The Second Chair on the Key West Pier

Someday turned into thirty-some years of corn and beans and two daughters and a church basement full of funeral dinners. Dad died four years ago this spring, in the machine shed, of a heart attack, with the radio still playing.

At his visitation, Mom held my hand and said, “He promised me the sunset at Mallory Square. I believed him every year.”

So this trip was hers. She picked the ship because it stayed in Key West until eight thirty at night, which meant she could see the sunset from the square and still sleep in her own bed on the water.

She picked who came, too. Me, and Augusta, and her husband Ralph. My husband Randall stayed home because it was planting week in southern Indiana, and you do not leave a hundred and sixty acres of corn ground in planting week for a boat.

“Bring me a shirt,” Randall said, driving us to the Indianapolis airport at four in the morning. “Something with a fish on it. Nothing with a beer on it. Your mother will see.”

My sister

I should tell you about Augusta, because otherwise you will think she is a bad person. She is not. She is four years older than me, and she has been in charge of me since I was born.

When we were girls, she stood between me and every big dog and every mean boy in Daviess County. She taught me to drive a stick shift in Dad’s old Ford in the church parking lot. She held my hair at my wedding reception when I had too much punch, and she never told a soul.

She also never once in her life asked me what I thought before she decided something.

She married Ralph when she was twenty-two. Ralph Hoeing was a pipefitter for thirty-one years, union, out of the Evansville hall, and he has the knees to show for it. You do not spend three decades kneeling on steel grating in a power plant without paying somewhere.

Ralph is a good man. I want that said plain. He coached Little League for fifteen years and never yelled at a single child. He fixed my mailbox post three times for free after the county plow took it out. He is quiet and stubborn and would rather saw off his own leg than make a fuss in front of strangers.

Which, it turns out, was the whole problem.