The Cabin I Took My Boy To

I walked a mile and a quarter that morning, a little faster than the week before.

Every time I looked over, Tucker was watching me through the glass instead of reading. When I hit a mile he stood up and waved with his whole arm.

In the parking lot afterward I sat in the car with the engine running and the air on and looked at the envelope in my purse.

Two hundred dollars. It was the first Wednesday in a month I had not handed it over.

“Tucker,” I said, “you ever been to a state park? A real one, with a lake?”

“We went to the one with the waterfall when I was little,” he said. “I don’t remember it much.”

“How would you like to go to one with a lake and stay in a cabin for two nights? Just you and me.”

He looked at me like I had offered him a pony. “Can we fish? Can we really fish?”

“We can fish,” I said, and I had no idea yet how I was going to manage that, but I meant it.

I called the park from the parking lot. It was a state park about two hours west of us, on a big lake in the hills, with a row of rustic cabins up the hillside and a fishing dock at the bottom.

A woman with a voice like a church secretary told me they had one rustic cabin open Wednesday and Thursday night, because of a cancellation that morning. I told her I would take it before she finished the sentence.

The rustic cabins were eighty-nine dollars a night. Two nights came to a little under two hundred with the tax.

I gave her my card number, and then I sat there a minute with my hands in my lap and let myself shake.

Pat had said walking was good for me. She had said thirty minutes a day on level ground.

I went back inside and asked her about the lake, and she smiled and said, “Go walk around that lake. Keep that heart rate under 120. Don’t carry anything heavier than a gallon of milk. And come back Monday.”

On the way west we stopped at a little bait shop on the county road, a block building with a gravel lot and a drink machine out front. Inside it smelled like crickets and cold water and burnt coffee.

The man at the counter was about seventy, with a feed store cap and forearms like hams. He looked at Tucker over the counter and said, “You the fisherman?”

“Yes sir,” Tucker said. “I haven’t caught anything yet though. Not ever.”

I bought two cane poles, already rigged with line and a red and white cork.

I bought a little green plastic tackle box with a tray that folded out, a card of small hooks, a pack of split shot sinkers and a tub of red wigglers. Then I asked for a fishing license.

“For you?” the man said. “Annual’s about thirty-four dollars. The boy doesn’t need one. Kids under thirteen fish free in Tennessee.”

Tucker made the man say it again. Then he made me say it.

In the car he asked me to look it up on my phone, and I did, and it was true. He said it to himself half the drive. “Under thirteen fish free.”