The Second Canopy on the Beach

“Aunt Hilda pulled it down,” Tanner said. He had been coming down the pier steps when it happened. “It fell on Grandma. Mom had to lift it off her.”

It got very quiet under those two canopies. I could hear the waves, and somebody’s radio playing a ball game a few towels over, and a gull complaining up on the pier rail.

Hilda’s face went red from her neck up. “That’s not exactly,” she started. Then she stopped. “I didn’t know it would fall like that, Emery. I swear I didn’t.”

“Did it fall on Mama?” Emery asked her. Not loud. Just plain, the way you would ask somebody whether they had locked the truck.

Hilda looked down at the sand between her feet. “Yes,” she said. “It did.”

Emery nodded once. He reached into the back pocket of his swim trunks, where he keeps his wallet in a plastic bag because he is my father’s son. He opened it and counted out bills.

Two hundred dollars. All twenties. He walked over and held it out to me.

“For the tent,” he said. “My wife bent it. I’m paying for it.”

“Emery, you don’t have to do that,” I said. “It’s just a canopy. I already bought another one.”

“Yeah, I do,” he said, and he put the money in my hand and closed my fingers over it.

There were people watching. The older man under the umbrella a few yards up had sat all the way up in his chair.

Then Emery turned to his wife. He did not shout. I have never once heard my brother shout. He said it low enough that only the people under our canopies could hear.

“Hilda. That’s my mother.”

That was all. Four words. I watched them land on her like a weight set down on her shoulders.

“I know,” she said, and her voice cracked right down the middle.

“Carry that up to the truck,” Emery said, and nodded at my bent canopy in the sand. “Put it in the bed of Flora’s truck. Then come back down here and eat.”

I thought she would argue. She did not. She picked up the bent frame, and she carried it up the dune walkover in her bare feet, across sand hot enough to fry bacon.

It took her a long time. People turned their heads to watch her go, the way people do at the beach when there is nothing else to look at. I am sure she felt every one of them.

I did not enjoy it. I want you to know that. I sat down next to Mom and ate a deviled egg and did not watch.

Mom watched, though. She watched the whole way, and when Hilda disappeared over the top of the dune, Mom set her plate down on her knees.

“She’s hurting about something,” Mom said quietly. “That wasn’t meanness, Flora. That was something else wearing meanness like a coat.”

“It looked like meanness from where I stood, Mom. It looked like meanness when that frame came down on your head.”

“I know it did,” she said. “But I raised two children and taught Sunday school for thirty years. I know what scared looks like when it’s wearing a mean face.”

When Hilda came back, her feet were red on the bottoms and she was walking on the sides of them. She did not come under the canopy at first. She stood at the edge again, the way she had before.