The Bait Shop on the First Day of Deer Season

The Last Hand Warmer

At five minutes to nine, Tori sold the last pair of hand warmers to a woman who’d come in for her husband. Jake sold the last orange cap off the shelf. Then he reached up and pulled the tag off his own hat, set it on the counter, and sold that one too.

By nine we had nothing left. No hand warmers. No toe warmers. No orange anything. Twelve dozen doughnuts gone. Both coffee makers dry. The minnow tanks mostly empty. One case of knives with the orange handles, and one drag rope that somebody had already put a hand on.

Jake counted the drawer while Tori wiped down the counter. Three thousand four hundred and sixty dollars, mostly in fives and tens, plus a page of tabs in the receipt book in the handwriting of men who’d been running a tab at Gus’s for forty years and always paid it.

I paid off my card that week and there was still money left over.

I am not telling you it was a lot of money. It was one morning. Mark was right that the shop loses money nine months of the year, and one good opener doesn’t change that.

But it wasn’t nothing, either. And it wasn’t about the money. Everybody in that room knew that, including my uncle.

In the Yard

I found him out back in the yard, standing at the bottom of the three wooden steps that go up to Grandpa’s kitchen door. The sun was all the way up by then, low and white, and his breath was smoking in the cold.

He was looking at a patch of ground just off the bottom step. It looked like nothing. Frozen grass and a bit of gravel.

“This is where he was,” Mark said without looking at me. “Right there.”

I stopped beside him and didn’t say anything.

“He went out to check the pump and he slipped coming down these steps. His phone was in his coat in the kitchen. Nobody came by. It was the first week of November, nobody’s out on this road that early in the off-season.”

He breathed out slowly.

“I came out because he didn’t pick up at seven. He always picks up at seven. I found him right there. He’d been lying on the ice forty minutes. He couldn’t get up. He was trying to crawl to the steps and couldn’t do it. His lips were blue, Lacey.”

I hadn’t known that. Nobody had told us about the forty minutes.

“He’s eighty-three,” Mark said. “He’s out here alone in this shop from November to March with nobody coming by for hours. The next time it’s going to be the ice on the lake road, or the steps at the pump, or his heart, and I’m going to be the one who finds him again, and he’s not going to be breathing.”

His voice broke on that, just once, and he cleared his throat hard.

“So I thought, sell it. Get him a little apartment in town by the clinic. Close enough I can see the lights from my office.”

I let that sit a second. I understood him. I did. But I also knew what I’d watched for three hours that morning, and so did he.

“You didn’t ask anybody,” I said. “You didn’t ask Jake or Tori. You didn’t ask me. You told Grandpa in a hospital chair and he couldn’t even get up and walk out of the room.”

“I know.”

“He’d rather fall on that ice than sit in an apartment in town and never see those men again. You heard them.”

“I heard them.” He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. “Rudy Petersen told him he’d come by every morning and check on him. Every morning. Rudy’s seventy-six.”

“Rudy meant it.”

“I know he did.” Mark finally looked at me. “That’s what’s killing me. Every one of them meant it.”