The Dock We Built Back for Dad

“Your mother knew,” Dad said. “She’d sit right here and lean on them.”

Leah cried then. Not loud. She stood at the end of that dock with her fingers on her own initials and cried, and Dad got up out of Mom’s chair slow and put his arm around her, and I took Kip’s elbow and we walked back up the hill and left them there.

I don’t know what they said. I never asked. When they came up, Leah’s mascara was gone and Dad was carrying his rod like it weighed nothing, and they drove off to church together.

That was the end of July. Here is the rest of the summer, as plain as I can tell it.

Brett put the cleat on that Monday after work. I came up the next Saturday and checked it. It was galvanized and through bolted with a backing plate, and he had set it exactly where I pointed. I couldn’t have done it better myself.

The aluminum dock with the bench came in the middle of September. Brett called the dealer and canceled it. He paid a restocking fee to do it, three hundred dollars, and Leah told me he never said a word about it.

Every Saturday in August, Dad drove out to fish. Every Saturday, Brett’s jet ski was tied off the left side of the dock, and the right side was clear.

Kip came up with me twice more. The second time, he and Brett spent an hour in the shop rebuilding the crank on Brett’s lift, which had been slipping all summer. I didn’t help. I didn’t need to.

In October, the first cold weekend, it was time to pull the dock. I drove up with Kip early. When we got there, Brett was already standing in the lake in a pair of chest waders, a wrench in his hand, loosening the collar on the first leg of the end section.

“Figured you’d want an extra back,” he said. “Leah said you pull it the second weekend in October.”

“We do,” I said.

“Gunnar’s drawings say so,” Brett said. “She showed me.”

The four of us pulled all five sections in two hours, Dad on the shore in Mom’s chair telling us we were doing it wrong. We stacked them on blocks by the shed, under a tarp, crown up.

The end post we brought into the shop. Leah wouldn’t hear of leaving it out for the winter.

But the part I remember, the part I will remember when I’m Dad’s age, was the last Saturday in August.

It was a sunny, still morning, cool for August, with mist going off the water. I came up the hill at seven with my coffee and saw Dad already sitting at the end of the dock in Mom’s chair, rod out, bobber down on the blue water.

Before I could get to the shore, the screen door slapped up at the house.

Brett came down the hill with two cups. He didn’t see me. He walked out the whole forty feet of Dad’s dock, careful, so as not to slop, and stopped beside Mom’s chair.

My father looked up. Brett held out one of the cups.

“Black, two sugars,” Brett said. “Leah said that’s how you take it.”

Dad took the coffee. He held it in both hands a minute, the way Mom used to, and nodded toward the plank beside him.

And Brett stood there on the end of my father’s dock, handing my dad a coffee, while the sun came up over the pines.