The Ring My Son Pulled From the Lake

We fished until dark on Saturday. Hayden threw and I threw and Gunnar moved the buoys.

We pulled up a pair of sunglasses, a fishing reel, a beer can, a cast-iron pan lid, a toy truck I think belonged to one of the cousins, and a small hammer.

No ring.

By the time the sun went down behind the island, Gunnar was quiet again. He sat at the end of the dock with his knees up, looking at the water where the third buoy floated.

“Maybe it’s not in there,” he said. “Maybe it went farther.”

“It’s in there,” I said. “It’s down in the muck. That’s all. We’ll find it tomorrow.”

The others had gone up to the house. Somebody turned on a radio up there and then turned it off again.

The lake went still, the way Minnesota lakes do on a summer night, flat as a plate.

Gunnar lay back on the dock boards with his head on a life jacket. I sat next to him in Neva’s lawn chair.

I meant to send him up to bed, but he was asleep before I could say it.

He sleeps the way he did when he was three, with one arm flung up over his head. I sat there and looked at him for a long time.

He had his father’s jaw and my hands. He would be taller than both of us before he was done.

Neva came down a while later with a blanket. She did not wake him.

She just shook the blanket out and laid it over him, tucked it under his feet, and sat down on the dock next to my chair.

“He used to sleep out here when he was little,” she said softly. “Hector would bring him down in the morning to watch the loons. You’d come down and find the two of them asleep out here in the chairs.”

“I remember,” I said.

“Hector would have pitched Gilbert off this dock himself last night,” she said. “He’d have gone right in after him.”

“I know,” I said.

She was quiet for a while. Then she said the thing I think about more than anything else from that weekend.

“You’re the one I’d have picked,” she said. “If anybody had asked me. I want you to know that. He married up. He always did.”

I did not trust my voice. I reached down and held her hand, and we sat there with Gunnar asleep at our feet until almost midnight, listening to the loons call across the water.

Sunday I was out on the dock at five. The fog was still on the water, thick enough that I could not see the island.

I had coffee in Neva’s thermos and the magnet coiled at my feet.

I threw and dragged and threw and dragged. I did a whole new row of the grid by myself before anybody woke up.

Bottle caps. A fishing weight. A big bolt. One of those little bells people clip on a fishing rod.

Hayden came down at seven with two sandwiches and took over for an hour. Then Gunnar came down. Then Neva, with her lawn chair. Nobody said much. It was a working morning, and everybody knew it.

Around noon one of the cousins asked what we were doing, and Gunnar told her. He told it straight, not mean. “My dad threw his ring in the lake. We’re getting it back.” The little girl nodded like that was the most normal thing in the world and went off to swim.