The Dock We Built Back for Dad

Leah’s eyes filled up. My sister is not a hard person. She is a person who has been left, and I think everybody who has been left knows what that does to your judgment for a while.

“Brett is the first man who has stayed since the divorce,” she said. “He fixed my furnace. He fixed the porch steps. He’s here. I’m not going to lose him over a dock.”

I want to be honest about that part, because it would be easier to tell this story if she had a worse reason. She didn’t. She had a lonely reason. It was still wrong, and she knew it was wrong, and she let it happen anyway.

Brett stayed up at the house. I saw him once in the kitchen window, and then I didn’t see him.

People have asked me since why I didn’t make a phone call. Call a lawyer, call the sheriff, call the county. The answer is simple. The place was Leah’s. Dad had signed it over fair and square. It was hers to change, dock and all.

There was nobody to call. There was only my sister, and my dad standing on the shore with no place to sit.

So I asked her one question.

“Can I build it back?” I said. “Not where it was. Ten feet over, to the east, off that flat spot by the birch. Brett can keep his lift right where it is.”

Leah looked at the water a long time. Then she looked at Dad. Then she looked back at the house, at the kitchen window where Brett had been.

“Build whatever you want, Troy,” she said, and she went back up the hill.

Dad didn’t fish that morning. I offered to run him to the public access on the south end, and he said no, he’d go on home. I walked him to his car and he sat behind the wheel for a long minute before he started it.

“Your mother would have had something to say,” he said.

“I know it.”

“She’d have said it nicer than I would.”

He drove off. I stood in the drive and watched the dust settle on the gravel and made up my mind.

I have a son. His name is Kip, and he is fifteen. He is tall and quiet and mostly made of elbows right now, and he can run a video game controller faster than I can run a wire stripper, but he had never in his life held a framing square.

That Saturday night I told him what happened at the lake. He listened all the way through without looking at his phone once, which is how I knew it landed.

“Can we just build it again?” he said.

“That’s what I was going to ask you.”

My wife works weekend shifts at the hospital, and she said go, and she said take sunscreen, and she said to tell Grandpa she was praying for his knees. That was her blessing on it.

On Sunday afternoon Kip and I drove into town and sat with Dad in his apartment. He had the ball game on with the sound off. I told him what I wanted to do, and I watched his face while I said it.

He didn’t say anything at first. Then he got up, slow, and went to the closet in his spare room, and came back with a blue coffee can with a plastic lid.