…yelling down at her to hold the line and not let go, no matter what. The storm surge had already begun to push the water over the end of the dock, and the fishing boat was bucking against its pilings like a frightened horse. My mother, eighty years old, had the bow rope wrapped around both of her forearms, and she was leaning backward on her heels with her whole body, trying to keep a thirty four foot boat from slamming into the planks. Her white hair had come loose. Her sneakers were skidding on the wet wood. “Lorraine,” she called, calmly, as though she were asking me to pass the salt, “would you give me a hand?”
I did not remember running. I remember the rope burn on my palms and the weight of the boat against my shoulders as I took the line from her and threw it over the big cleat. Then I wrapped it twice and made it fast, and my brother in law, Glenn, jumped down from the deck and began shouting at me about knots. “Glenn, shut up,” I said, and I had never spoken to him that way in twenty years. I got my mother under the arms and lifted her bodily onto the dock. She was shaking so hard that her teeth clattered. “Honey, I told him I would hold it just a minute,” she whispered. “That was an hour ago.”
Tammy drove up in her white SUV a moment later, honking, and leaped out with her phone to her ear. “Lori, thank goodness you are here,” she said. “The county just called the evacuation. We need to get the boat to the marina right now. Mama was helping Glenn secure it.” I looked at my sister. She was fifty four, and her hair had been done that morning, and her nails were pink. “Tammy, you let an eighty year old woman hold a thirty four foot boat in a storm surge,” I said. “While you were at a salon.” She lifted her chin. “She insisted,” she said. “Lorraine, you know how Mama gets.”
A wet dock rope coiled beside a pill box gave one daughter the weekend to bring her mother back to the porch in Wilmington.
I gave my terms in the pelting rain, with my mother wrapped in a towel inside my car. She was coming home with me immediately, and she was not going to be asked to carry, haul, hold, lift or tie anything for anyone ever again. The beach house would be closed for the storm, and Glenn would handle his own boat. Tammy would take my mother to an urgent care clinic, with me, and pay for every visit. And for each week my mother had spent in that house, doing the work of a hired deckhand and a housekeeper, they would pay her five hundred dollars, which came to fourteen thousand dollars.
Tammy began to cry, loudly, and for a moment I thought she would argue. Instead she opened the passenger door of my car, knelt on the wet pavement and took the face of our mother in both hands. “Mama, I am so sorry,” she said. “I told myself you liked it. I told myself you were happier here than alone.” My mother touched her cheek with one rope burned hand. “Tammy, I did like it at first,” she said. “I liked being needed. But somewhere I stopped being your mother and started being your help. And I did not know how to say it, because I was afraid you would stop calling.”
We drove inland that evening in a convoy, with the wind already tearing the palm fronds off the trees. My mother sat in the front seat with a cup of hot tea I had poured from my thermos, and for the first time in months she took her pills, one after another, all the missed ones, as I counted them out. She leaned back and watched the dark road. “Lori, do you know what I thought about when I was holding that rope?” she said. “I thought about your father. I thought, Raymond would be so ashamed of me for being this stubborn.” We both laughed until we had to wipe our eyes.
The hurricane turned out to be a smaller storm than forecast, and the beach house lost a few shingles and a screen door. The boat survived. When we drove back to the coast three days later, my sister was waiting on the porch with a pot of gumbo and a pair of reading glasses perched on her nose. She had written a list of everything she wished she had done differently. It ran to two pages. She read it aloud to my mother, in the kitchen, in a voice that shook, and when she reached the bottom, my mother simply said, “That is enough, baby. Sit down and eat.”
The money consequences were handled with care. Glenn sold the fishing boat and bought a smaller one that he could manage alone, and Tammy wrote a check for fourteen thousand dollars, which my mother promptly gave to her church. She would not hear of keeping it. The following summer, they invited her down to the beach house again, and this time they had hired a college student to handle the heavy chores. My mother spent the week on the porch with a crossword and a glass of sweet tea, exactly where she belonged, and the only thing she lifted was her eyes to the pelicans.
In the name of my father, Raymond, who passed ten years ago and who taught half of New Hanover County to tie a bowline, I started the Raymond Dock Fund. It pays for safety training, life jackets and hired help for older people on the coast who own boats, piers or beach houses and cannot do the heavy work themselves. In the first year, we helped fifty seven households prepare for hurricane season. A retired shrimper of eighty three, sitting on his own newly braced dock, said, “I never asked for help once in my life. This is going to take some getting used to.”
On the last Sunday of August, my mother, Tammy and I sat on the porch of the beach house and watched a line of dark clouds come in off the ocean. The wind picked up, and the sea oats leaned over. Glenn went down to the dock and checked the lines, all by himself, whistling. My mother watched him with a small, private smile. “Lorraine, he tied that knot just right,” she said, and she lifted her glass of tea toward the water. “Your father would have approved.” The clouds rolled past, and the first stars came out over the sea.