The Second Chair on the Key West Pier

Nobody was going to answer that phone until she remembered to turn it back on. I looked at the gangway. I looked at Mom.

I couldn’t chase my sister up that ramp without leaving a 74-year-old woman sitting alone on a hot pier, and I was not going to do that. Not for a chair, not for a sister, not for anything.

Mom has congestive heart failure, the kind that is managed and not cured. She can walk about the length of a church aisle on a good day. In heat, it is less. Her ankles were already starting to puff over the straps of her sandals.

“Let’s get you out of this sun,” I said.

The only shade close by was under the edge of the terminal canopy, maybe sixty feet away. Sixty feet is nothing to me. I walk eleven miles some days. To Mom, it was a trip.

She put her hand on my elbow and we went one slow step at a time. Eleven steps, and she had to stop. She stood with her eyes closed, breathing through her nose the way the cardiologist taught her.

“Don’t you fuss,” she said. “I’m only resting my feet.” “I’m not fussing.” “You’re fussing with your face.”

We made it on the second try. A man in a fishing shirt saw us coming and got up off the end of a bench without being asked. He tipped his cap to Mom and walked off before she could thank him. I will think kindly of that man for the rest of my life.

I bought a bottle of water off a cart for four dollars and held it to the inside of her wrist before I let her drink it. That is a trick my grandmother taught me. Cool the blood where it runs close.

Then I sat beside her and thought about the chair.

The chair

I had rented that chair myself, back in February, sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the cruise paperwork spread out like a quilt.

The ship has a few wheelchairs, but they are for getting on and getting off, not for keeping. If you want a chair for the week, you rent one from an outside company, and they deliver it to your cabin before you sail and pick it up when you get home.

I found a Florida outfit that did Port Tampa Bay. A standard chair for the whole week was one hundred twenty-nine dollars, and they had it waiting in Mom’s cabin when we boarded on Sunday, with a little card on the seat that said Welcome Aboard Helen.

Mom cried over that card. She was the one who wanted this trip.

She had been talking about Key West since 1979. That was the year she and my dad, Ellis, were supposed to go for their tenth anniversary. They had the money saved in a coffee can in the freezer. Then the transmission went out on the grain truck in August, and the coffee can went to the transmission, and Key West went to someday.