The Boat His Daddy Left Him

The pole barn was empty where the boat should have been.

I stood in the doorway with the truck keys still in my hand and looked at the clean square on the dusty concrete where the trailer tires had sat all winter.

Clyde came around the side of the barn wiping his hands on a shop rag. He didn’t look surprised to see me, and he didn’t look sorry.

He looked like a man who had been waiting for this conversation and wanted it over with.

“Sold it Saturday,” he said. “Fellow from over by the lake. Seventy-five hundred, boat and trailer both.”

I heard the words, but they did not land right away. I kept looking at that clean square, at the little rust ring where the jack stand had rested.

Jimmy’s boat. The sparkly blue bass boat my husband had loved almost as much as he loved us.

“You sold it,” I said. “Jimmy’s boat.”

“Storage isn’t free, Becky.” He folded the rag and stuck it in his back pocket. “It sat in here since November. I needed the room, and I needed the money. You were selling everything else anyway.”

“You could have called me first,” I said. “Just once. You could have picked up the phone and called me before you did it.”

“Could have.” He shrugged and looked off toward the hay rings. “Didn’t.”

Then he turned and walked back toward the cattle pens, and I got in my truck and drove home with both hands on the wheel, and I did not cry until I was past the county road and nobody could see me.

My name is Becky Strand. I was thirty-eight that spring, and I had been a widow for fourteen months.

I worked the counter at the feed store in Crane, in southwest Missouri, and I had an eleven-year-old boy named Owen who was the whole reason I got up in the mornings.

Jimmy died in February of the year before, out by the mailbox, on an ordinary Tuesday. Heart attack at forty. The neighbor who found him said he was gone before he hit the gravel.

Jimmy built our house himself on four acres his daddy split off from the Strand home place. It took him three years of weekends. It was not fancy, but it was his.

Clyde farms the rest of the home place, about three hundred acres of grass and timber with a cow and calf herd. He and Jimmy argued about everything and would have died for each other.

When Jimmy passed, Clyde took it hard. He would not talk about it.

He came to the funeral in his good shirt and stood at the back and left before the ham was served in the fellowship hall, and after that I hardly saw him except across the counter at work.

The trouble with the house was money, the plain kind.

The life insurance through Jimmy’s job at the county road department was twenty-five thousand dollars, and the funeral and the hospital bills and the truck note ate most of that by summer.

The house payment was eleven hundred and forty dollars a month. I made about fourteen dollars an hour at the feed store.

I did that math a hundred times at the kitchen table after Owen went to bed, and it never once came out any different.

By fall I knew I had to sell. I found a little rental duplex in town, three blocks from Owen’s school, with a yard big enough for a picnic table.