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.
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.
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.
Tyler leaned down and felt around. I heard one bungee hook let go, and then the other.
He brought the tray up into his lap and frowned at it. “This isn’t leader.”
“Isn’t it,” said Mr. Lund.
Tyler turned it over to look at the top. Then he went still, and I knew he’d seen the printing.
He opened the lid.
I was behind him, so I didn’t see his face. I saw the back of his neck above his collar, and I watched it go red. I saw his finger come down on the first strip of tape and move slowly to the second. I could hear him breathing through his mouth.
“I remember this,” he said, to nobody. “It was sleeting. He wanted to quit and I wouldn’t let him.” His finger moved. “That northern. I had a Band-Aid on my thumb for a week and I showed everybody at school.”
He went down every row. It took a long time. Mr. Lund baited a hook he had no intention of using. I kept my hands in my vest pockets and my mouth shut, which is the hardest thing I have done in my adult life.
He got to the June one, the twenty-six incher that was bigger than his dad’s, and he gave half a laugh.
Then he got to the little cardboard box.
He read the tape. He read it again. And my big square son folded over that tray like somebody had cut a string, and put his forehead down on his fists, and cried the way he hadn’t cried at the funeral home or the church or the cemetery. The boat rocked with it. I could hear the rods rattle against the side.
I started to get up. Mr. Lund looked at me and shook his head about half an inch.
So I stayed in the bow. I’ve thought since that it was the kindest thing anyone did for my son that whole month, and it was done by a stranger with one small shake of his head.
When Tyler could talk, he talked to the tray. He still hadn’t turned around.
“He called me Labor Day weekend,” he said. “He said the walleyes were on the break and he’d bought something he wanted me to try. He said come up Saturday, we’ll be off the water by ten, Abby won’t even miss you.”
I hadn’t known that.
“I told him I had side work.” He wiped his face on the sleeve of his coat. “I didn’t have side work, Mom. I was tired. I wanted to sleep in. I figured there’d be another Saturday.”
“Oh, honey.”
“Ten days after that Saturday he was gone. And every time I pulled in your yard, there it sat. Like it was waiting on me. I couldn’t look at it. I thought if it was gone I could breathe.”
“Could you?”
“No.” He shook his head. “It was worse. Now there’s a dead spot in the grass and that’s on me too.”
He turned around then, finally, on the seat, so his knees were toward me. His eyes were swollen half shut. He was still holding the tray in both hands.
“I need to tell you about the money,” he said. “All of it. I don’t want you finding it out from Jeff.”
“All right.”
“I took nine days off when Dad died. For the hospital paperwork and the funeral and helping you with the garage. They gave me three days paid. The other six weren’t.” He swallowed. “Then the fuel pump went out on the truck on the highway, and when they had it up on the hoist they said both front wheel bearings were shot too. Eleven hundred and forty dollars. I had five hundred and forty in checking after rent.”
Eleven forty, less five forty. I did it in my head while he was still talking.
“Six hundred,” I said.
“Six hundred. And no truck means no job, I can’t get to Baxter on a bicycle.” He looked down. “I could’ve put it on a card. I could’ve asked Abby’s dad. I could have asked you.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I stood next to you at that desk in the funeral home and watched you write the check. I saw what it was. I wasn’t going to be the next person with his hand out.” His jaw worked. “And because there was a boat I couldn’t stand to look at that would cover it to the dollar. It felt like it was meant to be. I wrote six hundred on that card because six hundred was what I was short. I never even thought what it was worth. I didn’t want what it was worth. I wanted it gone by supper.”
“Jeff told you he’d get you two thousand.”
“I know he did.”
“That’s fourteen hundred dollars you left on a cork board.”
“I know, Mom.”
I let that sit. He needed to hear the number out loud from me, and I needed to say it, once.
Then I said the other thing, the one I had driven around with for five days.
“I’m going to tell you something, and then I’m not ever going to say it again. That boat had your name on the card. But I was married to it for thirty-one years. I packed the lunches that went in it. I sat up for it when the weather turned. You don’t get to decide by yourself, on your lunch hour, what I can stand to look at in my own yard. I came home with a sack of groceries and found out from the grass.”
He took it. He didn’t look away and he didn’t argue.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I did it behind your back because I knew what you’d say.”
“What would I have said?”
“You’d have said wait.”
“I would have said wait,” I agreed. “And then I would have found you six hundred dollars, if I’d had to sell my mother’s china to do it, and you’d have hated that worse. So I’m not sure I’d have been right either.”
Mr. Lund cleared his throat. It was the first sound he’d made in ten minutes.
“If the two of you are about done,” he said, “there’s a lure in that box that’s been waiting since Labor Day, and I’d hate to see a man’s last purchase go to waste.”
Tyler looked down at the little cardboard box.
“It says next time,” he said.
“Well,” said Mr. Lund. “What do you call this?”
Tyler’s hands shook so badly he couldn’t get the knot. He tried three times. Then he held the line and the lure back over his shoulder toward me, without a word, the way he used to when he was six, and I tied it on for him. I can still tie a clinch knot. Mike made sure of that the first year we were married.
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.
