer. Zoe was six. They stood still while she rubbed lotion into their shoulders and faces, hard and fast.

She did not look at Mom. She did not look at me. When the kids were done she took them by the hands and walked them down toward the water, where the waves were coming in small and green.

And there my mother sat, in the full sun, on a June day at Kure Beach, with her tank in her lap like a baby she was trying to keep cool.

I need to back up a little, so you know how we got there, and why that particular morning mattered so much to her and to me.

My father brought us to Kure Beach every summer from the time I was four until the year he died. He liked it because it was quieter than Carolina Beach and had the old fishing pier.

He could stand at the end of that pier all morning with his line out and nobody bothering him.

Mom liked it because Dad liked it. That is how she was with him. Forty-one years married, and she never once asked to go anywhere else.

Dad has been gone eleven years now. After the diagnosis, Mom started saying the same thing every few weeks, usually when the weather turned or a commercial for the beach came on the television.

“I’d like to sit and look at that water one more time,” she would say. “Just sit. I don’t need to get in it. I just want to look at it.”

She said it so often that by March I had started planning. I asked for the Saturday off at the garage. I called the oxygen company and asked how many tanks she would need for a full day away from her concentrator.

They told me the small cylinders with her conserver would run about four hours each at her setting, maybe a little more. I packed three, and the spares rode in a milk crate in my truck bed so they would not roll.