The Bait Shop on the First Day of Deer Season

Mark’s Own Kids

I called Jake that night and Tori right after. I figured I’d have to talk them into it. I figured wrong.

Jake was thirty-three and drove a propane truck. Tori was thirty and worked the front desk at the clinic where I clean teeth. They were Mark’s son and Mark’s daughter, and they had both grown up in that bait shop the same as I had.

“He didn’t even ask us,” Tori said on the phone. Her voice was tight. “He told us at dinner like it was the weather. I cried in the car the whole way home.”

“Grandpa says open the door,” I said. “That’s all. We don’t say a word to your dad. We just open.”

There was a long quiet on the line. Then Jake said, “I’m off Saturday. I’ll bring the big coffee maker from the shop at work. The old one in there won’t keep up.”

We met at the shop Tuesday afternoon at three, while there was still good light. I got the keys from behind the feed mill calendar, right where he said, on a ring with a plastic bobber the size of a walnut.

The door stuck the way it always stuck. You had to lift and push. The smell came out at us all at once: minnow water, cold coffee, pine boards, and the oil Grandpa used on the counter.

Nobody had touched a thing since the morning he fell. His reading glasses were folded on the register. His coffee cup still had a brown ring dried in the bottom. The minnow tanks were running, because Mark had kept the power on, but the tanks were empty except for a few shiners circling slow.

Behind the register sat Grandpa’s stool. A tall wooden stool with a cracked red vinyl seat, mended with silver duct tape so many times it was more tape than seat.

Tori walked over to it and put her hand flat on the tape. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

Taped to the side of the register was the prayer card from Grandma June’s funeral, eleven years old now and gone soft at the corners. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He had taped it there the day after we buried her, and it had never come down.