The Muskie in the Hardware Store Window

“I want to let her go,” she said. “She’s probably older than me.”

Royce nodded. I think he was proud of her for that. I know I was. Before we let it go, Royce lifted it out of the net for a quick picture. Ingrid’s arms were too worn out to hold a fish that heavy, and he did it the right way, one hand under the gill plate and one under the belly.

“Take one for me, would you, kid?” he said, and handed her his phone. “For Dad.”

She took it. I did not think a thing about it. Why would I? Then I took my own picture on my phone, with both of them in it. Royce holding the fish. Ingrid next to him with her hand on its back, her face so happy it hurt to look at.

Then Royce laid the fish back in the water and held it there, moving it gently, until it kicked and swam off under the dock. Ingrid lay on her stomach on the boards and watched it go until she could not see it anymore.

When we drove home, she talked the whole way. Every second of it. The hit, the first run, the turn, the time it went under the dock and she thought the line would break.

“Did you see the gill plate when it jumped?” she said. “Did you see how green it was?”

“I saw,” I said.

When we got home Margit was just pulling in from church. Ingrid ran across the yard to her and I watched my wife’s face go from tired to amazed.

That afternoon Ingrid wrote the date and the length on a piece of notebook paper and taped it to her bedroom wall. June 14. 44 inches. Released. That was Sunday. By Monday morning, at the hardware store, it was Royce’s fish.

On the drive home from Wendell’s, Ingrid did not say a word for the first ten minutes. I let her be quiet. Then she spoke to the window.

“Maybe he needs it more than me,” she said.

I had to pull over. I parked the county truck on the shoulder by a stand of jack pine and turned it off.

“What do you mean, honey?”

“Grandpa never said he was good at anything,” she said. “You know how Grandpa is. Uncle Royce has been trying to catch one over forty his whole life. Maybe it’s okay.”

I sat there with my hands on the wheel. I am not a man who has a lot of words. I fix trucks. I keep the county’s plows running in January and its graders running in July.

“It’s not okay,” I finally said. “But you don’t have to fix it. That’s my job.”

She looked at me then. “You promised you wouldn’t fight him.”

“I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”

I meant it, and I kept it. But I did not promise to do nothing.

After supper, with the sun still up over the garden and Ingrid gone to her room, I told Margit what happened. She put down the dish towel. She stood at the sink a long time, looking out at the garden.