The Dock We Built Back for Dad

Dad laughed. It was the first time I’d heard him laugh since the funeral. Then he stood up and turned to sit down in Mom’s chair, and that was when he saw the post.

He saw the post and he saw his own letters on it. He put his hand on it. His fingers went down over G.H. 1975, and over Leah’s, and over mine.

And then over Kip’s.

He stood there with his hand on that post a long time. I didn’t look at his face. I looked at the lake. Kip looked at the lake. A loon went under out past the drop-off and came up again a long way off.

“Who did the last one?” Dad said finally.

“I did, Grandpa,” Kip said.

“You pressed too hard on the H.”

“I know.”

“That’s how I did mine,” Dad said. “Look at the G.”

We looked. The G was cut too deep on one side. It always had been. I had never noticed.

Dad sat down in Mom’s chair. He baited up with a leech out of his little foam bucket, and he cast out off the end, and the bobber sat there on the blue water like it had been waiting fifty years to do it.

I stood beside him with my coffee. Kip sat on the edge with his bare feet dangling over the water. Nobody said anything. Nobody had to.

Then up at the house, the screen door slapped shut.

Brett was coming down the hill.

He had his jet ski key on a float in his hand and a life jacket over one arm. He walked down to the shore and stopped right at the foot of the new dock, where the planks began.

He looked at his lift. It sat out on the sand spot ten feet to the west of us, in water up to a man’s chest. For three weeks he had been wading out to it every time he wanted to ride, in his swim trunks, holding the life jacket over his head.

Leah told me later he had stepped on a rock out there the week before and opened up the bottom of his foot, and he had been driving gravel all week on a bandage.

He had asked Alvah if he could tie the ski at Alvah’s dock on the weekends. Alvah had told him he’d have to think about it. He had asked the people on the other side, and they told him the same. Nobody was rude. Nobody said no. They just all had to think about it.

The aluminum dock with the bench was still back ordered until September.

Brett stood there at the foot of my father’s dock in the bright morning with the key in his hand. Dad didn’t turn around. He kept his eyes on his bobber.

“Gunnar,” Brett said. “Can I ask you something?”

Dad reeled in a little slack. “You can ask.”

Brett walked out on the dock. He walked slow. I saw him look down at the planks as he came, at the gaps, at the bolts. He was a man who knew work when he saw it. He stopped about ten feet behind Dad’s chair.

“I was wrong about the dock,” he said. “It wasn’t rotten. I said it was because I wanted it to be. I looked at the frame after I cut it, and it was good, and I put it on the pile anyway.”

Dad didn’t say anything.

“I didn’t know you built it,” Brett said. “I mean, I knew. Leah told me. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t think about what it meant. I just wanted my spot.”