The Second Canopy on the Beach

Around one, I took Tanner and Ferrell and Zoe down to the water so Emery could go out on the pier and fish for an hour.

From out in the waves, holding Zoe up while she kicked, I could look back up the beach and see the two canopies standing side by side. The white one and mine, corners touching, one long shadow on the sand.

And under the seam, two women.

Mom with her tank at her feet, Hilda on the towel beside her, their heads tipped together. Hilda’s hands were moving the way hands move in a long story.

Later, when we were packing up, Mom told me some of it. Hilda had told her about her own mother. About the hospice bed in the living room in Dayton, and the double shifts at the pharmacy that made her miss most of the end.

“She said she never got to just sit with her,” Mom told me. “At the end. She was always running. She said she always meant to just sit.”

Mom was quiet a minute, holding the strap of her tank bag across her lap.

“So I let her sit with me,” she said. “Seemed like the least I could do for her.”

At half past two, the gauge on Mom’s tank was down near the red. I went to get the next cylinder from the milk crate in my truck, and Hilda stood up and said, “I’ll come with you. Show me how to switch it.”

So we walked up the walkover together, the two of us, across the hot boards. She walked carefully because of her feet. I slowed down to match her and did not say anything about it.

At the truck I showed her how the regulator comes off and goes on, how you crack the valve to blow out grit, how you read the gauge. She paid attention.

“I didn’t know any of this,” she said. “I didn’t know she needed so many. I didn’t know any of it, and I should have.”

“Nobody tells you,” I said. “You learn it when you have to, the same way I did.”

She looked at the bent canopy lying in the truck bed where she had put it, the crooked leg sticking up over the side.

“I’ll buy you a new one,” she said. “A good one. Emery paid, but I’ll pay him back out of my own money. I want to.”

“Emery already paid,” I said. “And I’m going to fix that one myself.”

“It’s bent, Flora. Bent bad. I heard it go.”

“I fix school buses,” I said. “I’ve got a vise in my shop as big as your head. I can straighten a canopy leg.”

She laughed. It was the first time I had ever heard Hilda laugh at something I said. It was a good laugh, too, surprised right out of her.

We carried the new tank back down together. She carried it, actually. She insisted. She held it in both arms like it was something that could break.

We stayed until almost six. The light went long and gold across the water. Emery caught two spot and a croaker off the pier and was prouder than if he had landed a marlin.

Mom fell asleep in her chair around five, under the seam, with her chin down and her tank hissing softly at her feet.

Hilda sat beside her the whole time and did not move, even when her own kids pulled on her arm.