The Cabin I Took My Boy To

The license and the tackle came to a little over sixty dollars. So the whole trip, the cabin and the gear and the gas, cost a good bit more than the two hundred in the envelope.

I paid the rest out of the grocery money and did not think twice. Some things you do not count.

The cabin was small and wooden, up on the hillside above the lake, with a little porch on the front and two rocking chairs.

Inside there was a bunk bed, a double bed, a table, a stove, a shower, and a window that looked down through the trees to the water.

The first afternoon he did not say much. We walked down to the dock, slow, because the path was steep and I was minding my rules.

I showed him how to thread a worm on the hook, the way my granddaddy showed me, and he made a face and then did it himself.

Then he sat on the end of the dock with his legs hanging over and watched the cork.

He watched it for an hour without saying one word. I sat beside him with my own pole and watched him watch it.

For supper we ate hot dogs on the cabin porch, and I thought about how he had told me “hot dogs” all those nights, and how much he had not been telling me along with it.

“Mama,” he said, with mustard on his chin, “is it okay we’re here instead of at Grandma’s? Is that allowed?”

“It’s more than okay,” I said. “It’s the best idea I’ve had all year, and I’ve had a lot of time to think.”

He thought about that for a while. Then he asked the one I had been dreading. “Do you think she’ll still love me?”

I set my plate down on the porch boards. “Bud, listen to me. Whatever Grandma said, that’s about Grandma. It isn’t about you. And it isn’t really about me, either, even though it was said about me. You hear?”

“Yes ma’am,” he said, and leaned against my arm, and we sat there and watched the shadows of the trees stretch down the hill toward the water.

He had caught nothing all afternoon but two little sunfish he let go because they were “babies.” He was sunburned across the nose in spite of all my sunscreen, his red ball cap pushed back, his face pink and serious.

At dusk we went back down to the dock. The wind had laid, and the lake had gone still as a plate.

The green hills on the far side were going dark at the edges. Up on the hillside behind us, our little wooden cabin sat quiet in the trees.

I had on my light blue T-shirt and my jean shorts, my hair pulled up in a ponytail because it was too hot for anything else.

I knelt on the boards beside him with one hand on his shoulder, partly to keep him from leaning too far over and partly because I wanted to.

The cork shivered once. Then it went under, clean, like somebody had pulled it from below the water.

“Pull, bud,” I said. “Up, up, up, that’s it.”

He swung the cane pole up, and on the end of the line, flipping and shining in the last of the light, was a bluegill no bigger than my palm, with an orange belly and a dark spot on its gill cover like a thumbprint.

He held it up in front of my face, grinning so hard his eyes went into slits. “Mama, look. Look at him. He’s a real one. He’s not a baby.”