The Crappie Supper on Dale Hollow

Jed picked up our big cooler by both handles, carried it off the back deck of the houseboat, and set it down on the dock at my feet without looking at me once.

Then he went back aboard and got the next one. He moved like a man loading a flatbed at the end of a long shift, steady and quiet and careful not to bang anything.

I stood there holding a bag of hot dog buns and watched him do it. The sun was low over Dale Hollow, and the whole marina had gone gold.

Our duffel bags came next. Then the kids’ tackle box, the sack of pillows, the grocery bags, and the little camp stove my husband insists on bringing everywhere.

He stacked it all against a dock post. The coolers two high, the soft bags beside them, so nothing would get crushed. Even angry, Jed was a tidy man.

“Jed,” I said. “What are you doing.”

He didn’t answer. He stepped back aboard, started both engines at the helm, then climbed down and began working the lines loose from the cleats himself.

My son Carter is seven. He stood beside me in his yellow life jacket with his hands tucked under the straps, the way he does when he is nervous. “Mama, is Uncle Jed leaving us?”

“I think he’s moving the boat, baby,” I said, because I could not think of anything else to say.

My younger boy, Jonah, is five. He had buckled his own life jacket because he was so excited, and the bottom strap was twisted. He was looking at me, not at the boat.

The white houseboat slid out of the slip with my little sister still below deck, putting sheets on the bunks for her two kids. The generator was running. She never heard a thing.

A man on the next slip stopped coiling his hose. A woman carrying a case of water stopped walking. There were thirty people on that dock on change-over Saturday, and every one of them watched.

The houseboat swung its nose toward open water and idled out past the no wake buoys. Jed did not look back.

That is how our first family vacation since Daddy died started. My husband, my two children and me on a wooden dock beside a stack of coolers, watching the boat we had paid half of go around the point.

My name is Stella. I am thirty-four, and I run the parts counter at a tractor dealership in Cookeville, Tennessee. I have argued with farmers about hydraulic fittings since I was twenty-two. I do not cry easily.

I didn’t cry on that dock either. But I came close, and I want to be honest about that.

To understand why a grown man would do that, you have to know what that week was supposed to be, what it cost, and what none of us knew yet.

Our daddy brought Tillie and me to Dale Hollow Lake every summer when we were girls. We never rented a houseboat. We had a tent, a johnboat with a fifteen horse motor, and a cooler full of bologna.

Daddy fished crappie. Every winter he sank cedar trees in the coves with cinder blocks tied to the trunks, and every June he took us out at daylight to fish them.