The Second Chair on the Key West Pier

Mallory Square

The square was already filling up by seven. People come from all over the island every night to watch the sun go down. There were jugglers and a man with trained cats and a woman playing steel drums and a boy selling bottled water out of a wagon.

I found Mom a spot along the edge, by the water, with nobody tall standing in front. I set the brakes and sat down on the low wall beside her.

“Do you remember the coffee can?” she asked me. “I remember.”

“Two hundred and twelve dollars,” she said. “Your father counted it every Sunday night after church. I’d hear the change clinking. I’d lie in bed and listen to it and think, a little closer.”

“And then the grain truck.”

“And then the grain truck.” She smiled. “I wasn’t even mad. We had to have the truck. But I’d have liked to come here with him one time.”

I took her hand. Her skin was soft and thin like old tissue paper, the kind you save from Christmas presents.

“You’re here now,” I said. “I’m here now,” she said.

At seven forty, the sun was getting low and orange over the water, and the crowd started to hush the way a church hushes before the first hymn.

That was when I heard wheels behind us.

The wheels

I turned around. Augusta was pushing Ralph in the new chair across the bricks. She was going slow, picking her way around people, saying excuse me, excuse me.

Her sunglasses were up on her head now. Her eyes were red.

Ralph had his right leg straight out on the elevated footrest, wrapped in one of the ship’s white towels with ice inside. He had his hand up a little, like a man waiting to be called on at a sale barn.

Augusta stopped the chair right beside Mom’s, so the two chairs were side by side, armrest to armrest.

Nobody said anything for a second.

“Odette,” Augusta said. Her voice cracked on my name. “There’s something about his knee I didn’t tell anybody. Not even you.”

Ralph looked at the water. “Augusta.”

“No. I’m telling her.” She took a breath. “It’s not his meniscus, Odette. It hasn’t been his meniscus since Christmas. It’s bone on bone. They have him on the list for a full knee replacement six weeks from now. The surgeon told him not to take this trip.”

I looked at Ralph. Ralph looked at his boots.

“He came anyway,” Augusta said. “Because Mom asked him to. Because he didn’t want her to think he was making excuses. He’s been taking four ibuprofen every morning and walking on it like nothing’s wrong.”

“It wasn’t a big deal,” Ralph said.

“Last night he fell in the shower,” she said. “In the cabin. I heard him go down. I found him sitting on the floor of that little shower with the water running on him, and he looked up at me and said, don’t tell your mother.”

Mom made a small sound beside me.

“And then today on the pier,” Augusta said, and stopped.

She stood there with her hands on the handles of that rented chair, and I watched my big sister, who had never in her life not known what to do, try to find the next word.

“When he went down on that pier,” she said finally, “it was the machine shed. Odette, I saw Daddy. I saw Daddy on the floor of the machine shed with the radio going. I didn’t think. I just grabbed the closest thing and ran.”