Willa’s Dock
She was out on the end of her dock in the late morning, coiling a stern line.
She had on an old Royals cap and a pair of Carter’s work gloves that were too big for her.
She looked up when my feet hit the boards, and she saw the flagpole sticking up out of my bag, and her whole body went still.
“If that’s for me,” she said, “I don’t want it.”
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“It’s for the lead boat,” I said.
She frowned. “What lead boat?”
“Yours. You’re still running the parade, aren’t you? The association asked you back. Agnes told me.” I pulled the flag out of the bag and held it out to her, pole and clamp and all.
“I want you out front. Every pontoon on the cove is flying one this year. Yours ought to be first.”
She set the rope down on the dock box. She took the gloves off, one and then the other, and laid them on top of the rope, and for a while she just looked at the flag in my hand.
Her face did something I had never seen it do in fifteen years. It came apart a little at the corners.
“Selma,” she said. “Why would you do that?”
I did not have a good answer, so I told her the true one. “Because Drew looks at that picture in the paper with the gap in it,”
I said. “And I don’t want the last thing he remembers about the Fourth to be the gap.”
She sat down on the dock box. I stood there holding the flag out like a fool, and then I set it across her knees, because my arm was getting tired, and I sat down on the boards in front of her with my back against a piling.
What She Told Me
It came out of her slowly, and then all at once, the way water comes out of a cooler when you finally pull the plug.
She said that when the lake association asked her to take the parade after Marsha retired, she had said yes before she could think, because nobody in that family had ever asked her to be in charge of anything.
She had married into a family of men who fix things and women who were born on the lake, she said, and in fifteen years she had never once felt like she knew the rules.
“Marsha told the whole Thursday coffee group I’d ruin it,” she said. “I heard it from three people. She said I’d make it look like a car dealership.”
Willa laughed, but it was not a laugh. “So I made a binder. I made a map. I bought bunting with my own money for every family boat. I wanted one thing in my life to be perfect, Selma, one day, and I wanted Evan to look at it and be proud.”
She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. “And then I came up the line and there was Brady’s flag. And all I could see was the frayed end in the photo, and everybody looking at your boat and thinking about him, and the whole day turning sad. I wanted one happy day. I told myself I was doing it for the family.”