The Muskie in the Hardware Store Window

“He showed Dad the picture,” she said finally. “Yesterday afternoon. At the care home. Mom called me.”

Margit’s father is seventy-nine. He had a stroke two winters ago and lives at the nursing home in town now. He was a logger and a hard man, and he raised four kids on a lot of silence.

“Mom said Dad looked at that picture a long time,” Margit said. “And then he said, ‘That’s a good fish, son.’ Mom said Royce went out to the parking lot and sat in his truck for half an hour.”

I did not know what to say to that. I thought of my own father, who told me he was proud of me about once a year, and how I would have done almost anything for one more time.

“Royce is forty-five years old,” Margit said. “And that is the first time Dad ever praised him for anything. I think he heard those men at the coffee pot and he just couldn’t let go of it.”

“I understand that,” I said. “But that is our daughter’s fish.”

“I know.” Her eyes were wet. “I know it is, Arne.”

“I’m going to talk to him,” I said. “Just talk.”

She nodded. “Talk,” she said.

I drove out to the lake on Saturday in the middle of the day. Royce was on the dock, re-tying his leaders. He looked up when he heard my boots on the boards, and I could see in his face that he knew why I had come.

I sat down on the bench next to his tackle box. The sun was on the water and a couple of pontoons were drifting out on the bay.

“Royce,” I said, “you need to set it straight. With the guys at Wendell’s. You don’t have to make a big thing of it. Just say she caught it and you netted it.”

He kept tying his knot. His hands were steady, but he did not look at me.

“It’s a fish, Arne,” he said. “She’s thirteen. She’s going to catch a hundred more.”

“Maybe she will. That doesn’t make this one yours.”

“I netted it. I taught her everything she knows about muskie fishing. On my dock. With my gear.”

“I know you did,” I said. “And she knows it too. That’s why it hurts her.”

He snipped the tag end of his line. Then he finally looked at me, and his face was hard in a way I had not seen before.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

“Then tell me,” I said.

But he would not. He just shook his head and went back to his leaders. I sat there a little longer. Then I stood up.

“I’m giving you the chance,” I said. “That’s all I came for.”

I walked back up the dock and he did not call after me.

The summer went on, and the story grew the way stories do in a small town. By the Fourth of July, the guides were telling their clients about Royce Lunde’s forty-four-inch fish off his own dock. By the end of July, a man at the gas station asked me if I was the brother-in-law of the fellow who caught the big one.