My 80-Year-Old Mother Had Never Seen the Ocean. I Had Six Days to Get Her to My Island Before She Signed Away Her House

The man who opened the door was eighty-three, tall and thin, in a pressed white shirt. He had a cane in one hand and a dish towel in the other.

He looked at my mother for a long moment.

Then he dropped the towel.

“Vernie,” he said.

“Hello, Lucien.”

I stood on the sidewalk like a fool while my mother and a stranger held hands on a porch in Biloxi.

His name was Lucien Broussard. They had met in 1963, the summer she was eighteen, when she came down with a church youth group and he was a shrimper’s son who fixed their bus when it broke down.

“He was going to show me the ocean,” my mother said. “The real one. His uncle had a boat. We were going out past the islands, where you can’t see land.”

“What happened?”

“My father found out about him. We left the next morning. I never saw him again.”

Lucien made us sweet tea. He showed us photographs of his late wife, his children, his grandchildren. He’d had a good life. So had she.

At the door, he held her hand one more time.

“You still never saw it?” he asked.

“I was waiting,” she said.

I thought she meant waiting for him. Then, back in the truck, I saw her face.

“I had a whole life in that house,” she said. “Your father, you, the garden. It was a good life. But I always wondered what was past those islands.”

She buckled her seatbelt.

“Lucien’s coming with us,” she said. “He’s packing a bag.”