The Johnboat Ramp at Lake Week

Her face had gone the flat, careful kind of still it goes when she is deciding not to cry in front of her father.

“Coffee, Dad?” she said.

“I’d take one,” Walt said. “Thank you, Kelly girl.”

She went inside. I parked Walt at the porch rail where he could see the water, set the brakes, and pulled a lawn chair up next to him.

For a long while neither of us said anything at all.

The lake was flat and bright that afternoon, the way the northern lakes get in early August when the wind lies down.

“Your boat looks good,” Walt said finally.

He meant my johnboat.

It was tied up at the end of the dock where it always was, a dented green sixteen-foot flat-bottom with a twenty-five horse outboard and a bench seat that had been patched with duct tape since before Emma was born.

I bought it used eight years ago for nineteen hundred dollars cash. It leaked a little at one rivet if you loaded it heavy.

“Looks like a beer can somebody stepped on,” I said.

Walt smiled at that, a real one, the right side of his mouth going up the way it does now. “Beer cans catch fish,” he said.

Then he went quiet again and looked out at the point, and I watched his good hand on the armrest of the chair.

The fingers were moving. Opening and closing a little, the way a man’s hand moves when it is remembering something it used to do every day.

I knew that hand. I had held it every morning for two years, getting him from the bed to the chair.

Walt had lived in our back bedroom since the stroke, because the place in town made him miserable.

So I knew how he moved. His right leg was strong, and his left would hold him about ten seconds if you braced the knee.

I knew the pontoon had a wide gate on the side, wider than his chair. I knew there was plenty of room. I knew “no room” was not about room.

I just did not know what it was about.

The pontoon came by the cabin twice that afternoon, like Brad said it would. The second time, Tyler waved with both arms, and Walt waved back.

Brad, at the wheel, kept his eyes on the water and did not turn his head toward the porch.

Supper was hamburgers on the grill. Brad talked about the boat’s sound system and the deal he got on it. He sells trucks in Saint Cloud, and he is good at it.

Walt ate half a hamburger and said he was tired. I wheeled him into the back bedroom of our cabin, got him into bed, and set his water glass where his good hand could reach it.

“Michael,” he said, when I was at the door.

“Yeah, Walt.”

“The walleye come up on that rock bar off the point about this time of year. Twenty-two feet of water. Leeches, not crawlers.” He said it like he was telling me where he had left his car keys. “Your boat would sit nice right on top of it.”

Then he rolled onto his right side and closed his eyes.

I stood in that doorway for a long minute. Then I went out to the kitchen, where Kelly was washing the plates and the radio was playing low, and I stood next to her at the sink.

“I’m going to take him out,” I said. “Tomorrow morning. In my boat.”