The Fishing Trip They Never Came Home From

Josh was seventeen that last summer, already six feet tall, already talking about enlisting after graduation the way seventeen year old boys in Loon Lake often do, because the recruiter’s table at the county fair was the most interesting thing most of them had ever seen up close. Ben was fifteen, quieter than his brothers, the one who actually read the fishing magazines instead of just flipping through them for pictures of bass boats. Luke was thirteen, the baby, still small enough that Mark used to hoist him onto his shoulders at the Fourth of July fireworks even though Luke complained loudly that he was too old for it every single year, and climbed up anyway.

The fishing trip was Mark’s tradition with the boys, not mine, and I liked it that way. Every summer, the first weekend after the Fourth, Mark loaded up his sixteen foot aluminum boat, packed enough tackle to outfit half the county, and took Josh, Ben, and Luke out to Comfort Lake for two nights of sleeping in the truck bed and eating gas station sandwiches and catching, by Mark’s own admission, almost nothing. It was never about the fish. It was about getting three teenage boys away from their phones and their sister and their mother long enough to remember they were brothers.

That morning, I stood in the driveway in my robe with a coffee mug in my hand while the boys loaded coolers and rods into the truck bed, elbowing each other over who got the front seat, and I took a picture of all four of them squinting into the sun because Emily told me to. I did not know it would be the last photograph I would ever take of my husband and my sons together. Nobody ever knows that. That is the cruelest thing about a photograph like that. It looks exactly like every other one.

They were supposed to be home Sunday evening for supper. I made a pot roast. I remember that detail so clearly it embarrasses me, that in the middle of the worst week of my life I keep returning to a pot roast going cold on the stove because nobody ever came to eat it.

By nine that night I told myself Mark’s phone was just dead. Mark’s phone was never dead. By midnight I had called the sheriff’s department, and by six the next morning a deputy was standing in my driveway with his hat in his hands, telling me Mark’s truck had been found at the Comfort Lake boat ramp, the trailer still attached, the truck locked, nothing out of place. Search crews found the boat itself later that afternoon, capsized and half sunk against the rocks on the far side of the lake, its hull scraped and cracked along one side like it had been dragged over something it should never have hit.

There was no sign of Mark. No sign of my sons.