The Johnboat Ramp at Lake Week

Over on the pontoon, Owen said, loud enough for the whole lake to hear, “Dad, can we go with Grandpa? Can we go fishing with Grandpa this afternoon? Please?”

“Me too,” Tyler said. “I want to go in Uncle Mike’s boat.”

Brad did not answer them.

He stood there at the wheel of his sixty-eight thousand dollar boat, in his new sunglasses, and his boys were hanging over the rail of it, begging to get off it and into my dented beer can with their grandpa.

Then he pushed the throttle forward and the pontoon swung away toward the cabins, and the wake rocked us, and Walt put a hand on the gunwale to steady himself and watched it go.

“He’ll come around,” Walt said quietly.

I did not answer. I did not trust what I would say.

We fished another hour, but the bite was done, and Walt was tired. When we came back in, Kelly was waiting on the dock with the ramp already laid out and the chair unfolded.

I tied up, laid the ramp down, and we did the transfer backward, from the seat to the chair, on three.

Kelly had seen the fish. Tara had sent her the picture from the pontoon before we even got back. Kelly held her father’s face in both hands for a long moment and did not say anything at all.

At three that afternoon, I took Tyler and Owen out with Walt.

Four of us in a sixteen-foot boat with a plywood deck, all in life jackets, and Emma stayed back on purpose so her cousins could have Grandpa to themselves. She said she had already had him all morning.

Tyler caught a crappie. Owen caught a perch and a weed. Walt tied both their knots. Five turns, not four, through the little loop, wet it, pull slow.

I sat in the back with my hand on the tiller and listened to him teach it again.

Brad did not take the pontoon out that afternoon. From the water I could see him on the porch of the other cabin, watching his boys fish with his father from a boat that was not his.

That was the price. Nobody yelled at him. Nobody made a speech. He just got to sit on the porch and watch from there, the way he had told his dad to do.

That night, after supper, after Walt was in bed and the kids were in the cabin playing cards, I went down to the dock to check the lines on my boat.

It was full dark. The lake was black and flat and the stars were out over it so thick they looked like spilled salt.

Brad was sitting on the end of the dock with his feet hanging over, holding two cans of beer. He held one up without looking at me.

I took it and sat down next to him. For a while, neither of us said anything.

“Owen hasn’t stopped talking about that fish,” Brad said finally, turning the can in his hands. “Tyler says he’s going to make a seat like that for his bike.”

I waited. Half my job is waiting in basements for people to tell me what is really wrong with the furnace.

“I couldn’t do it, Mike,” Brad said. “Watching you lift him. I’ve watched you do it all year, at Christmas, at Easter, at Mom’s grave. You and Kelly get him up and he grabs your shirt and his face goes all tight, and I can’t stand it. I can’t watch it.”

He took a long breath.