The Dock We Built Back for Dad

That was the arrangement. Leah kept the house. Dad kept his Saturday mornings on the end of his dock. For three summers it worked.

Then Leah met Brett.

Brett is forty-seven. He drives a gravel truck for an outfit out of the county seat, and he is a decent enough hand with an engine. He came to Thanksgiving last year and carved the turkey without being asked, and I liked him fine for it.

This spring he bought a jet ski. It was used, a few years old, and he was proud of it the way a man is proud of the first thing he buys only for himself. He bought a lift for it too, a manual crank lift off a classified ad.

I knew none of this mattered until I pulled into the lake place that Saturday and walked down the hill and saw my father standing at the edge of the water in his red plaid flannel shirt, holding his rod.

Where the dock had been there was nothing. Sand and weeds and a few pipe holes in the bottom where the legs had stood. Out past where the end used to be, a jet ski sat up on a lift, dripping.

The planks were up by the brush pile behind the shed. Somebody had cut every section in half with a circular saw so they would stack better for burning. The galvanized legs were lying in a heap next to them in the grass.

I stood there next to Dad for a while without saying anything. A loon called out on the lake. Somebody across the bay was running a weed whip. It was a beautiful morning, and I hated every bit of it.

“It’s just boards, Troy,” Dad said.

His hand was shaking on the cork of his rod. I had seen that hand steady on a live panel at two hundred amps. I had never seen it shake like that.

“It’s not just boards,” I said.

“It’s Leah’s place now,” he said. “She can do what she wants.”

I heard the screen door, and Leah came down the hill in her robe with a coffee cup in both hands. She stopped a little way off from us, the way she used to stop outside Dad’s shop door when she was a girl and had broken something.

“Dad,” she said. “I was going to call you.”

“Were you,” Dad said. He didn’t say it hard. He just said it.

“Brett needed the spot,” Leah said. “That’s the only sand bottom on our whole shoreline. Everywhere else is rock and cabbage weed. He couldn’t set the lift anywhere else, and the dock was right on top of it.”

“So he took it out,” I said.

“He said it was rotten,” Leah said. “He said the old frame was half gone and it was going to hurt somebody.”

I walked up to the brush pile and turned over a cut section with my boot. The decking was weathered silver, and two of the planks were soft at the ends. The frame under them was solid. Dad had redecked the whole thing in 2009 with my help, and the two by sixes underneath were as sound as the day he bolted them.

I didn’t say anything. I just walked back down.

“He’s ordering one of those aluminum docks,” Leah said. “A nice one, with a bench. It’s back ordered until September. Dad can fish off that one.”

Dad looked out at the jet ski on the lift and didn’t answer her.