The Bait Shop I Would Not Sell

Chapter 2

To understand why nineteen thousand dollars made me want to laugh and cry at the same time, you have to understand the night Earl and I decided to buy this shoreline.

It was 1979. We were renting a farmhouse with a furnace that quit every February. Earl worked the paper mill in town and I cleaned rooms at the Carlow Lodge, and on Sundays we fished.

That was the whole marriage at the start. Work, and then fish. We could not afford a boat, so we fished off a public culvert on the north end where the sunfish stacked up in June.

One Sunday a man was packing up a card table by the boat landing with a hand lettered sign that just said bait. He was moving to Arizona for his lungs. He had the little lot, the shack, and two stock tanks of minnows, and nobody wanted them.

Earl asked the price on the way to the car. I remember I pulled his sleeve. I remember saying we did not have it.

We did not have it. We put the down payment on a credit card and a loan from Earl’s brother, and we ate a lot of the fish we could not sell that first year.

People said we were foolish. A paper mill man and a cleaning woman, running a bait shop on a lake that froze five months a year. They said it kindly, the way Glen says things. It must be so much. Have you really thought it through.

We had not really thought it through. We were twenty-three and twenty-four and we were in love with a lake.

Earl built the real building himself over three summers. He was not a carpenter. The floor has a slope you can feel with a marble, and the back wall is a quarter bubble off true, and I would not trade that crooked building for a cathedral.

He painted the sign the summer the walls went up. He mixed the blue himself because the hardware store blue was too bright. He wanted the color of the lake at six in the morning, and he got close.

I used to bring him lemonade on the ladder. He used to come down and kiss me with paint on his hands and leave a blue thumbprint on my cheek, and I would wear it all day on purpose.

We never had children. That is a sentence I have learned to say without my voice breaking, but it took me years. The shop became the thing we poured it into instead.

Every regular who walked through that door became ours in a way I cannot fully explain to people who did not live it. We knew their divorces and their remissions and which ones were fishing to get away from a house that had gone quiet.

Harlan buried his wife the same spring I buried Earl. He started coming in at dawn because his kitchen was too loud with her not in it. I understood. My kitchen was loud too.

I knew the man who lost his job at the mill and still bought his boy a dozen crawlers every Saturday so the boy would never know anything had changed at home. I knew which of the summer renters were really here because a marriage was ending in the city and the lake was the last quiet place left to them.

You do not learn that selling bait by a gas pump. You learn it over years, one dawn at a time, by being the light that is already on when a man pulls into the lot with whatever he is carrying. Earl used to say we did not sell minnows at all. He said we sold a reason to get up before the sun, and the minnows were just the receipt.

Earl died three winters ago. His heart, in February, the cruelest month on this lake, when the ice is thick and the shop is closed and there is nothing to do but miss a person.

I almost did not open that next spring. The grief was a physical weight. I would stand in the shop at dawn and the quiet would come at me like water.

But I opened. Because Earl and I built it, and because opening was the only prayer I knew how to say that still felt like him.

The regulars carried me through that first season without him. Not by rescuing me. By showing up. By needing their leeches and their coffee and wanting to tell me about the walleye they lost at the boat.

So when Glen Dermott set a paper on my counter and told me a number, he was not pricing a building. He was pricing the only church I have. He just could not see it, because to him it was a run down shack with a crooked sign, and he was not entirely wrong about the shack.