The Muskie in the Hardware Store Window

He opened his mouth to say something. Then he closed it. Then he went inside, and I watched through the glass as he walked to the coffee pot, and filled his thermos, and stood in front of the corkboard.

He reached up and took his picture down. He folded it once and put it in his shirt pocket. Then he paid Wendell for the coffee, like always, and walked out the side door instead of the front.

I did not gloat. I want that understood. I did not say a word to Royce that day, or the next, or the one after that. I did not have to. The window said it.

And every single morning, Royce had to walk past it. Wendell’s is the only place in town that has coffee before the café opens, and Royce has had his coffee at Wendell’s since before Ingrid was born.

So every morning, he walked past my daughter’s fish and the little brass plate with her name on it. He did not go around the block. I will give him that. He walked right past it.

The window did more than I ever expected. Kids started stopping to look at it on the way home from school. Little boys pressed their faces against the glass and left nose prints that Wendell wiped off every evening without a word of complaint.

A grandmother brought her granddaughter in from out of town and took a picture of the girl standing in front of the fish. She told Wendell her granddaughter wanted to learn to fish muskie now.

The guides started bringing their clients by. “That one was caught by a thirteen-year-old girl,” they would say. “Twenty minutes off a dock. Let it go, too.”

And Ingrid started going into the hardware store again. The first time she walked in, a couple of the old-timers at the coffee pot looked up. One of them raised his cup to her. She turned red and went straight to the lure case, and stood there for twenty minutes, like she always used to.

Wendell gave her a new bucktail. He did not ring that one up either.

Margit and I did not talk about Royce much that fall. It hurt her, I knew. He was her brother. She loved him, and she loved our daughter, and she had been standing between them since June.

One Sunday after church, we went to see her father at the care home. Ingrid came with us. Margit’s dad was sitting in his wheelchair by the window in the common room, looking out at the birch trees. He does not talk much since the stroke, and when he does it comes out slow.

Ingrid went and sat beside him. She took his hand.

“Grandpa,” she said. “Did Uncle Royce come see you?”

He nodded once.

“Did he tell you about the fish?”

He was quiet a long time. Then he looked at her, and his eyes were wet.

“He told me,” he said, slow. “He told me the truth.”

Margit put her hand over her mouth.

“He said you caught it,” Grandpa said. “Twenty minutes. He said you were better than him.”

Ingrid did not know what to say. She just held his hand.

“Good fish,” the old man said to her. “Good fish, girl.”