The Second Canopy on the Beach

I held the plate up. The one I had already fixed for her. A sandwich, two eggs, a thigh, some grapes.

“Sit down, Hilda,” I said. “Your feet are burnt. Get in the shade before you blister.”

She took the plate. She sat down on the end of the blanket, as far from Mom as she could get and still be out of the sun. She held it in both hands and did not eat.

Then she looked at Mom. “Goldie,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Are you all right? Did it hurt you?”

“I’m fine, honey,” Mom said. “Eat your lunch before the eggs get warm.”

“I’m not fine,” Hilda said, and then she put the plate down and put her face in her hands.

Emery moved to sit by her and she shook her head, so he stopped. Tanner looked at me like he wanted to know if it was his fault. I shook my head at him.

“I need to say why,” Hilda said through her fingers. “It’s not an excuse. I know it’s not. But I need to say it out loud to somebody.”

“Then say it,” Mom said gently. “Nobody here is going anywhere. We’ve got all afternoon.”

Hilda lifted her head. Her eyes were red and her nose was running, and she wiped it on the back of her wrist like a little girl.

“Two summers ago we took the kids to Topsail,” she said. “Zoe was four. The wind broke our cheap umbrella about eleven, and I thought, it’s fine, she’s got sunscreen on.”

She looked down the beach toward the water, toward the place where her kids had been playing.

“By three o’clock her shoulders were the color of a stop sign. That night she had blisters as big as quarters and a fever of a hundred and two. We ended up at an urgent care in Hampstead at midnight.”

Zoe had come over and climbed into her mother’s lap while she talked. Hilda put her arms around her and rested her chin on the top of that wet blonde head.

“The doctor there was nice about it,” Hilda said. “But she told me Zoe has my skin. The kind that burns in fifteen minutes. And she told me to get her checked every year, because of my mother.”

I did not know about her mother. I realized, sitting there, that in twelve years of Christmas dinners I had never once asked Hilda a real question about her mother.

“My mom died when I was twenty-six,” Hilda said. “Melanoma. It started as a spot on her shoulder she thought was nothing. She was fifty-four years old.”

Mom made a small sound in her throat and pressed her hand flat against her chest.

“She worked outside her whole life,” Hilda said. “Cleaned pools every summer back in Ohio. Never wore a hat. The doctors thought it went back to bad burns when she was young.”

She took a breath that shook all the way through her.

“So this morning we came over that dune, and I saw the beach packed end to end, and not one open spot with any shade.”

“And I saw Zoe crying in the bathtub with her back like that. And I saw my mother in the hospital bed. And I did not see anything else.”

“You saw your babies,” Mom said softly.