The Pond I Bought Back With My First Pay

I handed it to her. She looked at it like she did not know what to do with it, and then her hands remembered, and she checked the bobber and the hook the way he had taught us.

We dug in the coffee can of worms I had brought. Brittany made a face at the first one, exactly like she did when she was six, and then baited it anyway, quick and neat.

We sat at the end of the dock with our boots hanging over the water, side by side, the way we sat when the dock was eight feet long and leaned to the left.

She caught the first fish. A bluegill no bigger than her palm, flashing gold and blue in the last of the light. She squealed, and I laughed so hard I nearly lost my cap.

“Throw it back,” I said. “He always made us throw the first one back.”

“For luck,” she said. “I remember.”

She let it go. It sat in the shallows a second like it could not believe its good fortune, and then it was gone into the cattails.

Brittany went home to Council Bluffs that night, but she went by Mom and Dad’s first. I did not ask her to. She told me later what she said, standing in their kitchen with her car keys still in her hand.

She told them she knew what Mom had said. She told them she knew Dad had known. She told them that she would not be going out on the pontoon on the Fourth of July, or any other day, until they had driven out to that pond and said it to my face.

Mom cried. Dad went out to the garage and did not come in until Brittany had left.

Mom called me the next afternoon. Her voice was small and tight, and for once, there was no gravy boat to reach for.

“We didn’t think you cared about the land,” she said. “You never said anything.”

“I said something at dinner that day,” I told her. “You patted my hand.”

There was a long quiet on the line.

“I never had a wedding,” Mom said finally. “Your dad and I got married in the church basement with ham sandwiches and a sheet cake from the grocery store. I was nineteen. I wanted one of my girls to have the thing I didn’t.”

“I know, Mom.”

“And you were always so,” she started, and then she stopped herself. I heard her stop herself. It was the first time in thirty two years I ever heard her not finish that sentence.

“I know,” I said again. “I know what you wanted. I just wish you had asked what I wanted too.”

She did not say she was sorry, not that day. But she did not say I was fine, either. That was something.

Dad came out to the pond on a weekday evening in June. I was down at the end of the dock alone with Grandpa’s pole, and I heard his new pickup on Vern’s lane and knew it before I turned around.

He parked at the gate and walked down to the fence and stopped. He did not come through. He stood at the wire with his hands on a steel post, looking at the dock and the water and the cattails, which were waist high by then and full of redwings.

I walked up to meet him. We stood on either side of the fence like neighbors.

“Vern says you did most of the dock,” he said.

“Vern did the posts. I did the boards.”