The Fishing Pond in the Back Pasture

Grandpa Steve

Beau was not about to be outdone. While I helped Addie get the hook out and the fish in the bucket, he lay down on his stomach on the dock and stuck his face as close to the water as he could get.

“There’s a big one under here,” he said. “A giant one.”

He was right. There was one bass that had grown faster than the rest. It hung around in the shade under the dock most afternoons. It must have been nine inches by then, which is big for a fish that was two inches in October.

“That one,” Beau announced, pointing straight down at it, “is Grandpa Steve.”

I laughed out loud. “Why is he Grandpa Steve?”

“Because he’s the biggest,” Beau said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “And he’s the boss of the pond. And he doesn’t say much.”

Ryan made a noise like he had swallowed something wrong. Then he laughed, really laughed, the way he used to when he was a boy, with his head back.

When I told Steve that night at supper, he set down his fork and laughed until he had to wipe his eyes with his napkin. Then he went quiet.

“Nobody’s ever named a fish after me,” he said.

“Well, now somebody has,” I said. “And you can’t keep him for three years. The hatchery man said.”

“I wouldn’t keep that fish for a million dollars,” Steve said. And I believe him.

The End of the Dock

But that came later. That afternoon, after the fish went in the bucket and Beau finished naming things, the pond went quiet again. Addie cast her line back out by herself. Beau leaned against his daddy’s side.

Ryan was sitting at the end of the dock with his legs hanging over. He kept tugging the brim of his ball cap down, around and around, the way his father does when he is working up to something.

My son is a lineman. He climbs poles in ice storms. He puts the lights back on for whole townships at three in the morning. He says about nine words a day, and most of them are to his kids.

He had not said one word about Brooke to me since that January, a year and a half before. Not one. And I had kept my promise. I had not asked.

“Mom,” he said.

I came and sat down on the dock beside him. Beau had gone still against him, watching his sister’s bobber with his mouth open.

Ryan was looking at the water, not at me.

“There’s something about Brooke I should have told you a long time ago,” he said.

I folded my hands in my lap and waited. Twenty years of waiting at mailboxes teaches you how to do that.

“You know she was engaged before me,” he said. “To that guy in Ottumwa. Before we met.”

“I knew there was somebody,” I said. “I never knew much.”

“His mom was a lot,” Ryan said. “Brooke doesn’t talk about it. But his mom ran everything. She planned every trip. She paid for everything. And then she used it.”

“She’d pay for a weekend at the lake and then decide who sat where at supper. She’d buy Brooke a dress and tell her when to wear it. She came on every trip they ever took. Every single one. Brooke never got one thing that was just hers.”

“That’s part of why she broke it off,” Ryan said. “She told me once she felt like she was disappearing. Like she was a guest in her own life.”

“Oh, Ryan,” I said.

“And you know how she grew up,” he said. “Her mom raised her and Kim by herself. They never went anywhere. Not once. Brooke had never been on a plane till our first Disney trip. She saved for two years for that.”

He finally looked at me.

“Disney is the one thing she ever got that’s only hers and the kids’. Hers and mine and theirs. And then you offered to pay for all of it.”

I felt something go cold and then warm in my chest. I had not thought about it that way. Not once in all that time.

“She cried, Mom,” he said. “When she read your message. She sat on the bathroom floor and cried, and she said it was happening again. That somebody was going to buy their way in and take it over.”

“I would never,” I started, and stopped, because it did not matter what I would never.

“I know,” Ryan said. “I know you wouldn’t. I told her that. But she was scared. And when you asked what you did, she didn’t know how to answer, because you didn’t do anything. So she panicked and she blocked you.”

He looked down at Beau, who had fallen half asleep against him in the sun.

“That’s not an excuse,” he said. “It was wrong. She knows it was wrong. She’s known it for months.”