The Name in the Lodge Record Book

The Plan

That night, after supper, I sat on the back step with my phone and the lodge number I had known by heart since I was a teenager.

Ken answered on the third ring. His father started the lodge in the seventies, and Ken took it over in the late nineties.

He has the slow, polite voice of a man who has spent his whole life on the water.

“Matt Kowalski,” he said. “You boys aren’t due for two weeks yet.”

I told him I was not calling about the men’s week. I asked if he had anything open the week before, for two people, a man and his daughter.

There was a little pause on the line. “Your girl?” he said. “How old is she now?”

“Twelve,” I said. “She’s been waiting six years.”

Another pause. Then I heard pages turning. “I’ve got cabin seven open, the little one by the point. Sixteen-foot Lund with a twenty-horse tiller. $1,640 for the week, American. Gas is extra.”

It was almost exactly what my dad had just handed back to me. I told him to put us down before I could think of a reason not to.

When I came inside, Jenna was at the table with her reading glasses on. She looked at my face and knew. “You’re going,” she said. It was not a question.

“We’re going,” I said. “If you’re all right with it.”

She took her glasses off. “Matt, I’d drive her myself if I knew how to back a boat.”

Jenna could not come. She is a pharmacist at the hospital, and she had already traded two weekends to cover a coworker’s surgery. She did not mind. She said this one belonged to Hailey and me.

There was paperwork. A kid crossing into Canada with only one parent should carry a signed letter from the other parent saying it is all right. The border people can ask for it, and some of them do.

Jenna typed it up that night at the kitchen table. Our names, Hailey’s birthday, the dates of the trip, the name and phone number of the lodge, and her own cell number at the bottom so anybody could call and check.

She signed it and had it notarized at the bank on Friday, just to be safe. Then she put it in a plastic sleeve so it would not get wet, and tucked it in with our passport cards.

I went online and bought my Ontario Outdoors Card and a fishing license.

Hailey was under 18, so she did not need her own license as long as she fished with me. Whatever she kept would count against my limit.

We would not keep much anyway. A couple of eaters for shore lunch. The big ones go back. My dad taught me that before I could tie a knot.

On Saturday I took Hailey to the sporting goods store in Wausau and bought her a new life jacket. Not the cheap orange horse collar. A real vest, the kind with zipper pockets and a loop for pliers.

“I can swim, Dad,” she said, holding it up in the mirror.

“I know you can,” I said. “You’ll wear it every minute you’re on the water anyway. That’s the one rule there’s no arguing with.”

She shrugged and zipped it up and looked at herself. Then she smiled for the first time in a week. “It has a pocket for my jig box,” she said.

I did not tell my dad we were going. I did not hide it, either. I just did not bring it up, and he did not ask. We had always been good at not asking each other things.

The night before we left, Hailey packed her tackle box three times. I heard her in her room, opening and closing those latches, until almost eleven o’clock.