The grass told me before anybody else did.
I came home from work on a Monday with a sack of groceries on my hip, and there was a long yellow rectangle beside the garage where my husband’s boat had been. Two bare strips of dirt ran through it where the trailer tires had sat. A cinder block that used to hold up the trailer tongue was lying on its side.
Twenty-three years that boat lived in that spot. I’d mowed around it so many times I could have done it blind.
I set the groceries on the hood of the car and stood there. My first thought was that somebody had stolen it. My second thought was that nobody around here steals a 1987 Alumacraft with a dent in the bow. They steal the new ones.
So I called my son.
He picked up on the fifth ring. I could hear a compressor running behind him, which meant he was still on the job.
“Tyler, is your dad’s boat stolen?”
Nothing for a second. The compressor shut off.
“No, Mom.” A long breath. “I sold it.”
I looked at the rectangle. There was a pop can tab in the dead grass, and a clothespin, and one of Mike’s red and white bobbers faded pink.
“You sold it.”
“This morning.”
“For how much?”
“Six hundred.”
I know what things cost. I’ve been married to a mechanic for thirty-one years. The motor alone was worth more than that, and the trailer had new tires on it from April.
“To who?”
“Mom.”
“To who, Tyler?”
“It’s done. It was mine to sell and it’s done. I can’t talk about it.” His voice cracked on the last word, and I think that’s why he hung up so fast. He didn’t want me to hear the rest of it break.
I stood on that dead grass until the yard light came on by itself. The milk in the sack went warm on the hood of the car. Two weeks earlier I had buried my husband, and I had gotten through it by doing the next thing, and then the next thing. For the first time since the funeral I couldn’t think what the next thing was.
Mike’s heart quit on a Tuesday evening in the garage, with the radio on to the Twins game. He was fifty-eight. He’d had a stent put in three summers ago, and he’d been good about his pills and bad about bacon. I found him. I’m not going to say more about that.
He worked twenty-nine years in the county highway shop keeping plow trucks alive, and every hour he wasn’t doing that he wanted to be on the water. We live on one of the small lakes north of Brainerd, the kind the tourists drive past on their way to the big ones. Not on the lake, mind you. Across the county road from it. People with lake frontage don’t cook at the care center.
He bought the boat used the summer Tyler was four. Sixteen feet of aluminum, painted green once, worn down to bare metal along the rails where thirty years of elbows and rod butts had rubbed. A twenty-five horse Evinrude on the back, the kind you start with a rope. A dent in the bow from the Fourth of July he met the public dock too fast while waving at somebody. It smelled like two-stroke gas and minnow water and the inside of an old thermos. When you stepped down into it, the whole hull boomed like a washtub.
I’ll be honest. I didn’t love that boat. I loved the man who came home in it. But a thing can sit in your yard so long that it turns into part of how you know you’re home.
And Tyler was right about one thing. It was his to sell.
The summer of the stent, Mike came home from the license bureau with the registration card switched into Tyler’s name. He laid it on the kitchen table and said, “There. Now there won’t be any fuss about it someday.”
So on paper my son had every right. It was only in every other way that he didn’t.
I put the groceries away. I threw out the milk. Then I called my daughter-in-law, because Abby tells me the truth, and my son was not going to.
She answered in a whisper. “Hang on, Connie. Let me go out on the step.”
I heard a screen door.
“Did you know about the boat?” I said.
“I knew when he came home without it on the hitch. He went over to your place on his lunch. He didn’t tell me first either. I’d have stopped him.”
“Abby, what is going on with him?”
She didn’t answer right away.
“He doesn’t sleep,” she said. “He lies there. Around two he gets up and goes out and sits in the truck in the driveway, and he doesn’t even turn the key. I asked him what he does out there and he said nothing, he just can’t be in a bed.” She took a breath. “And every time we drove over to your place, he’d park so he was facing the road. So he didn’t have to look at the side of the garage.”
I hadn’t noticed that. I’d been busy noticing my own things.
“Is he in money trouble?”
“He won’t say. The truck was in the shop last week and now it isn’t, and I don’t know how.” Then, quietly: “Please don’t be hard on him. I know you’ve got every right.”
“I’m not planning on being hard on anybody,” I said. “I just want to know where it went.”
She didn’t know. He hadn’t told her that either.
I didn’t sleep much myself that night. I lay on my side of the bed and thought about calling him back and having it out. I got as far as picking up the phone. But I know my son. He’d have said he was sorry, and he’d have meant it, and then he’d have gone out and sat in his truck, and nothing in either one of us would have been any different.
I thought about buying it back, too. I thought about that for a good while. But I had written a check to the funeral home ten days before, and what was left in the account after that had to last me to the first of the month. I didn’t have six hundred dollars. I had the grocery money and a quarter tank of gas.
And say I had found the money. Say I’d hauled that boat home and backed it onto its yellow rectangle. My boy would still be parking with his face to the road.
It wasn’t the boat I wanted back. It took me until about four in the morning to work out what I did want, and when I had it, I went to sleep.
