Every Pontoon on the Cove Flew One

The Summer

The cove talked. A cove that size always talks. There are maybe forty houses on it, half of them weekend people from Kansas City and Columbia and half of us full time, and news moves down those docks faster than a jet ski.

I did not tell anyone what happened. I did not have to. Thirty boats saw it, and most of them had grandkids with phones.

By Wednesday Heath Hagen’s wife Agnes stopped me at the cluster boxes up on the county road and squeezed my arm and said, “Honey, we all saw. We’re just sick about it.”

I told her it was over and done. I meant it, mostly. I did not want the cove taking sides.

Willa was still my son’s aunt and my husband’s brother’s wife, and we were going to be living next to each other until one of us died.

But the cove took sides anyway, quietly, the way lake people do. Nobody was ugly to Willa. They were just a little cooler at the gas dock.

A little slower to wave. The Saturday fish fry on Heath Hagen’s dock went on all summer, and Willa stopped coming after the second one.

The lake paper ran its parade photo in the next week’s edition, a wide shot from the point with the whole line strung across the cove.

Our family’s boats were all there in their matching bunting, and right in the middle of the line was a gap where my boat had been. You could see it plain as a missing tooth.

Somebody cut it out and stuck it on the bulletin board at the bait shop by the bridge.

I do not know who. I asked them to take it down, and they did, but by then everybody had seen it.

Drew would not ride on Carter’s boat the rest of that summer. He told me he would ride with Uncle Carter anytime but not with Aunt Willa, and I did not make him.

I probably should have tried harder. I was tired, and I did not have it in me to argue with a ten year old about something I agreed with.

Evan brought the flag back the following Sunday after church. He came down the shore path with it folded under his arm, and he handed it to me on the dock, and he did not say anything about it at all. He just went and sat in his chair.

I unfolded it on the dock boards in the sun. He had trimmed the frayed end square and turned it under in a hem so neat you would have thought a machine did it.

The torn header was patched from behind with a strip of new canvas, and there were two new brass grommets, bright as pennies.

He had stitched the hem with red thread on the red stripes and white thread on the white.

Every inch of it by hand. I sat back on my heels and looked at him, and he was looking at the water.

“Evan,” I said. “This must have taken you all week.”

“Had the time,” he said.