The Bass Boat in My Machine Shed

What Rick Said

For a long time Rick didn’t say anything. He stood on that dock with his hands hanging at his sides, and I watched something give way in him that I hadn’t seen give way in twenty-two years of marriage.

Then Brittany’s voice came from the foot of the dock.

“What thirty-eight thousand?”

She said it quietly. She didn’t sound angry yet. She sounded like somebody who had just heard a number she should have known.

Rick turned around. He looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked down at the boards of the dock.

“The divorce,” he said. “I owe Tammy thirty-eight thousand. I owed it. I never paid it.”

“You told me that was all settled.”

“I know what I told you.”

He rubbed his face with both hands. When he took them away, his eyes were red.

There were maybe twenty people on that landing, and every one of them was suddenly very busy with their own boats.

“The business is underwater, Britt,” he said. “Has been for two years. The bank called my line of credit in February. I’ve been paying the seed company late and borrowing from one place to pay the other.”

Brittany didn’t move.

“Cancun was on a credit card,” he said. “I can’t pay it. I just wanted one week where it didn’t feel like it was all going under. I wanted you to have one nice thing before you found out.”

I’m not going to pretend I felt nothing for him then. I was married to that man for twenty-two years.

I knew what it cost him to say that, on that dock, in front of men he’d sold seed to for twenty years.

Brittany looked at him for a long time. Then she turned around and walked back up the ramp to the truck and got in the passenger side and shut the door.

She didn’t slam it. She didn’t drive away either. She just sat there.

Rick sat down on the bench at the end of the dock. He put his elbows on his knees.

I picked up a ham sandwich out of the cooler, and I walked over, and I held it out to him.

I don’t know why I did. It’s what my mother would have done.

He looked at the sandwich, and then at me.

“I don’t deserve that, Tammy.”

“It’s a sandwich, Rick,” I said. “Nobody deserves a sandwich. You just eat it.”

He took it. He didn’t eat it. He held it in both hands the way Cole had held his phone face down on my kitchen table that night, like it was something that might get away.