The Half Mile I Swam Beside Grandma

The Plan

I carried everything down to the dock and laid it out on the boards like instruments on a tray. Old habit from work. Grandma watched me do it with her arms folded and her head tilted.

“What’s all this?”

“This is your rower,” I said, and I patted the kayak. “I’ll swim right beside you. The kayak rides behind me on the line. If you get tired, it’s right there. You grab the handle, you rest, you float as long as you want.”

“I won’t need it.”

“I know you won’t. It’s for me. So I don’t have to worry.”

She almost smiled. Then I handed her the box from the boathouse, and the smile stopped. She opened the lid, and she saw the printing, and she put her hand flat on top of it the way you put a hand on a Bible.

“Howard,” she said. Only that. Her eyes stayed dry, but her chin did a thing I had not seen since the funeral.

Dad came over and crouched by the tow belt. “Hand me that line,” he said. I did. He tied a bowline to the belt ring with one hand and his teeth, which is a thing I did not know a person could do, and then tugged it twice, hard.

“Quick release is here,” he said, tapping the buckle. “If the line snags on a weed bed or a buoy, you pull this and you let the boat go. You don’t stay tied to anything in that water. Understand me?”

“I understand, Dad.”

“Say it back.”

“If it snags, I pull the buckle and let it go.”

He nodded and stood up. That was the most he could do with one arm, and it was everything I needed from him.

Arne Comes Back

Arne came down the dock again while I was buckling the belt. His face was red from the sun or something else. He stopped about six feet from us.

“Britt. Don’t encourage her.”

“I’m not encouraging her,” I said. I kept my voice as level as I use with patients who are scared of the drill. “I’m going with her. That’s different.”

“You’re a hygienist, not a coast guard.”

“I was a lifeguard for four summers at the beach she’s swimming to. I’ve pulled eleven people out of that water, Uncle Arne. Two of them were grown men.”

He did not have an answer for that. He looked at the kayak. He looked at the yellow line. He looked at his mother in her faded navy swim dress with the white cap in her hands.

“Mom,” he said. And his voice cracked on it. “Please.”

Grandma pulled the white cap over her silver hair. She tucked the edges in with her thumbs, the way she has done sixty-four times before. Then she snapped her goggles down over her eyes and looked at her son.

“Arne,” she said, “I’ll see you on the other side.”

He turned around without another word and walked up to the cabin. A minute later we heard his truck start in the gravel drive. Then the crunch of tires going out toward the county road.

Grandma watched the dust settle through the pines. “Well,” she said again. Then she took hold of the ladder rails and backed down into the lake.