For a long moment, nobody moved.
The music kept playing. A little boy in a shark-print swimsuit ran past my wheelchair and knocked over one of my clay pots of geraniums. Nobody went after him. A woman I had never seen before stood on my porch holding a paper plate piled with shrimp and stared at me the way you’d stare at a delivery driver who had come to the wrong address.
Megan still had her hand on her hip. She was wearing a white linen cover-up and a pair of sunglasses pushed up into her blond hair. She looked relaxed and golden, like a woman in a magazine ad for somebody else’s life.
“Why is she here?” she asked again. This time she said it louder, and she didn’t say it to me. She said it over her shoulder, toward the open front door.
That was when I saw my son.
Robert came out onto the porch with a beer in one hand and a pair of barbecue tongs in the other. He was forty-four years old, a little gray at the temples now, with his father’s broad shoulders and his father’s habit of rubbing the back of his neck when he was nervous. He saw me and stopped dead.
“Mom?”
“Hello, Robert.”
“You weren’t supposed to come until tomorrow.”
Not what a surprise. Not let me help you with your bags. Not even hi.
You weren’t supposed to come until tomorrow.
I folded my hands in my lap. My knees had given out on me two winters ago, after a fall on an icy church parking lot in Savannah, and since then I got around in a lightweight chair Henry would have teased me about endlessly. He used to say I’d never sit still long enough to need one. I could still stand and take a few steps with my cane when I had to, and I’d had hand controls put in my car so I could keep driving. But on uneven ground like that sandy driveway, the chair was how I got anywhere.
“My appointment was canceled,” I said. “So I came a day early. It’s my house, Robert. I didn’t think I needed a reservation.”
Megan laughed. It was a thin, bright laugh, the kind people use when they want everyone around them to know that nothing is wrong.
“Of course you don’t, Eleanor,” she said. “It’s just that we have a full house this weekend. My parents are here, and some friends from Sarasota, and the Hendersons brought their kids. We didn’t plan for you.”
“I can see that.”
Then something small and fast came tearing around the side of the house.
“Grandma!”
My granddaughter, Lily, nine years old and all elbows and knees, threw herself at me so hard my chair rolled back an inch. Her hair was wet and smelled of sunscreen and salt water, and she wrapped both arms around my neck and held on.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” she whispered into my shoulder. “Nobody told me.”