The Bait Shop I Would Not Sell

Chapter 5

Glen helped it happen within the week, and he did it exactly where I had guessed he would. The supply line.

My minnows come from a man two counties over who traps them in spring ponds the way his father did. He is reliable and ornery and he does not have a contract with me because for twenty years we have not needed one. A handshake and a standing Thursday order.

That Thursday he did not come. He called instead, embarrassed, and told me a fella had offered to buy his whole spring output for the summer, every minnow, cash up front, more than the market, for a new operation on Carlow.

“I didn’t say yes, Ruth,” he said. “But I didn’t say no either. It’s a lot of money for an old man with a bad back.”

There it was. Glen was going to build his marina and stock it with my trapper’s minnows and let my tanks run empty in July, and then the story would not be a lie anymore. Closed by August. A prophecy he was paying to fulfill.

I could have panicked. I could have called the men, as some people kept suggesting I do, as though a problem with my business belonged to any man who would take it off my hands.

Instead I drove two counties over that same afternoon and I sat at that trapper’s kitchen table.

I did not match Glen’s money. I could not. What I did was remind him of something Glen could not buy.

“You trapped for Earl thirty years,” I said. “You trapped for his father before that. Glen Dermott will pay you top dollar this summer and the summer his marina has its own supplier, you will get a letter, not a phone call, and you will be a line item he cuts. I cannot pay you more than him. I can pay you every Thursday until one of us is dead, the way we always have.”

He looked at his coffee a long time. Then he said, “You want the usual order tomorrow or the big one.”

“The big one,” I said. “I’m open at four now.”

He almost smiled. “Heard you were closing in August.”

“You heard wrong,” I said. “You want to come see for yourself, I’ll have coffee on at four.”

I drove home with my supply line intact and my hands steady on the wheel, and I understood that this was the whole war in one afternoon. Glen had money. I had thirty years of showing up. He could outbid me on any single thing. He could not outbid me on all of it at once, because loyalty is not a line item and he did not believe in it.

That was his weakness. Not greed. Greed I could have fought all day across a counter. His weakness was that he could not imagine, truly could not picture it, that anyone would choose a thirty year handshake over a bigger number, so he never once saw the loyalty coming until it had already beaten him.

That is the thing money does to a man. It teaches him that everything has a price, and then it blinds him to the one table where that is not the rule. My table. Earl’s table. The table where a trapper with a bad back chooses the widow over the cash because thirty years is a thing you do not put a number on.

The next piece was the bank. My loan officer had called me a seasonal risk, and I needed the summer inventory money he had made me feel foolish for asking about.

I did not call and ask again. I made an appointment and I walked in with Earl’s old ledgers and my new ones, every line clean, the early opening already showing in three weeks of numbers that beat the year before by a third.

I laid it out on his desk like a catch. “I am not asking you to bet on a widow,” I said. “I am asking you to read a business. Three weeks, opening at four, up thirty-one percent over last year. I have locked my supply. I intend to land the Carlow Classic. Now tell me about that line of credit, and this time read the book before you look at my face.”

He read the book. He gave me the line of credit, smaller than I wanted, but real.

On the way out he said, a little sheepish, “Glen Dermott told half the lake you’d be gone by fall.”

“Glen Dermott,” I said, “has never once bought a minnow from me. He does not know what time the crappies move. I would not take fishing advice from him and he should not have given you business advice about me.”

I meant it as a closing line. It turned out to be more than that. The loan officer fished. Men talk. And the next Saturday, the man who signs the loans on this lake launched his boat at four fifteen and bought his leeches from me, and told me the bite was off the point, and I told him to try the weed edge in twelve feet, and he caught his limit.

He became a regular. Not a rescue. A customer who learned I was worth more open than Glen said I was closed.