The Bait Shop I Would Not Sell

Chapter 4

The alarm went off at ten to four and the lake was black glass and I was the only light on the whole north shore.

I made the coffee strong. I turned the pump up on the minnow tanks. I unlocked the door into cold air that smelled like water and pine and two-stroke oil, which to me is the smell of my entire adult life.

At four twenty, headlights swung into the gravel. It was the Dupree boys, and they stopped short, surprised, because I was never open this early.

“Ruth,” the older one said through his window. “You’re open.”

“I’m open at four now,” I said. “Every day. What do you need.”

They needed fatheads and leeches and a dozen crawlers and gas station coffee they did not get because I had my own pot on. They spent thirty-one dollars. They would have spent it at the gas station at four thirty if I had still been dark.

By the time the sky went gray I had sold to nine boats, and six of them told me, surprised and pleased, that they did not know I opened this early. That is the thing about a habit. People do not know you changed it until you show them.

When the morning rush thinned around eight, I pulled Earl’s old wooden ladder out of the back and I set it under the sign, and I made myself climb it, which at seventy is not nothing.

The sign is a single cedar board, long as a man, that Earl cut and planed himself. I got my putty knife under the curled edge of the old paint to scrape it smooth before I primed it.

The paint came off in long blue curls. Forty years of lake weather had done half the job for me. And under Earl’s faded blue, I found another layer I had forgotten existed.

His first coat. His practice letters. The summer he painted it he had lettered it once, hated it, sanded it, and done it again, and I had watched him do it and then I had forgotten, the way you forget the small motions of a long marriage.

Under the top paint, in that first ghost coat, I could see where he had lettered the whole thing once in a hand that was surer than the final version. He had sanded his best work off and painted over it with the nervous version because he was worried the first one looked too proud.

That man. Forty years and he still surprised me from inside a board.

I stopped scraping. I sat on the top of that ladder with blue curls in my lap and I cried in a way I had not let myself cry at the funeral, because at the funeral I had to be upright for everyone else.

Up there nobody needed me to be upright. Just the lake and the ghost of my husband’s steadier hand.

And then, because I am practical and the minnows do not sell themselves, I wiped my face on my sleeve and I kept working. But I did not sand off his first coat. I primed carefully around the ghost of it, and I decided I would letter the new sign to match his sure hand, not his nervous one.

That afternoon a man I did not recognize came and stood in my lot with a clipboard, taking pictures of my dock and my shoreline and my gravel.

I walked out and asked if I could help him. He said he was with Dermott Shoreline Holdings, just documenting the parcel.

“This parcel is not for sale,” I told him.

He gave me a small smile, the kind that has a fact behind it you are not supposed to know yet. “Everything’s for sale eventually, ma’am,” he said, and he got in his truck.

I watched him drive the shore road, slowing at every dock, and I understood something I should have understood at the counter the day before. Glen was not making me an offer. He was assembling a thing, and my little lot was a missing tooth in the middle of his smile.

That made me more valuable than he had told me. And it made me more of a problem to him than a soft landing. It meant he could not just wait for August. He needed August to actually happen.

Which meant Glen was going to help it happen.