The Johnboat Ramp at Lake Week

Walt put his right hand on the armrest of the boat seat, and on three he pushed, and stood, and we turned him a quarter turn together, and he sat down in that seat like a man sitting down at his own kitchen table.

I flipped the armrest down. I unlocked the swivel, turned him to face the bow, and locked it again.

Then I rolled the empty chair back up the ramp, folded it, and set it on the dock where it would stay dry.

I climbed back down, knelt on the deck beside Walt, and put his rod in his hands so he could feel the weight of it again.

Behind us, the pontoon pulled away from the end of the dock, slow and quiet in the fog, with Brad at the wheel and Tara and the boys aboard.

Owen had turned around in his seat to watch us. Brad did not turn around.

Only then did I untie the ramp and slide it up onto the dock beside the chair.

Kelly did not get in the boat. Somebody had to be at the dock when we came back with the chair and the ramp, and she said she would rather watch anyway.

She kissed her father on the top of his fishing hat, and she kissed Emma, and she squeezed my arm once, hard.

I pulled the cord. The old outboard coughed twice and caught.

I backed us off the dock and swung the bow toward the point, and the last thing I saw before the mist closed in was Kelly standing on the porch steps with both hands over her face.

I did not know until later that she cried for the better part of an hour, sitting on those steps in her bathrobe with her coffee going cold.

She told me she had not cried like that since the night of the stroke. She said it was the good kind.

The rock bar was right where Walt said it would be. I watched the depth finder come up from thirty feet to twenty-five to twenty-two, and Walt said, “There. Right there. Drop it,” before I had even said the number out loud.

I lowered the anchor slow so it would not spook anything and let the boat swing around on the rope until we sat quiet with the bow into what little breeze there was.

The mist was starting to lift off the water in patches. The sun was a white circle behind it.

I had rigged Walt’s rod the night before. It was his own six-and-a-half foot spinning rod from the eighties, and Kelly had packed it without telling him.

I baited a leech on his hook and handed it to him.

He held that rod in his right hand and looked at it. Then he looked at his left hand, lying in his lap.

Then he brought the left hand up slow, an inch at a time, and pinched the line against the rod with his thumb and first finger. He flipped the bail with his right.

“Walt,” I said. “You want me to…”

“No,” he said.

He brought the rod back over his right shoulder. It was not pretty.

It was a short, stiff little cast, nothing like the long, easy ones I had watched him make off this point fifteen summers ago. The leech went out maybe twenty feet and plopped into the water.

But it was his. It was his first cast in two years, and he made it himself, sitting in a seat I bolted down in the dark, on the lake he had fished since Eisenhower.