The Second Canopy on the Beach

I called my brother Emery in April. He lives over near Greenville with Hilda and the kids. He drives a propane route and works most Saturdays, but he traded with somebody.

“Mom wants to go to Kure,” I told him. “She keeps saying one more time. I don’t like how she says it, Emery. I don’t like it at all.”

“I don’t either,” he said. He was quiet a minute on the line. “We’ll be there. I’ll bring the kids. Hilda will want to come too.”

I did not say anything about Hilda then. There was nothing to say. She and I had never been close, but we had never been enemies either. We had just been two women who sat at the same Christmas dinners.

She had always kept a careful distance from Mom, polite and a little stiff. I had put it down to her being raised different, up in Ohio.

That was all I knew about her. That was all I thought there was to know, and I am not proud of how little I had bothered to find out.

My brother was not even on the beach that minute. He had walked out onto the pier with my son, Tanner, to buy their fishing passes and look at what the old men were pulling in.

Tanner is thirteen. His father moved to Raleigh after the divorce and calls on birthdays. Emery has filled in more than he had to. I will always be grateful to him for that.

Mom touched my arm. “Flora, let’s just go,” she whispered. “We can sit in the truck a while with the air going. I don’t want any trouble.”

I looked at her face. She was flushed already. Her white curls were damp at the temples, and her sky blue cover-up, the one she had bought at Belk for this exact trip, was sticking to her back.

“We drove two hours for this, Mom,” I said. “You’ve been talking about this ocean since March. We are not sitting in the truck.”

Then I looked at Hilda’s canopy. It was a ten by ten, same as mine had been. The kids’ towels were spread under the front, but the back half was empty sand in good shade.

I picked up Mom’s beach chair with her still sitting in it. She weighs maybe a hundred and ten pounds now. I have lifted heavier batteries.

“Flora,” she said, and grabbed the arms of the chair. “Flora Ann, you put me down this minute.”

I set her down under the back corner of Hilda’s canopy, squarely in the shade, facing the water. Then I went back for the tank and set it on the sand at her feet, out of the sun.

“Flora, that’s hers,” Mom said. She looked toward the waves where Hilda was standing. “She’s going to come back up here and pitch a fit.”

“It’s shade, Mom,” I said. “You sit right here and look at your ocean. I’ll be back before she is.”

I checked her finger meter again. Ninety-two. She was coming back. I stood there long enough to watch the number hold, and then I picked up my wallet and my keys.

“Where are you going?” she asked, twisting in the chair to keep me in sight.

“To get us our own,” I said.

The shop at the foot of the pier sells everything a family forgets. Boogie boards, folding chairs, sunscreen at three times the price, bait in the back. I had seen canopies in the window that morning.