The Name in the Lodge Record Book

I got the net under it on the first try. Thank God. If I had missed that fish, I would have had to move to another country.

We did not even try to measure it in the boat. I put the fish in the livewell, Hailey sat down hard on the seat, and I ran us straight back to the dock with her laughing so hard she could not talk.

Ken was standing on the dock with his coffee. He must have heard the motor coming in fast at six in the morning and guessed.

He took one look in the livewell and set his cup down on a post.

He brought the measuring board out of the fish house himself. Hailey held the fish while he laid it out, nose to the bump board, tail pinched together.

“Twenty-nine and a quarter,” Ken said, very quietly. He looked at it again. “Twenty-nine and a quarter inches.”

He took our picture with my phone. Hailey and me on the end of the dock with the fog still on the water behind us, both of us holding that walleye, both of us laughing like idiots. It is on our refrigerator right now.

Then Hailey knelt on the dock and held the fish in the water by the tail until it got its breath back. It took a while. When it finally kicked loose and went down into the green, she said, “Bye,” like she was talking to a friend.

The Record Book

Ken stood there on the dock for a minute after the fish was gone, wiping his hands on his jeans. Then he said, “Wait here,” and walked up to the office.

He came back with a book I had never seen in 25 years of coming to that lodge.

An old green ledger, the cloth cover worn white at the corners, the kind they used to sell at the five and dime for keeping accounts.

“Lodge record book,” he said. “My dad started it the year he opened. Biggest fish of each kind, every one that ever beat the one before it. We don’t bring it out much. Only when somebody earns a line.”

He opened it on top of a gas can and turned the pages carefully. Northern pike. Lake trout. Smallmouth. Then a page headed, in old fountain pen, Walleye.

There were maybe a dozen entries down that page, starting in the seventies, each one a little bigger than the last. Names, dates, lengths. Different handwriting on every line.

Ken took a ballpoint out of his shirt pocket and held it out to Hailey. “Your name, the date, and the length,” he said. “Under the last one.”

Hailey took the pen like it was something that might break. She bent over the book, braced it with her other hand, and set the pen on the empty line.

Then she stopped. She did not write anything. She was looking at the line just above the empty one, and she did not move.

I leaned over her shoulder to see. The last entry before hers was written in blue ink, faded almost to gray, in big round letters that leaned uphill. A child’s handwriting.

June 1989. Walleye, twenty-seven and a half inches. Katie Kowalski, age 10.

Under it, in a grown man’s square capital letters, somebody had added two words. Proud Dad.

I knew that handwriting. I had a check in my wallet with that same handwriting on it.

Hailey looked up at me. “Dad,” she said. “Who’s Katie?”

I opened my mouth and nothing came out. I had a lot of cousins on the Kowalski side. None of them was named Katie.

None of them would have been 10 years old on this lake in 1989, when I was two years old myself.

Ken took off his cap. He held it in both hands against his chest, and he looked out at the fog for a while before he said anything.

“I was 17 that summer,” he said. “Working the dock for my dad. I held the board for that fish.” He stopped. “Matt, that’s not mine to tell you. That’s your father’s. I’m sorry. I’d want it from him, if I were you.”

Hailey looked at the name for a long time. Then she wrote her own, right underneath, slow and careful in her best printing.

June 2026. Walleye, twenty-nine and a quarter inches. Hailey Kowalski, age 12.

She looked at it, and then she did something I did not expect. Under her own line, very small, she wrote three more words: For Katie too.

Ken saw it. He did not say anything. He just closed the book gently, the way you would close a Bible, and carried it back up to the office under his arm.