The Ring My Son Pulled From the Lake

I thanked him. I said I’d call back. Then I sat on the dock with my feet over the edge and I thought about metal, because metal is what I know.

Most people think a ring will not stick to a magnet, and most of the time they are right. Gold won’t. Silver won’t. Titanium won’t.

But Gilbert’s ring was not gold. It was cheap tungsten carbide, and cheap tungsten carbide is held together with cobalt. Cobalt is magnetic. Not a lot, but enough.

I knew it for a fact because of our garage. I have a magnet strip on the wall over my workbench where I hang drill bits and screwdriver tips.

A hundred times over fourteen years, Gilbert had taken that ring off to work on the snowblower and set it on the bench, and a hundred times it had jumped onto that strip.

He used to laugh about it. “Your magnet keeps stealing my ring,” he would say, and he would peel it off the strip and put it back on.

So I knew. A magnet strong enough, on a rope long enough, in the right spot, and that ring would come up.

Gunnar came down to the dock at eight with his hair sticking up. He sat next to me with his feet in the water.

His eyes were red. He did not want to talk about his father, and I did not make him.

“I saw where it went in,” he said. “Right out there. Past the third buoy, a little to the left of that rock on shore.”

“I believe you,” I said.

“I’m going back in,” he said.

“No,” I said. “You’re not. We’re going to fish for it.”

He looked at me like I had lost my mind. So I told him about the magnet strip and the cobalt, and I watched his face change.

Gunnar is a kid who likes to know how things work. He gets that from both of us.

“Does that actually work?” he said.

“We’re going to find out,” I said.

The Fleet Farm in Baxter is forty minutes from Neva’s place. Gunnar rode with me. We did not turn on the radio. When we pulled into the lot, he said, “Is Dad coming back?” and I said, “Not to us, honey,” and he nodded like he had already known.

They had a whole section for magnet fishing, which I did not expect. Kits for kids, kits for grown men who pull up safes out of the Mississippi.

I picked a round neodymium magnet rated for five hundred pounds of pull, with a hundred feet of yellow rope and a pair of gloves in the box. It was forty-four ninety-nine.

The kid at the register was maybe nineteen. He looked at the box and grinned. “Going treasure hunting?” he said.

“Something like that,” I said. Gunnar did not say anything. He just carried the box out to the truck like it was something that could break.

When we got back, Neva was on the dock. She had carried down a lawn chair, a thermos, a cooler with sandwiches, and a coffee can.

She set them all out in a row at the end of the dock without a word.

“What’s the can for?” Gunnar asked her.

“For the junk,” Neva said. “Forty years of your grandpa fishing off this dock, there’s going to be plenty of it.”

I tied the rope to the magnet with a bowline and checked it twice.