The Second Canopy on the Beach

When I was done, I gave each leg a hard shake. Nothing moved. I could have hung from that canopy by my hands and it would have held me.

Then I picked up Mom’s chair one more time and moved her six inches to the left, right under the seam where the two canopies met. Half in Hilda’s shade. Half in mine.

“There,” I said. “Now you’re in both of them, and nobody can say a word about it.”

Mom laughed. It made her cough, and I waited it out with my hand on her back, and then she laughed again, more carefully this time.

I went to the cooler. I had packed it the night before for everybody, because that is what you do.

I laid it all out on the big beach blanket under the two canopies. Pimento cheese sandwiches on white bread, cut in triangles the way Mom used to cut them for us. A dozen deviled eggs with paprika. Grapes. Cans of Cheerwine for the kids.

And a twelve-piece box of chicken I had picked up at the Bojangles on the way out of Wilson. Sweet tea in a gallon jug for Mom, who believes unsweet tea is a sin against the Lord.

Seven paper plates. Mom, me, Tanner, Emery, Hilda, Ferrell, Zoe. I counted them out twice, the way Mom always did before a family meal.

I fixed Mom’s plate first. Half a sandwich, two eggs, one wing because she cannot manage much more. I set it on her lap and put the tea in the cup holder of her chair.

Then I fixed a plate for Hilda. I did not do it to make a point. She was family, and my mother raised me to feed people.

But I also knew what it would look like when she walked up and saw it. I knew that, too, and I am not going to pretend I didn’t.

That was when Hilda came back up from the water. Zoe was on her hip, wet and sandy and talking a mile a minute about a crab. Ferrell trailed behind them with a bucket.

Zoe saw her grandma and slid right down off her mother. She ran straight to Mom’s corner and leaned on the arm of the chair. “Grandma, there’s crabs in there, little ones, they go sideways.”

Hilda stopped at the edge of the shade and did not take another step.

She looked at the second canopy, staked tight against hers. She looked at Mom, sitting under her white top with the tank in the shade at her feet. Then she looked at the plate in my hand.

Her mouth opened, but nothing came out of it right away.

And right behind her, coming down off the pier steps with Tanner beside him, was my brother Emery.

He stopped short at the blanket. He had seen the bent leg of my old canopy lying in the sand behind Mom.

Emery is a big man, like Dad was. He does not talk much. He looked at the bent canopy for a long moment, and then he looked at his wife, and then at me.

“What happened to your tent, Flora?” he asked, in that slow voice he uses when he already suspects the answer.

I opened my mouth, and Tanner beat me to it. Thirteen-year-old boys will tell you exactly what they saw, with no shading at all.