The Second Chair on the Key West Pier

The machine shed

I need to tell you something now that I had not thought about in a long time.

It was Augusta who found Dad. Not me. I was at work on my route that morning, out past the Odon road, with my phone in the cup holder. Mom was at the doctor in Washington. Augusta had stopped by the farm to drop off a pie.

She heard the radio in the machine shed and went to say hi.

She did chest compressions on our father for eleven minutes on a concrete floor, until the ambulance came out from town. Her knees were bloody for a week. I knew that. I had always known that. I just never thought about what it would look like inside her head four years later, when another man she loved went down on the boards of a pier.

“I’m so sorry, Mama,” Augusta said. She had let go of the handles. She was crying now, out in the open, in front of the whole square. “I left you on that post in the sun. I didn’t even look back. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Mom reached over the armrest. She had to lean, and I put my hand behind her back so she wouldn’t tip. She took Augusta’s wrist and pulled until Augusta knelt down beside her chair.

“Nothing’s wrong with you,” Mom said. “You got scared. You got scared for your husband. That’s love, honey. It just came out sideways.”

“I left you,” Augusta said again.

“And your sister came and got me,” Mom said. “That’s what sisters are for. You’ve been doing it for her for forty-eight years. She was due.”

Ralph

Ralph cleared his throat. He is not a man for speeches, so I paid attention.

“Odette,” he said. “I should’ve said something on the pier. I should’ve said it loud. I’m sorry I didn’t.”

“You did say something. You said give your mother her chair.”

“I should have said it louder,” he said. “And I should’ve told the surgeon no, or told all of you yes, one or the other. Not both.” He looked at his knee in the towel. “Pride’s a heavy thing to carry on a bad leg.”

“It is,” Mom said.

He reached into his shirt pocket and took out his wallet and pulled out a hundred-dollar bill, folded in half. He held it out to me.

“For the chair.” “Ralph, put that away.”

“Your sister already told me what it cost. Eighty-five. I’ll take the change in conch fritters.” He kept holding it out. “Please, Odette. Let me be the one.”

I looked at Augusta. Augusta nodded.

I took it. I want to be honest, it felt good to take it. Not because of the money, but because he wanted to, and because that was Ralph making it right the only way a man like Ralph knows how.

“And tomorrow,” Augusta said, wiping her face with the back of her hand, “is the sea day. I’m pushing Mom. All day. Wherever she wants to go. The pool, the shows, the buffet. You sit on a deck chair and read a book, Odette, for once in your life.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I know I don’t have to,” she said. “I want to. Let me do something right on this boat.”