The Aide Who Drove Ludie to the Ocean

I turned her oxygen to three. She did not need it, but I felt better.

Nobody said anything. Out past the breakers, two pelicans skimmed the swells, so close to the water that their wings nearly touched it, and Ludie pointed.

“Look at them go,” she whispered. “Oh, look at them go.”

I took one picture. Only one, because I did not want to be a person who looked at her through a phone. I stood back and held it up and caught her sitting there in the foam with her good hat on and her mouth open and her face turned up to the sky like she was being forgiven for something.

It is the best picture I have ever taken. It is the only picture, in the end, that mattered.

We stayed about an hour. When it was time to go, Tommy Ray lifted her himself, wrapped in all three of the blankets, and carried her the whole way up the beach in his arms. He put her in the chair at the bottom of the ramp and straightened up slowly.

“My mother passed in a place like yours,” he said to me, low. “Nobody carried her anywhere.”

I did not have anything to say to that. I put my hand on his arm.

On the drive home, Ludie fell asleep somewhere around Suffolk and did not wake until the pines of Southside began to thicken on either side of the road. She slept with her shoes in her lap and sand in the creases of her ankles.

It was twenty minutes to nine when I turned into the lot at Piney Fork. There was one truck parked by the side door, a gray Ford with a dent in the tailgate that I knew very well.

Lyle Brannock was standing by the laundry door in the light, with his arms hanging at his sides and no tie on.

I stopped the car and got out. I did not know what to say. He did not say anything either.

He walked around to the passenger side, opened the door, and looked at Ludie asleep in the seat with her hat on crooked and her bare feet showing from under the blanket. His face did something I could not read.

Then he bent down, slid one arm under her shoulders and one under her knees, and lifted her out of the car like she was made of eggshell. I had never seen him carry anything heavier than a clipboard.

“Get the chair,” he said to me, very quietly.

I got it. He set her in it and tucked the blanket tighter around her feet. Ludie opened her eyes and looked up at him in the yellow light.

“Lyle Wayne,” she said, thick with sleep. “I saw the ocean.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. His voice was not quite steady. “I heard.”

“I’ll tell Burl it said hello.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He pushed her inside himself. He did not look at me. When the door had shut behind them, he stopped it with one hand and said without turning around, “My office. Monday. Seven-thirty.”

I drove home with a bag of wet sand on the floor mat, crying the whole way, and I could not have told you which kind of crying it was.

I was not there for what happened next. I only know it because Roz Tuggle called me every few hours for two days, and because later I read every card.