The Week in March Nobody Wanted

After that, every year, it was the second week of March. Walleye season was closed by then, so we fished perch and crappie through the ice.

He did not care about limits or size. He cared about the quiet. He brought his green Stanley thermos, the big one with the dented cup, full of coffee with so much sugar in it that it was more like syrup. When I turned twelve he let me have the first cup.

We talked in that fish house in a way we never talked anywhere else. He told me about Vietnam, a little. He told me about meeting Mom at a dance at the Legion in Deer River.

When I was seventeen and my heart got broken, he did not say a word for about an hour, and then he said, “He was not good enough to clean your fish,” and I laughed so hard I nearly fell off the bucket.

We went every March until I was twenty-five, the year I married Scott and moved to Duluth. After that we went some years and not others. The last time was four years before Dad died, when his knees were already bad and I drilled all the holes myself with his old hand auger.

My brothers were at hockey every one of those years. Later they were coaching hockey, and then they were watching their own boys play hockey. They never once asked where Dad and I went in March. I am not sure they ever noticed we were gone.

So when Steve wrote “Bring a space heater, ha,” what I heard was not an insult. What I heard was my brothers handing me the one week of the year that had always been mine, without the faintest idea they were doing it.

That is why I said thank you. I meant it.

But I also knew they had meant it as the leftovers.

Bobby

The idea did not come to me right away. It came in January, at work, from Linda Pederson.

Linda is a regular of ours, seventy-something, sharp as a tack, picks up her blood pressure pills on the first of the month. She was waiting for her refill and complaining about her son-in-law.

“He guides up by Bigfork,” she said. “Ice fishing. He’s good at it, too. But every March he’s beside himself, because the resorts up there start closing once walleye’s done, and his perch people still need a bed.”

I stopped counting tablets.

“What kind of a bed?”

“Any kind with a roof. He’s had people sleeping in a camper in a church parking lot.”

I finished her prescription and rang it up, and then I said, “Linda, would your son-in-law want my number?”

His name was Bobby LaValle. He called me that night while Scott and I were eating supper. He was thirty-eight, grew up in Effie, and talked fast, like a man who has to get things said before his fingers freeze.

“Which lake?” he asked, and I told him.

He was quiet for a second.

“That’s a good perch lake,” he said. “Hardly anybody fishes it in March. How many does the cabin sleep?”

“Six. Two bedrooms and a loft, and the couch folds out.”

“Heat?”

“Propane furnace and a wood stove. We keep the furnace at fifty all winter so the pipes don’t freeze. The well has heat tape on it.”

“Road plowed?”

“The county plows the road. My brother has a guy who plows the driveway, sixty-five dollars a push.”