The Second Canopy on the Beach

It was a long walk on hot sand, and I went fast. My feet burned. I did not care. I kept thinking about that number on Mom’s finger.

Inside it was cool and smelled like coconut lotion and shrimp. There were two canopies left on the rack by the register. One was a fancy one with side walls. The other was plain.

The plain one was a hundred thirty-nine dollars. I had brought two hundred in cash for the whole day. I put a hundred and two twenties on the counter.

The girl at the register was maybe nineteen, sunburned across the nose, with her hair pulled back in a clip. She looked at me in my red swimsuit and shorts, and at the long canopy bag, and then back at me.

“That’s about forty pounds,” she said. “You want me to get somebody from the back to carry it down for you?”

“I fix school buses for the county,” I said. “I can carry a canopy.”

She grinned. “Yes ma’am.” She threw in a bag of four sand anchors without ringing them up, and I thanked her, and I have never forgotten that girl.

I put the bag on my shoulder and walked back down the beach. You keep a load close and let your legs do the work.

When I came over the rise by the walkover, I could see Mom from a long way off. She was sitting very still in that back corner of Hilda’s shade, her hands folded, looking at the water.

Hilda was still down with the kids. Ferrell was digging. Zoe was jumping the little waves and screaming every time one touched her. Nobody had noticed yet that Mom had been moved.

I set the bag down right next to Hilda’s canopy. Not ten feet away. Not across the sand. Right beside it, so close the corners would touch.

That was the whole idea. I was not going to set up my own little country down the beach. We came to sit together, and we were going to.

Pop-up canopies are easy until there is wind, and there is always wind at the coast. The trick is to walk the frame out slow.

I pushed the frame open until the top bars were tight. Then I lifted one side and clicked the first two legs up to full height. The breeze caught the top and tried to take it, and I leaned into the leg and held it.

Mom was watching me. I could feel it before I looked up from the leg.

When I did look, she was sitting forward a little in her chair, her white curls lifting in the breeze, the sky blue cover-up loose around her shoulders.

She was smiling the way she used to smile at Dad’s back when he was fixing something in the yard.

“You always did fix things quiet,” she said.

I did not answer. I could not have. I raised the other two legs and lined the corners up with Hilda’s until the two tops were edge to edge with no gap between them.

One long piece of shade, twenty feet wide, running right down the sand like it had been planned that way from the start.

I filled the anchor bags with sand, hooked each one to a leg, and then drove the stakes at an angle into the packed sand under the soft top layer, two to a corner. Dad taught me that. You stake toward the wind, not away from it.