The Ramp Where the Boat Used to Sit

We dug side by side for a long time without talking. Dale glanced over at us once and went back to his lumber.

Hank sat in a lawn chair by the porch, telling everybody what they were doing wrong, which was his way of helping.

“I’ll take it back,” Rick said finally, between swings. He didn’t look up. “Tomorrow morning. The boat. I’ll take it back to the dealer.”

“They won’t give you what you paid,” I said.

“I know they won’t.”

“You’ll lose money on it.”

“I know that too.” He threw a clump of clay out of the hole. “I lost a lot more than money on it already, Cole. I’d like to stop losing.”

We worked under the lights until a little after ten. Mom watched part of it from the front window, sitting in her wheelchair that I’d finally carried in from the truck.

Joan sat with her. They had the lamp on, and I could see Mom’s face every time I looked up.

We got the posts set in quick-set concrete before we quit. Twelve posts, every one plumb, because Dale checked each one twice with a level and made Travis redo one that was off by a hair.

“She’s going to be rolling on this for years,” Dale said. “It’s going to be right.”

When the other guys went home, I went inside. Mom was still awake.

Rick was sitting on the couch across from her with his cap in his lap, and I could tell from the way the room felt that they had been talking a long time.

I stood in the doorway. I didn’t want to interrupt, and I didn’t want to leave her alone with him either.

I was not proud of that second feeling, but it was there.

“Come sit down, honey,” Mom said. “I want you to hear this. I want you both to hear it, so nobody tells it different later.”

I sat on the arm of her recliner. She reached up with her good hand and took mine.

“Rick,” she said. “I’d have bought you that boat. Do you know that? If you’d asked me, the day I was home and walking, I’d have bought you a boat. I know how long you’ve wanted one.”

Rick put his face in his hands.

“All you had to do was wait,” she said. “That’s all. Wait for me to come home. And you didn’t think I was coming home, and that’s the part that hurts, Rick. Not the van. That you’d already buried me.”

“I know,” he said into his hands. “Deb, I know.”

“I’m still here,” she said. Her voice was steady. It dragged on the left, but it was steady.

“I’m going to keep being here. And you’re going to have to decide what you are, now that I am.”

We were back at it by six the next morning. It was cool and gray, and the cottonwoods were dropping their first yellow leaves on the stacked lumber.

Joan had coffee going before any of us got out of our trucks.

Rick was already in the alley when I pulled up. He was checking the tire pressure on the boat trailer with a gauge.

He didn’t look up when I walked past, and I didn’t say anything to him.

About seven, he got in his pickup and pulled out with the boat behind him.

I watched him turn the corner toward the highway to Grand Island, the shiny hull catching the first sun, and then he was gone.