The Bait Shop I Would Not Sell

Chapter 3

I did not sleep the night after Glen made his offer. I sat at my kitchen table with Earl’s old ledgers and I made myself look at the truth, because fear lies and numbers do not.

Here is the truth I was afraid of. The season before had been thin. A cold wet June had kept the fishermen home, and I had finished the year with less in the account than I had started it.

Glen knew that. I do not know how, but he knew. A small town leaks. The bank leaks. People talk at the Koffee Kup over eggs and my thin year had become a fact that everyone owned but me.

So when he said closed by August, he was not pulling it from the air. He was reading a real page in a real book. That is what made it stick to me. A cruel lie you can brush off. A cruel truth you have to answer.

I opened the ledgers Earl kept in his blocky pencil, the ones from the good years, and I started reading them like a map instead of a grave.

And somewhere around two in the morning, I stopped being afraid and started being angry, and under the anger I found the thing I had forgotten I had.

I know this lake.

I do not mean I like it. I mean I know it the way Glen Dermott will never know it if he lives to be a hundred and buys every foot of shoreline on it.

I know that the crappies move into the north bay the second week the water hits fifty-two degrees. I know Harlan’s grandson can be talked into a dozen fatheads if I ask about his baseball first.

I know that the Dupree boys launch at four forty on tournament Saturdays and that if I am open at four, I have them, and if I am dark until six, the gas station in town has them, and they are gone for the day.

I know which cabins are rentals and which are family, which renters tip the local economy and which just want a selfie by the water. I know the difference between a man who wants minnows and a man who wants to stand at my counter for ten minutes because he is lonely, and I sell them both exactly what they came for.

Glen had money and lots. He was buying shoreline like poker chips, cabin after cabin, planning a marina and condominiums where the cattails are now.

But Glen did not know that walleye bite the leech before the crawler in late June. He thought bait was bait. He thought a cooler of worms by a gas pump was the same thing I do.

It is not the same thing. What I sell is not the minnow. It is the morning. It is forty years of knowing exactly what you need before you know you need it.

That was the advantage he overlooked. He was counting my age and my thin year and my crooked building, and he had left my actual knowledge off the ledger entirely, because to him a seventy year old woman could not be an asset. She could only be a liability with a soft landing coming.

I made a list that night at the kitchen table. Not a battle plan. A work plan.

Open at four, not five thirty. Beat the gas station to the early launchers.

Repaint the sign, because a dead man’s faded shack invites the story that she is already half gone, and a fresh sign at dawn says the opposite without a single word.

Call my minnow trapper and lock in my supply before Glen thought to buy him out, which I suspected he might try, because men like Glen always go for the supply line.

Clean the books, every line, so that when the bank looked at me again they would see a business and not a widow.

And land the Carlow Classic, the big fall tournament that every shop on the lake wanted and that had always gone to the lodge, because if I landed that, August was a joke and everyone would know it.

I went to bed at three. I set the alarm for ten minutes before four.

I lay there in the dark and I talked to Earl, which I still do. I told him I was not selling. I told him I was sorry the last year had been thin. I told him I was going to repaint his sign and I hoped he would not mind that I meant to straighten the second word this time.

I did not know yet that the sign would answer me back.