The Patch at the Boat Ramp

Marlys

My sister called me at six-thirty while I was standing in the shower trying to rinse the itch off my arms.

I called her back when I got out. She picked up on the first ring.

“Ansel says the boat was like that when he got it,” she said, before I could say hello.

I sat down on the edge of the bed in my towel.

“Marlys,” I said.

“He said there must have been a crack in it already,” she went on. “He said it just let go. He said he barely touched bottom.”

I thought about the gravel in the bilge. I thought about the fresh scrape on the skeg, and the hole the size of a dinner plate, and the fact that he had told me he would fish off the point by the ramp and had instead driven twenty minutes to the river.

I could have told her all of it. I could have told her he lied about where he was going. I could have said a lot of things.

But my sister was sitting in our mother’s kitchen with her two kids asleep in the next room, trying to decide whether her marriage was worth saving, and nothing I said that night was going to fix a boat.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay?” She sounded surprised.

“Then it’s a good thing I know how to fix it,” I said. “Tell the kids I love them.”

She was quiet a minute. “Tess, I’m not saying he’s right.”

“I know you’re not,” I said. “Go to bed, honey.”

I called Corwin after that. He was in a motel room in Louisiana that smelled like wet carpet, he said, and he’d been up since four. I told him about the inside layers. He asked how my shoulders were.

“Sore,” I said.

“Ice them,” he said. “And eat something.”

I ate a bowl of cereal standing at the sink, and I went to bed.

Friday

I was back at the ramp by eight o’clock Friday morning. The tarp was wet with dew, and when I pulled it back, the inside patch had cured hard and smooth. I knocked on it with my knuckle. It sounded solid.

Now came the outside. This was the part that mattered most, because it was what the water would push against at thirty miles an hour.

I cut the cloth in rings, smallest to biggest, just the way Dad’s cards showed in a little pencil drawing. The smallest piece filled the hole. Each one after that was a little wider, stepping out over the taper I had ground the day before.

I laid them one at a time, wetting each one out and rolling the bubbles out with the little ribbed roller from Dad’s box. Then the next one. Then the next.

It was slow work, and it was quiet. The lake was calm. Boats came and went from the ramp all morning, men going out for the fall bite, and I stayed tucked up at the top corner of the concrete, out of everybody’s way.

At ten o’clock a man I had guided two summers back came up the ramp with two cups of coffee from Tobin’s. He set one on the concrete beside me and didn’t say a word. He just went and got in his truck.

I drank it while the last layer kicked.

By noon all seven layers were on. The patch was built up a little proud of the hull, which is the way you want it, so you can fair it back down smooth.

I let it cure through lunch. I ate a sandwich on my tailgate, looking at the water, and called Corwin. He was up a pole and couldn’t talk, but he called back twenty minutes later.

“How’s it look?” he asked.

“Like Dad did it,” I said, and my voice did something I didn’t expect.

“Then it’s right,” he said. “It’s right, Tess.”