The Last Cast
The leaves were turning gold and scarlet along the shore of Shagawa Lake when Harold turned eighty-five.
We didn’t throw a big party at the diner—Harold would have hated that more than a cold breakfast—but Clara baked a three-layer chocolate cake with buttercream frosting, and half the high school hockey team came in after practice just to shake his hand and wish him a happy birthday.
Later that afternoon, after the rush had cleared and the shadows were stretching long across the floorboards, Harold sat in his corner booth with his final cup of coffee.
The diner was quiet. The low hum of the refrigerator, the faint sound of a country song playing on the small radio behind the counter, and the rhythmic breathing of Duchess asleep by the door.
“Birdie,” Harold said, not looking up from his cup.
“Yeah, Harold?” I asked, wiping down the counter with a clean towel.
“You ever take that old cedar boat out on Vermilion anymore? The one your dad kept in the boathouse?”
I stopped wiping. The cloth felt heavy in my hand. I hadn’t been out on the water with a rod in five years—not since Ed’s hands got too stiff to hold the oars and the boat started taking on water through the seams.
“Not in a long time,” I said honestly.
Harold looked up, his eyes bright and clear in the late afternoon sun streaming through the front window.
“You should,” he said simply. “The smallmouth are running heavy near the narrows this time of year. Just like they used to when we were kids.”
I looked at him—this old soldier who had walked out of the North Woods with a dog and a pocketful of history, who had carried my father’s voice through forty years of silence—and I felt something inside my chest loosen, like an anchor being hauled up off a muddy bottom after a long night on the lake.
“Alright,” I said, resting the towel on the edge of the counter. “Next Sunday. If the weather holds.”
Harold smiled, a slow, deep crease of lines around his eyes that looked just like the map of every road we’d both traveled to get here.
“Good,” he said, lifting his coffee cup in a quiet, solitary toast. “Tell your dad I said hello.”
“I will, Harold,” I said. “I’ll tell him every single word.”
THE END..!
