The Salmon at the Cleaning Station

What Bobbie did

Bobbie looked at that envelope for a long moment. Then she looked at Zach, and something passed over her face that I will remember for the rest of my life.

“Your fish was a good fish,” she said. “Fourteen pounds is a really good king. You fought it for twenty minutes.”

“Not as good as yours.”

“Mine’s gone,” she said simply. “Yours is right here, and we’re going to eat it. That’s better than a fish at the bottom of the lake.”

She took the envelope from him. Then she opened it, counted out the money, and handed half of it back across the table. One hundred fifty dollars.

“We split it,” she said. “Biggest fish that’s still a fish, and biggest fish that got away. That’s fair.”

Zach stared at the money. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” she said. “But you have to promise you’ll practice filleting. You’re going to need it.”

He laughed. It was a real laugh, sudden and surprised, and it made Larry put his hand over his mouth and turn away toward the water.

I stood there on that dock and watched my uncle cry and my daughter hand a crying boy a hundred fifty dollars, and I was not angry anymore. I do not know exactly when it left. Somewhere between the first fillet and the envelope.

The grill

We cooked it at the pavilion beside the cleaning station, on the big charcoal grills the city keeps there. Carmen had brought foil, butter, lemons, onions, and a shaker of the same seasoning Grandpa Sawyer always used.

Larry ran the grill. That was one thing he was good at. He laid those fillets skin side down on the foil, dotted them with butter, laid the onion and lemon over the top, and closed them up.

Zach stood next to him the whole time, watching. Every once in a while Larry would put his hand on the back of the boy’s neck, and Zach would let him.

Roland ran up and down the dock looking at the boats. Carmen set out paper plates on the picnic table and a bag of potato chips and a store-bought birthday cake with candles shaped like a six and a zero.

When the fish came off the grill it was just right. Flaky and bright and smelling like butter and lake. We all sat at the picnic table with the sun going down behind the breakwall, the gulls crying, and we ate Zach’s king salmon off paper plates.

Nobody said much at first. Then Roland asked Bobbie how she got so good with a knife, and she told him about Grandpa Sawyer, about how he used to clean everybody’s fish at this same station, even people he didn’t know, because he said a fish deserved to be done right.

“He had a rule,” she said. “He said you never let a good fish go to waste. Even if it isn’t yours.”

Larry put his fork down. He looked at her a long time across the table.

“He did say that,” he said quietly. “He said it to me about a thousand times.”