Coffee at Seven Across the Loop

But she was picking up per diem shifts at the hospital in Norman to make her camper payment, and she was sleeping a lot of days.

Campers would knock on the host site door at two in the afternoon and get no answer, and then they would walk across the road to Mom.

Mom never said a word against her. If somebody asked where the host was, Mom would say, “She works nights at the hospital, honey, she’ll be up by four. What do you need?”

The second week of June, a little boy got a fishhook in his thumb down at the point. His grandmother came running up the loop in a panic, straight past the host site, straight to Mom.

Mom had the first aid kit out of her trailer before the woman finished talking. She sat that boy on her camp chair and talked to him about his dog while she looked at the hook.

“This one needs a nurse,” she said. “Josette, run and knock on your sister’s door. Knock hard.”

I did. I stood on the step of my mother’s old site and pounded until Kendra opened up with her hair flat on one side.

“Kid with a fishhook in his thumb,” I said. “Mom’s got him. She said you’re the nurse.”

Kendra looked at me for a second. Then she grabbed her bag off the counter and ran across the gravel in her socks.

She got that hook out clean in about four minutes, pushed the barb through and clipped it off, and the boy hardly cried at all.

She cleaned it and wrapped it and told the grandmother what to watch for. She was good. She has always been good.

When she was done, Mom put a hand on her shoulder. “Thank you, sweetheart,” she said. “I knew you’d know what to do.”

Kendra looked at Mom’s hand on her shoulder.

Then she looked at the line of campers who had gathered to watch, every one of them with a coffee mug, every one of them standing on Mom’s side of the road.

She did not say anything. She just picked up her bag and walked back across the gravel in her wet socks.

I would like to tell you I felt nothing but sorry for her. I did not. But I felt more sorry for her than I wanted to, and that bothered me more than anything else that summer.

The Fourth of July fell on a Saturday.

The county put on a little picnic at the pavilion by the swim beach every year, hot dogs and watermelon and a man from the county parks board with a microphone who read the names of the campers who had been coming the longest.

He read Fritzie’s name, 24 years. Everybody clapped. Then he read Mom’s name and said, “Our camp host, eleven summers,” and then stopped and looked at his paper and looked up.

The whole pavilion went quiet. People were looking at Mom, then at Kendra, then at Dwayne, who was standing by the grill with a spatula.

Mom stood up from the picnic table, gave a little wave, and sat back down. “Twelve this year,” she said. “I’m just across the road.” Everybody laughed, and the moment passed, and the man went on.

But I saw Dwayne’s face. He was looking at the grill like it had said something to him.

After the picnic, in the middle of the afternoon, Dwayne found me at the trash bins behind the pavilion. He had a black garbage bag in each hand and sweat running down his neck.