Three Long Blasts Below the Bluff

Shane

Shane Kosky is 37. We went to high school together, and he was the boy who could fix anything with an engine in it. I married him at 24, and for a few years it was good.

I want to be fair to Shane, because my mother raised me to be fair, and because Jory will read this someday.

Shane is not a cruel man. He is a tired man who has gotten used to telling people what they want to hear.

After the divorce he moved to an apartment over in Monona and went to work at a cabinet shop there. Money was tight for him.

It is tight for everybody around here. He fell behind on his support that first winter, then caught up, then fell behind again.

This summer he told me he had picked up Saturday shifts to get caught up for good.

I believed him, because I wanted to, and because a man trying to pay what he owes his son is a man worth giving some room.

But a Saturday shift does not come as a surprise at noon. You know it is coming. You can pick up a phone the night before and tell your boy the truth.

Shane did not do that. Three times he did not do that.

Three Saturdays

The first one was the second weekend of August. I was on the boat up near Red Wing, and Shane had texted me that week that he was taking Jory to the lock at Guttenberg to watch the barges go through.

“He’s been asking all summer,” Shane wrote. “Thought I’d take him down for the double lockage and get him a burger after.”

I remember being glad. A 15-barge tow is too long for the 600-foot chambers on our stretch of the river, so it has to be split and locked through in two pieces.

It takes an hour or more, and for a boy it is the best show in the county.

Jory was up at six. Mom said he made his own toast and ate it standing at the window.

He had his red hoodie on and his notebook in the front pocket, and he sat down on the porch steps where he could see the bluff road.

At noon Shane texted Mom. “Something came up. Next week, bud. Tell him sorry.”

Mom read it to Jory, and Jory said, “Okay,” and went inside and lay on his bed with his shoes on for the rest of the afternoon.

The second Saturday, Shane did not text at all.

Jory waited on the steps until two. Then Mom made him come in for a sandwich, and he ate it on the steps. At five she called Shane herself, and it rang through to his voice mail.

That night Shane texted me, not Mom and not Jory. “Got stuck at work, couldn’t get to my phone. I’ll make it up to him.”

I called him then. I stood on the stern deck of a towboat in the last of the daylight and we had the same fight we had been having since the day I moved out.

I said he could not keep doing this to a little boy. He said I did not know what it was like to work like he worked.

I said I worked 28 days in a row on a boat. He said that was my choice. I said he was right, and that this was his.

We went around like that for 20 minutes, and at the end of it he said, “Next Saturday. I swear, Hadley. I’ll be there at eight.”

And then came the third Saturday, and my mother’s call after supper.