Tuesday after work I did what a person does in a town this size. I went to the bait shop.
Jeff has run that shop since his dad had it, and Mike was in there three mornings a week for as long as I can remember. There’s a cork board by the door with index cards on it. When Jeff saw me he came around the counter wiping his hands on his jeans.
He didn’t make me ask.
“Don Lund’s got it,” he said. “North shore, the green cabin past the Bible camp road. He’s had it out every morning since.”
“So there was a card.”
Jeff pointed at the board. There was a thumbtack still stuck in the cork with a torn corner of index card under it.
“Tyler put it up at seven yesterday when I opened. Sixteen foot Alumacraft, twenty-five Evinrude, trailer, six hundred dollars, today only.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Connie, I told him. I said, Ty, that’s a two thousand dollar rig all day long, and I’ll hold the card a week and get it for you. He said he didn’t want a week. He said he didn’t want men coming around the yard kicking the tires and telling him stories about his dad.”
That landed on me harder than the six hundred had.
“Don came in for minnows at eight,” Jeff said. “Read the card twice. Asked me if it was a joke or if the kid was in trouble. I said I didn’t know. He went and got his checkbook.”
“What’s he like?”
“Don? Drove propane for the co-op thirty-one years. Lost his wife a while back. Never shorted anybody a gallon that I heard of.”
Wednesday I worked a double. Thursday night I made a pan of Special K bars.
Where I come from you don’t go to a stranger’s house and ask a favor with your hands empty. I pressed the cereal down with a buttered spoon the way my mother did, and melted the chocolate chips and butterscotch chips together for the top, and while they set I took the grocery envelope out of the drawer.
There was a fifty and two twenties and some ones in it. I took the fifty. I folded it once and put it in the pocket of my quilted vest, and I snapped the pocket shut so I wouldn’t lose my nerve and put it back.
Friday I got up at five-thirty and drove around the lake.
It was a gray morning with no wind at all. The water was flat as a plate and the same color as the sky, and the pines on the far shore looked black. Most of the cabins had their docks pulled already and stacked on the bank for winter. The green one past the Bible camp road still had its dock in.
And there it was, tied alongside.
I knew it from the road. Same dent. Same bare metal along the rails. Same coffee can full of concrete with an eye bolt set in it, which Mike poured himself for an anchor because he said a store anchor was thirty dollars of somebody else’s profit.
I left the bars on the seat of the car. I don’t know why. I think I wanted to see the man’s face first.
An older man in a cap was sitting on the back seat of the boat with a big yellow sponge, working water out of the bottom and wringing it over the side. He heard me on the dock boards and looked up.
“Mr. Lund?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m Connie. That was my husband’s boat.”
He took his cap off. Then he didn’t seem to know what to do with it, so he put it back on.
“I wondered if somebody’d come,” he said. “Ma’am, the boy’s name was on the card. I checked it against his license. I asked him twice was he sure, and I told him the motor was worth what he was asking for the whole outfit. He said he knew that.”
“I know you did. Jeff told me. I’m not here to take it back.”
That surprised him. He set the sponge down on the seat.
I folded my arms so he wouldn’t see what my hands were doing.
“I’ve got fifty dollars in my pocket,” I said, “and a pan of Special K bars in the car. What would you charge for one Saturday?”
He squinted up at me. “For you?”
“For my son. The one who sold it to you. I want him in that boat one more morning, with somebody on the tiller who knows what he’s doing. I don’t want it in my yard. I don’t want it back at all. I just want him to sit in it once more before it’s all the way gone.”
He didn’t say anything. A loon called from someplace out on the flat water, and the boat nudged the dock post, that hollow knock an aluminum boat makes.
“I buried my wife three years ago in March,” he said finally. “Jean. I sold her Buick eleven days later to a kid from Pine River, because I couldn’t walk past it in the garage.” He looked out at the lake. “I have looked for that car in every parking lot since.”
I had nothing to say to that. I just nodded.
“So I don’t guess you have to explain your boy to me,” he said.
Then he bent down, with a grunt, and reached up under the middle seat.
“Before I answer you, you’d better see what I found Wednesday.”
I heard a bungee cord let go. He came up holding a flat plastic tackle tray, the kind with a clear lid and little square compartments, about the size of a cookie sheet. The lid had gone cloudy with age. He held it out to me over the gap between the boat and the dock, and I had to unfold my arms to take it.
“It was strapped up under there behind the foam,” he said. “You wouldn’t see it unless you were on your knees sponging. I opened it to see if there was a name. Then I put it back how I found it, because it sure wasn’t mine to move.”
There were twenty-four compartments. In most of them lay a single lure. And on the inside of the lid, over each one, was a strip of masking tape with ballpoint writing on it.
I knew the writing before I could read it. Mike printed everything in square capitals, the way he labeled the parts bins at the shop.
The first one was a tiny pink jig, hardly bigger than a pea.
T. 7-3-04. Sunny. Pink jig. Cried when we let it go.
Tyler was five that summer.
T. 5-14-05. First walleye. 15 in. Opener. Sleeting. He wouldn’t go in.
There was a red and white spoon with tooth marks in the paint.
T. 8-9-09. Northern, 31 in. Bit his thumb. Didn’t cry.
