The Ring My Son Pulled From the Lake

The hours went the way hours do when your shoulders hurt. I would throw. Count to ten while it sank. Drag. Pull it up hand over hand. Pick off the weeds. Look. Nothing. Throw again.

My hands got raw through the gloves. I pulled up a bike pedal. A belt buckle. A spark plug. A pair of pliers, which Hayden said were his, from when he was twelve.

By late afternoon we had covered most of the grid.

We had worked out from the end of the dock in a fan, the way Gunnar said the ring had gone, and we were down to the spot right past the third buoy, the very first place he had pointed.

“We already did there,” Gunnar said.

“We did there yesterday,” I said. “Yesterday I was throwing short. My arm’s better today.”

Around seven Neva called everybody up for supper. Gunnar did not want to go. I told him to go eat, that I would come up in a minute. He went, looking back twice.

So I was alone on the dock when it happened.

The sun was going down behind the island and the water had gone dark.

There was nobody on the beach, and nobody in a boat. Just me and the loons and the yellow rope coiled on the boards.

I knelt at the very end of the dock. I did not throw this time.

I leaned out and lowered the magnet straight down off the end, hand over hand, right where Gunnar had first seen the splash.

It went down nine feet and stopped in the muck. I let it sit.

Then I dragged it slow, along the bottom, back toward me, the way you would drag a lure for a walleye that did not want to bite.

Something changed in the rope. It was not heavy. It was not snagged.

It was just a tiny difference, a little catch in the weight, the way you know a fish is mouthing your bait before it takes it.

I pulled it up hand over hand. I made myself go slow.

The magnet broke the surface with a fat wad of muck and weeds on it, and I picked it apart with my fingers right there on the dock.

There was a bottle cap. There was a bent nail. And there, stuck to the side of the magnet with a crust of black mud on it, was a heavy gray ring.

I rinsed it in the lake. I held it up to what was left of the light.

Inside the band, where it had always been, was the tiny scratch where Gilbert had caught it on a hay rake the summer Gunnar was born.

I did not cry then either. I sat back on my heels on the dock boards and held that ring in my palm and I just breathed.

Then I got up and walked up the hill to the yard. I did not run.

Neva had supper out on the picnic table under the oak, and Gunnar was sitting at the end of the bench with a plate of corn, and I opened my hand and put it down in front of him.

He looked at it for a long time. He did not touch it. Then he picked it up and turned it over the way I had, and found the scratch, and closed his hand around it.

“Can I keep it?” he said.