The Fishing Trip They Never Came Home From

Mark was careful. Not cautious, careful, in the deliberate, almost stubborn way some men are. He never let the gas gauge drop below half a tank. He checked the marine forecast three separate times before any trip on the water, not once, three times, because he did not trust a single source. He kept a dry bag with a first aid kit, a whistle, and flares behind the bench seat of that boat every single season, and he had fished Comfort Lake for eleven years without so much as a scraped knee. I could not make the man I had slept next to for twenty four years fit inside the story the county had written for him. A storm does not care how careful you are, I told myself, over and over, trying to make it true.

Whenever I said any of that out loud, Jerry told me the same thing, in the same gentle, patient voice, like he was talking a spooked horse back into its stall.

“Annie, you have got to let it go. Torturing yourself with maybes isn’t going to bring them back. It’s only going to eat you alive.”

Jerry was around constantly after the accident, and I want to be fair to what that looked like from the outside, because from the outside it looked like devotion. He mowed my lawn every other Saturday without being asked. He fixed the garbage disposal, the storm door, the water heater when it finally gave out in year three. He drove Emily to her college visits when I could not make myself get in a car for that long a drive. He took over running the feed store entirely, since Mark’s half of the business had nobody left to claim it, and every year at the shareholders’ meeting he stood up and told the room, with his voice catching just enough to be convincing, that he was only holding it together for Mark’s family. For me. For the kids Mark left behind.

I stopped talking about the storm out loud sometime in year two, mostly because I got tired of being the widow who could not accept the truth. But I never once stopped wondering, and I never once stopped noticing, in some small unexamined corner of myself, that Jerry’s truck got newer every year while the drought years should have made that impossible for anybody running a feed store honest.

There were smaller things too, things I did not let myself add up at the time because each one alone meant nothing. Jerry insisted, gently, every single year, on being the one to speak at the co-op’s annual meeting on the family’s behalf, and every year the shareholders voted, without much discussion, to extend his authority over the business for another season, because who else was there. Jerry paid off his own house in year four, on a feed store manager’s salary, in a county where a bad drought year could sink a business twice his size. Jerry bought Russ, the son he had with his second wife, a four wheeler for his sixth birthday that cost more than my own truck. I noticed every one of these things the way you notice a crack in a ceiling, filed it away, told myself it was none of my business, and kept moving, because grief takes up so much room in a person that there is not always space left over for suspicion, even when suspicion is trying very hard to get in.