The Ramp Where the Boat Used to Sit

“You took her savings and bought yourself a boat,” I said. Quiet. Not a question.

“I put her van money down and financed the rest,” he said. He couldn’t look at me. “And I hated myself for it before I got it home. By the second week after, I couldn’t sleep. I’d come out here at night and stand next to it.”

“Why didn’t you take it back?”

“Because then I’d have had to tell her.” His voice cracked on it.

“Every Sunday I sat in that room and patted her hand and couldn’t tell her. And then she got better. Every week she got better, and every week it got worse, what I’d done.”

I believed every word of it. That’s what made it so hard. He wasn’t a monster.

He was a scared man who did a selfish thing when nobody was looking, and then didn’t have the nerve to undo it.

But my mother had just been carried into her own house like a child, in front of the whole street, because he did not have the nerve. And I didn’t know what to say to him about that.

A screen door slapped across the street. I looked up, and Hank Wiebe was coming down his porch steps, one at a time, with a hand on his own rail. He has bad knees from forty years on a tractor seat.

He crossed the street without looking either way, which in our town you can mostly get away with.

He walked up the drive, past the end of my truck, and right past me on the steps without a word.

He stopped at the bass boat. He put one hand on the trailer fender and stood there a minute, looking at the boat the way he used to look at a heifer at the sale barn he wasn’t going to bid on.

Then he looked at Rick.

“That’s a nice boat, Rick,” Hank said. His voice was flat as a county road. “That a Sherman Reservoir boat? You going to fish the dam?”

Rick didn’t answer.

“I was out on my porch when Debbie got carried up those steps,” Hank said. “Joan was too. Lot of people were. I expect half the street saw it, and the other half’s going to hear about it at the Cenex before supper.”

“Hank,” Rick said. “Don’t.”

“I’m not going to do anything,” Hank said. “I’m seventy years old. I don’t do much of anything anymore. But I’ve got one question for you, and I want you to think before you answer it.”

Rick waited.

“You got a hitch on that pickup of yours that’ll pull this thing?”

Rick blinked. “Yeah. Course.”

“Then move it,” Hank said. “Back of the house, the street, I don’t care. We’re going to need that side of the drive.”

He turned and looked up at me. “Cole. How many of your guys can you get here before dark?”

I didn’t understand at first. I stood there on the top step like a fool, and Hank sighed the way he used to sigh when I was fourteen and mowing his yard crooked.

“A ramp, son,” he said. “Your mother needs a ramp. I’ve got a chop saw and a post-hole digger in my garage and an account at the lumberyard. What I don’t have is knees. Make some calls.”