The Crappie Supper on Dale Hollow

He passed two years ago in March. His heart, at sixty-six, in his recliner after supper. Tillie found him. She has never quite gotten over being the one who found him.

The houseboat was her idea. She called me in January and said, “Stella, I want our kids to see the lake the way Daddy showed it to us. One time, done right.”

We found an older boat at a marina outside Celina, fifty-two feet with two bedrooms and a slide off the top deck. Early in the season, the week ran $2,200 with the fuel deposit. We each paid $1,100.

Eleven hundred dollars is a lot of money in our house. Jarvis works the line at a cabinet plant in Algood. We do fine, but we do not take trips. We saved from February on.

Tillie’s husband is Jed. He was thirty-eight that summer, a big, quiet man who worked maintenance at a plant in Livingston. He was not a talker, but he showed up, he fixed things, and he loved my sister.

So I want to be fair to him. What he did on that dock was wrong, and it hurt my children. But it did not come out of nowhere.

He was also not the only one who said something that afternoon he wished he could take back.

The boat was booked in Jed’s name, because his card had room for the deposit. That meant the marina walked him through the orientation: engines, generator, holding tank, how to tie up to the shore. It ran long.

By the time we were ready to load, it was going on seven o’clock, and the parking question came up.

The marina had a paved lot at the top of the ramp, maybe a hundred steps from our slip, at fifteen dollars a night. There was also a free gravel lot a good half mile up a steep road with no shoulder.

Jarvis had already pulled into the paved lot to unload. Jed walked up and said we ought to move both trucks to the free lot before we left.

Jarvis looked at him like he had suggested we swim to Kentucky. “I’m not walking that hill twice with two kids and six coolers. It’s fifteen a night.”

“It’s a hundred and five dollars,” Jed said. “For a parking spot.”

“Then I’ll pay mine and you park yours wherever you want.”

“Fine. Then you pay for both,” Jed said, and I could hear that he meant it as a challenge, not a joke.

Jarvis is a good man, but he was hot and tired and had carried coolers for an hour. He said it loud enough for the next boat over to hear.

“Quit being so cheap, Jed. It’s a vacation.”

I saw Jed’s face change. It was not anger. It was closer to shame, though I did not know enough to read it that way then. His ears went red and he looked down at the boards.

Jarvis walked up to the office to pay for our parking and put the matter to rest. He thought that would be the end of it. So did I.

That is when Jed started carrying our things off the boat.

I have gone over that moment a hundred times. I could have stepped aboard and stopped him. I could have hollered for Tillie. I could have grabbed the line out of his hand.