The Patch at the Boat Ramp

Hobart looked from me to him. “You the fella that ran it up on the gravel?”

Ansel’s face went red. He looked at the boards of the dock. And then, to his credit, he looked back up.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Below the dam. Wednesday. They shut the generators off and I didn’t know it. I ran a bar.”

“And you left it here,” Hobart said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, sir.”

Hobart nodded slowly. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. He had been a foreman on pipeline jobs for twenty years, and he knew exactly how long to let a man stand in his own mistake.

He let Ansel stand in it.

Then he turned to me.

“Tessa,” he said. “Put me down for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday next week. All three days. Full days, not halves.”

I stared at him. “Hobart, you were going home tomorrow.”

“I’ll call my wife,” he said. “She’ll be glad to be rid of me.” He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and counted out bills onto the top of the cooler. “That’s the deposit. Same rate as always. And I’m going to tell every man at my church about this boat, and the girl who fixed it in two days with her daddy’s tools.”

Ansel stood there and watched Hobart count out the money. It was more than he’d made in a month.

Then Hobart picked up his cooler and looked at Ansel one more time, not unkind.

“Son,” he said, “she fixed it so she could work. Somebody’s still got to fix it right.” And he walked up the ramp to my truck.

The rest of it

Ansel stood on that dock for a long time after Hobart left. I finished tying off and checked the patch one more time, and I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t have anything left to say.

Finally he said, “Tess, there’s something else.”

And he told me about the woman from the fish fry. He told me he’d said the boat was his. He told me he took her out on it.

He said it to the boards of the dock. He did not look up once.

“You need to tell Marlys that,” I said. “Not me. Her.”

“I know,” he said.

“Today,” I said.

He nodded. “Today.”

“And the marina’s going to fix my patch right this winter,” I said. “You’re going to pay for it.”

“I don’t have the money,” he said.

“I know you don’t,” I said. “You’ll pay it a little at a time.”

He looked at me then, finally. “How much?”

I had called the marina that morning from the house before Hobart came. The service manager had looked at a picture of my patch on his phone and said it was sound, and that with the structure already there, the winter job would be grinding it back, laying more glass inside, and matching the gelcoat. In January, when the shop was slow, it came to $2,600.

“Twenty-six hundred,” I said. “A hundred a week. In cash. Saturday mornings, on my tailgate, before I go out.”

“Twenty-six weeks,” he said.

“Twenty-six weeks.”

He put out his hand. I looked at it a moment, and then I shook it. His hand was cold and it was shaking a little.

He went to my mother’s house that afternoon and sat with Marlys at the kitchen table and told her everything. I wasn’t there. Mom told me later that it was the first time in months she’d seen him take his cap off in the house.

Marlys called me that night. She was crying.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said. “Thursday. Why didn’t you tell me what he did?”

“Because it needed to come from him,” I said. “And because you’d have taken his side, honey. You always do. And then you’d have hated yourself for it.”

She laughed, a wet little laugh. “I would have.”

“I know,” I said. “I love you anyway.”