I went down the rows. A rubber frog with one leg gone. A yellow jig with the feather chewed to a stub. Nineteen of them, one for every fish of Tyler’s that Mike thought was worth retiring a lure over, across twelve summers. The last one with a date was a plain gold hook and a spinner blade.
T. 6-18-16. Walleye, 26 in. Bigger than mine. Hasn’t let me forget it.
Tyler was seventeen. That was about the last summer he went out regular. After that there was a job, and a girl, and then a different girl who turned out to be Abby, and a truck payment, and all the usual things that happen to a boy.
In the twentieth compartment was a lure still in its little cardboard box. A perch-colored Shad Rap, never wet. The price sticker from Jeff’s was still on it. The tape over that one was newer and whiter than the rest.
T. Next time.
I sat down on the dock. I sat with my boots hanging over the water and that tray in my lap, and Mr. Lund picked up his sponge and went back to the bilge and gave me all the time I wanted.
Thirty-one years, and the man still had a drawer I had never opened.
“He never showed you that,” Mr. Lund said after a while. It wasn’t a question.
“No.”
“Or the boy.”
“No. Tyler would never have sold it. He’d have sold the truck first.”
Mr. Lund wrung out the sponge. “Then I expect he ought to be the one to find it,” he said. “Same as I did.”
He held out his hand, and I gave the tray back, and he strapped it up under the seat again. I heard both bungee hooks catch.
“Six-thirty tomorrow,” he said. “Tell him to dress warm. And I won’t take your fifty, so don’t fight me on it.” He almost smiled. “I’ll take the bars. I’m old, I’m not stupid.”
I went and got them out of the car.
Getting Tyler there was the part I had been dreading, and it turned out to be the shortest conversation of the whole week.
I called him that evening. I said, “I need you someplace at six-thirty tomorrow morning, and I need you not to ask me why.”
“Mom, I’ve got…”
“I haven’t asked you for one thing since the funeral,” I said. “Not one. I’m asking now. North shore, the green cabin past the Bible camp road. Wear your insulated bibs.”
It was quiet long enough that I knew he had figured out where the boat was.
“I can’t get in it,” he said.
“You come and tell me that at the dock, then. But you come.”
He came.
I was there at a quarter after six with a thermos. Mr. Lund already had the gas can in and three rods laid along the side. Three, I noticed, not two.
Tyler’s truck came down the drive slow. He parked it facing the lake this time, because there was no other way to park, and he sat behind the wheel for a full minute with the engine off. Then he got out. My son is a big, square young man who hangs ductwork for a heating outfit in Baxter, and that morning he walked down the dock like a boy being sent to the principal.
He didn’t look at the boat. He looked at Mr. Lund.
“Sir,” he said. “If you came to tell me I shorted my mother, I know it.”
“I didn’t come to tell you anything,” Mr. Lund said. “I live here. Your mother hired me for the morning, and I’ve been paid in full.” He nodded at the middle seat. “You’re there. Your mother’s in the bow.”
I had not planned on being in the bow. I said so.
“Boat seats three,” Mr. Lund said. “And I’m not leaving Mike’s wife standing on my dock for four hours in October. Get in, the both of you.”
So I got in. The hull boomed under my boots the way it always had. Tyler stood on the dock above us with his hands opening and closing.
“Ty,” I said. “It’s a boat. Step down.”
He stepped down. He sat on the middle seat with his back to me and his face to the motor, exactly where he’d sat from the time he was four years old, and I watched his shoulders come up around his ears.
Mr. Lund squeezed the primer bulb until it went hard. He pulled the choke, cracked the throttle, and yanked the rope. Nothing. Again. Nothing.
“Third pull,” Tyler said, not turning around. His voice was thick. “It never goes till the third pull. And you’ve got to talk to it.”
“What do I say?”
“Dad always said, come on, old girl.”
“Come on, old girl,” said Mr. Lund, perfectly serious, and pulled. The Evinrude caught and rattled and coughed out a cloud of blue smoke that hung on the flat water behind us. He pushed the choke in. That smell came forward over the boat, gas and oil and cold lake, and I saw my son put his hand flat on the aluminum seat beside him and leave it there.
We ran out to the point. Mr. Lund didn’t ask where the fish were. He just looked at Tyler, and Tyler lifted his arm and pointed, and then pointed again a little left, and then held his palm down flat to say slow, slow, here. Mr. Lund cut the motor. In the quiet you could hear the water ticking against the hull.
“There’s a break off this point,” Tyler said. “Twelve feet dropping to twenty-two. They sit right on the edge of it when the water cools off.”
“Your dad’s spot.”
“Everybody’s spot. Dad just thought it was his.”
That was the first thing he’d said in two weeks that sounded like himself.
Mr. Lund lowered the coffee can anchor over the side, hand over hand. We fished jigs and fatheads on the bottom. I caught a perch the size of a clothespin and Mr. Lund said it was the nicest one he’d seen all year, and Tyler made a sound that might have been a laugh. Mr. Lund poured himself coffee from my thermos and ate a Special K bar for breakfast and told us about hauling propane to the fish houses in January, backing a loaded truck out onto the ice with the door open and one foot on the running board in case it went through.
He was good company. He never once asked my son a question.
About eight o’clock he reeled up and looked at his line.
“I’m bit off,” he said. “Tyler, I keep a spool of leader up under your seat there. Reach up behind the foam for me, would you? My shoulder won’t do it.”
There was no spool of leader under that seat. I knew it, and Mr. Lund knew it, and he looked off toward the Bible camp shore like a man with nothing at all on his mind.
