Mr. Lund pulled the anchor and started the motor on the third pull. He said come on, old girl, without being told. He ran us slow along the edge of the break, the Evinrude just muttering, and Tyler let out line behind the boat and sat with the rod tip low, watching it tick.
We made one pass. Nothing. We made a second.
On the third pass the rod bent over double and stayed there.
Nobody said a word. Tyler stood up, the way you’re not supposed to in a boat, and Mr. Lund slipped the motor out of gear and reached for the net. It came up slow and heavy and gold out of that gray water, shaking its head, and Mr. Lund got the net under it on the first try.
A walleye. Mr. Lund laid it against the ruler Mike had painted on the inside of the hull in black shop enamel. Twenty-one inches.
“Not bigger than his,” Tyler said. He was laughing and crying both. “Not even close.”
“He’d have been glad to tell you so,” I said.
Tyler knelt on the floor of the boat and held that fish in the water over the side with both hands, moving it gently forward and back until it got its breath. Then it kicked once and was gone. He stayed there on his knees a little while with his wet hands hanging over the rail.
Mr. Lund found a ballpoint pen in his shirt pocket and passed it forward without comment.
Tyler peeled the lure off his line, dried it on his pant leg, and laid it back in the twentieth compartment without its cardboard box. Under his father’s printing, on the same strip of tape, he wrote the date. Then he wrote: 21 in. Let it go. Didn’t cry much.
His printing looks just like Mike’s. I had never noticed that before.
We were back at the dock a little after ten, the way Mike had promised him on Labor Day.
Abby’s car was in the drive. She was standing at the end of the dock in one of Tyler’s sweatshirts with a box of gas station donuts, and one look at her husband’s face told her everything. He climbed out and she held on to him and neither one of them said anything.
Mr. Lund tied off the bow and sat a minute with his hands on his knees.
“Tyler,” he said. “Come here. I have a business matter.”
Tyler came back down the dock, wiping his nose.
“I’ve got two grandkids in Maple Grove. Ben is nine and Katie is seven. I bought this boat for them, because the one I had is too big and too fast and my daughter won’t let them in it.” He flexed his right arm and winced. “What I failed to consider is that this shoulder won’t run a tiller for more than an hour, and I can’t see to tie a knot anymore without my glasses fogging. I need a guide.”
Tyler waited.
“They’re coming up for the long school weekend in two weeks. That’s two mornings. Next summer they’re here from the second week of June until the middle of August, and I count ten Saturdays in there. That’s twelve mornings altogether.” He looked up at me, and I’ll swear his eyes were laughing. “Your mother set the going rate herself yesterday. Fifty dollars a Saturday.”
Twelve times fifty. I had it before he said it.
“Six hundred dollars,” Tyler said slowly.
“Six hundred dollars. You work it off twelve mornings, and the morning you finish, I sign that card back over to you. Boat, motor and trailer. I winter it in my pole shed in the meantime, so it isn’t sitting in anybody’s yard.” He held up one finger. “Two conditions. I ride along whenever I please. And that tray stays strapped right where your dad put it.”
Tyler looked at me. I kept my face still. This was between the two of them.
“Mr. Lund, you’d be out a boat that’s worth…”
“I’d be out six hundred dollars I already spent, and up twelve Saturdays with my grandchildren and a man who knows where the break is. I’ve made worse trades. I once sold a Buick.” He stuck out his hand. “I asked you twice on Monday if you were sure. I’m only asking this once.”
My son shook his hand. He used both of his.
I took the fifty out of my vest pocket and held it out, because it didn’t seem right not to. Mr. Lund looked at it like I’d offered him a dead mouse.
“Go buy groceries, Connie,” he said. “And if you ever feel you owe me, I am out of bars.”
Tyler and Abby followed me home. He didn’t park facing the road. He pulled up beside the garage, got out, and stood looking down at the yellow rectangle with his hands in his coat pockets.
Then he went in the garage and came out with his dad’s rake and a half sack of grass seed. He raked that dead patch down to dirt, and seeded it, and stood the cinder block back up on its end where it belonged. I watched from the kitchen window with Abby and we let him do it alone.
The long school weekend came. I rode along the second morning, since somebody had to bring the bars. Ben is a serious boy who asked my son eleven questions before we cleared the dock. Katie wore an orange life jacket up to her ears and talked to the minnows. Tyler ran the tiller with one hand and baited hooks with the other and never once lost his patience, and I sat in the bow and watched my husband come out in him, a little at a time.
Ben caught a crappie off the point. It wasn’t much of a crappie. Tyler held it up for him and told him it was the nicest one he’d seen all year, and Mr. Lund caught my eye and looked away quick.
When we got in, Tyler reached under the middle seat. He took the jig Ben had been using and set it in the twenty-first compartment, and tore a fresh strip of masking tape, and handed the boy the pen.
“Print it,” he said. “Your initial, the date, and what happened. That’s the rule in this boat.”
Ben printed it with his tongue between his teeth. B. Crappie. Katie screamed.
There are three empty squares left in that tray. Mr. Lund says he’s ordering a second one.
The boat is in his pole shed now, under a tarp, with the plug pulled and the motor tipped down to drain. Ten Saturdays to go. The grass came up thin and bright beside my garage before the first hard frost, a different green from the rest of the yard.
It’ll match by June. And by August I’ll be mowing around that boat again.
THE END …!
