“I’ll help you, Mom.”
“Careful, sweetheart. It’s heavy.”
“I’ve got it.”
His face went pink with effort. He’d taken one handle and I’d taken the other, and the two of us shuffled it through the kitchen and across the front porch and down the steps like two movers with a piano.
By the time Ryan came down — in the first shirt again, the navy one — we’d loaded everything into the trunk and Mason was sitting in his booster seat, buckled, holding his bucket in his lap.
The Long Walk Across the Sand
The company had reserved a stretch of beach way past the public lot. Maybe three hundred yards of sand between the car and the picnic tables.
Ryan started out carrying the folded picnic blanket, which is the single lightest object we owned.
After about fifty yards he tucked it under my arm because he needed a free hand to check a message on his phone.
