Ingrid saw him and put down her rake. I came out of the garage and stood in the doorway, wiping my hands on a rag. I did not go any closer. This was not mine.
He walked across the yard to her. He stopped a few feet away.
“Inga,” he said. “I’m sorry. For all of it. I told those men it was mine and it never was. You caught that fish. You did it right, and you let her go, and I should have been proud of you instead of jealous of you.”
She looked at him. Thirteen years old, with leaves in her braid.
“It’s okay, Uncle Royce,” she said.
“It isn’t,” he said. “But thank you for saying so.”
She stepped forward and hugged him. He held onto her a long time. Margit was crying by the porch steps. I will admit I was not doing so well myself.
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When he let her go, he wiped his face with the back of his hand and cleared his throat.
“I took down the picture at Wendell’s,” he said. “And I took the one down at the cabin too. I put your picture up instead. The one with both of us. On the wall by the door, where everybody can see it when they come in.”
Ingrid smiled at him. “Really?”
“Really,” he said. Then he looked at the ground and back up at her.
“And I want to ask you something,” he said. “You can say no. I’d understand if you said no.”
“What?”
He took a breath.
“Next fall,” he said, “when the water turns over and the big ones come up shallow again, would you come fish my dock? I’ll bring the net.”
Ingrid looked back at me, standing in the garage door with my oily rag. I did not nod or shake my head. It was her fish, and her uncle, and her decision.
She turned back to him.
“Can I use the red and white bucktail?” she said.
Royce laughed, and it was a real laugh, the first one I had heard out of him since June.
“You can use whatever you want, kid,” he said. “It’s your dock too.”
The fish is still in Wendell’s window. He says it is staying there as long as he owns the store, which he says will be until they carry him out of it.
Royce still gets his coffee at Wendell’s every morning at seven-forty. He still walks past the window. But now, some mornings, I hear he stops and looks at it a while, and once one of the guides saw him point it out to a stranger.
“My niece caught that,” he told the man. “Off my dock. I netted it.”
That is all he says. But he says it like he means it. And next fall, if the Lord is willing and the water turns over on time, my daughter is going to be standing on the end of her uncle’s dock at six in the morning, with a rod in her hands, doing her figure eight.
I’ll be in the lawn chair with my thermos. And Royce will be right behind her, with the net.