The Catfish Off Grandpa’s Old Dock

That dock had held three generations of Muellers. Lou taught Kevin to fish off the end of it. Kevin taught his friends.

And the last spring Lou was alive, he taught Mason, who was four then and could barely hold a rod.

Lou has been gone four years now. His heart quit on him in the hayfield one July afternoon, and the neighbor boy found him sitting against the tractor tire like he had only stopped to rest.

After the funeral, Saturdays became Mason’s and mine. Kevin and Brittany both worked long weeks, and I had retired from cooking at the grade school, so I took him every Saturday from breakfast until supper.

We made pancakes in Lou’s cast iron. We walked the fence line and counted calves for the neighbor who rents our pasture.

We dug worms and sat on that dock, and I told Mason about his grandpa until he knew the stories better than I did.

Those Saturdays kept me alive that first year, if I am honest. The house was so quiet. Mason would come in the door hollering for me, and the whole place would wake back up.

So that first Saturday with no Mason, I did not know what to do with my hands. I cleaned the kitchen twice.

I weeded beans that did not need weeding. At noon I drove into town and parked across from the sports center, and then I felt foolish and drove home.

I waited two weeks before I said anything more. I wanted to be calm when I said it, and I wanted to say it right, because I knew I would only get one chance with Brittany.

I called her on a Tuesday when I knew Kevin would be at work.

I asked her, as kindly as I knew how, whether I could have Mason just one Saturday a month. Only one. She could pick it.

There was a long pause on the line. I could hear the dental office behind her, a phone ringing and somebody talking about an insurance claim.

“I don’t think so, Irene,” she said. “He’s busy. He’s got soccer, and he’s got friends in town, and it’s just not a good fit right now. I hope you can understand that.”

I told her I understood. I did not understand, but I told her I did, and I thanked her for her time like she was a lady at the bank, and I hung up.

Now, I can hear some of you already. Why not just tell her no? Why not go to Kevin and have it out?

Why not drive into town and sit in the bleachers at that soccer place every week until she gave in?

I will tell you why. It was her son and her rules, and I was never going to put Kevin in the middle of his own marriage over me.

I watched my own mother-in-law do that to Lou and me for eleven years.

Every holiday was a test, every visit was a tug of war, and Lou was the rope. I promised God and myself I would never be that woman.

And there was something else. I knew why Brittany was the way she was about the pond. Kevin had told me, quietly, the first Thanksgiving she ever came out to the farm.

She grew up in an apartment in Carbondale with her mother, and the only time they got out to the country was to visit an aunt with a farm pond.

When Brittany was ten, her cousin Gladys went out on that pond in a little plastic boat and drowned.