Every Pontoon on the Cove Flew One

That Night

Drew did not say much on the ride home. He sat on the front bench with his knees up and his life jacket still buckled, watching the parade go up the cove behind us, and when we tied up he went straight up the steps to the house.

I sat on the dock a long time and folded the flag in my lap.

Two long folds and then the triangles, thirteen folds in all, until only the blue and the stars showed. You could hear the music from the parade boats all the way down the cove, and somebody’s air horn, and kids yelling off the back of a tritoon when it went by the swim platform at Heath Hagen’s.

About noon Brady’s dad came down the shore path from his place next door with two bottles of water and his lawn chair.

Evan is sixty-eight. He did twenty years in the Navy and thirty more as an electrician, and he has never once in my hearing used three words where one would do.

He unfolded his chair at the end of my dock, sat, and handed me a water. He had been watching from his own dock with his binoculars.

I knew that because I had seen the sun hit the lenses from the mouth of the cove.

“Saw it,” he said.

“I know you did.”

He held his hand out, palm up, and I knew what he wanted. I gave him the flag. He turned it over and found the corner where the grommet had torn loose, and he ran his thumb along the frayed end, and he nodded to himself like a man reading a meter.

“I can fix this,” he said. “Header’s canvas. I’ve got a sail needle and waxed thread in the shop. New grommet. I’ll trim the fly and hem it. It’ll lose an inch.”

“Evan, you don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t,” he said, and that was the end of that conversation.

That evening, before he took it, Drew came back down to the dock in his pajama pants and asked if he could keep the flag in his room for one night.

Evan gave it to him. When I went in to check on him at ten, he was asleep on top of his covers with the folded triangle on the pillow beside his face, one hand flat on the stars.

I stood in his doorway a long time. Then I went out on the porch steps and sat in the dark and listened to the fireworks thump over the main channel, and that was when I cried, finally, where nobody but the whip-poor-wills could hear.

Carter

Carter came down to my dock the next evening after work. He still had red clay on his boots from the job. He did not sit.

He stood with his hands in his back pockets and looked out at the water instead of at me, which is how the men in that family say hard things.

“I talked to her,” he said. “Last night. A long time.”

“Carter, you don’t have to carry this.”

“It’s my house,” he said. “I carry it.” He was quiet a while. “She knows it was wrong. She won’t say it yet. She’s stubborn as a post. But she knows.”

I asked him why she did it. Not to be cruel back. I wanted to understand, because Willa and I had never been close, but she had never been mean to me like that, not in fifteen years of Thanksgivings and fish fries.

Carter shook his head. “She’s been wound tight since she took the parade over. Marsha ran it twenty-two years and told half the cove Willa would make a hash of it. Willa has had a binder since March. She was up till two the night before ironing bunting.”

He rubbed his jaw. “That’s not a reason. It’s just what was going on.”

“I know,” I said. “Thank you for bringing Drew to me.”

“He’s my brother’s boy,” Carter said, like that was obvious. Then he went back up the path, and I heard his truck start, and I sat there until the dock lights came on by themselves at dusk.