The Patch at the Boat Ramp

Winter

Corwin came home from Louisiana the next Thursday. He walked straight out to the shop without even going in the house, and he got down on one knee by the bow and ran his hand over the patch just like Hobart had.

“Well, I’ll be,” he said.

He wanted to drive over and see Ansel. I asked him not to. He went anyway, the following Sunday after church, and I held my breath.

He came back an hour later and told me he’d said one thing to Ansel and one thing only. “You pay my wife every Saturday,” he’d said, “and I’ll shake your hand at Thanksgiving.” And they’d stood there in Ansel’s yard and looked at each other, and Ansel had said, “Yes, sir.”

Ansel paid. Every Saturday from the first week of November, at seven o’clock in the morning, his truck pulled into my driveway and he got out and laid five twenties on my tailgate. Some weeks it was four twenties and a pile of fives and ones. But it was always a hundred, and it was always there.

He got a job in December on a county road crew. Hard work, cold work, but steady.

At Thanksgiving, Corwin shook his hand, the way he’d said he would. Not warm. Not cold. Just a handshake between two men who had settled something.

Marlys and the kids moved back home in January. I don’t know everything that happened between them, and it isn’t mine to know. But I know he told her the whole truth, and I know she decided it was worth trying.

The marina did the permanent repair the second week of January. When I picked the boat up, you could hardly see where the hole had been. The service manager walked me around it and stopped at the bow.

“Your patch was good, Tessa,” he said. “Real good. I almost hated to grind it out.”

Hobart came back that Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in November, just like he said. He caught fish all three days. And the next spring, three of the men from his church in Tulsa called me to book charters, and every one of them said Hobart told them to tip the guide well.

Spring

The last Saturday in April, Ansel’s truck pulled into the driveway at seven o’clock like it had for twenty-six weeks. He got out and laid five twenties on my tailgate.

“That’s the last of it,” he said.

I counted it, though I didn’t need to. “That’s the last of it,” I said.

He stood there a minute, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Tess,” he said, “I was wondering. The crappie are starting to bite. Do you think I could borrow the boat again sometime? Just for an evening?”

I looked at him for a long time. He looked better than he had in October. His shirt was ironed.

Then I went to the boat and opened the front compartment, and I took out a life jacket and the old white bucket I keep under the console. I handed him both.

“You can come along with me,” I said. “You can bail.”