The Stern Seat at Seventy One

She thought about it. “Dad knows the river.”

“Your dad knows the river in June,” I said. “He was training you in July, when it was higher. Things change.”

She was quiet for a while. Then she said, “I’m not hoping he gets stuck.”

“I know you’re not,” I said. “Neither am I.”

And I was not. I want that understood. I did not take that seat to beat Trevor. I took it so Greta would have somebody back there who wanted to be in the boat with her.

Signe came out to the landing on the eighth morning. She parked her car up by the shelter and walked down in her work clothes, with a travel mug in her hand, and stood on the bank watching us come in.

Greta waved her paddle. Signe waved back. When we pulled up, she grabbed the bow and held it steady while Greta climbed out, the way she used to do for her mother and me when she was small.

“You two look good,” she said.

“Your father is held together with ibuprofen and stubbornness,” Greta said.

“He always has been,” Signe said. Then she looked at me over Greta’s head, and I could see she had been crying in the car.

Greta went up to load the paddles. Signe stayed by the water.

“I didn’t know until Friday night,” she said quietly. “He told me she’d said it was fine. I should have asked her myself.”

“She did say it was fine,” I said. “That’s what thirteen-year-old girls say.”

“I could make him paddle with her,” Signe said. “I could, Dad. I’d only have to say it once.”

“I know you could,” I said. “And she’d know you made him. Let him be, honey. Let him have his race. She has a partner.”

Signe wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. “He’s not a bad man.”

“No,” I said. “He’s a man whose father never let him win anything. That’s a different thing. But this was still wrong, and I think he knows it somewhere.”

She nodded. Then she laughed a little. “Mom’s paddle?”

“Mom’s paddle,” I said.

She put her hand on the side of that old green canoe and kept it there a minute, like it was a horse she had grown up with.

Labor Day came up bright and clear, the kind of late-summer morning where the sky over the bluffs is so blue it looks painted on. It had not rained in sixteen days. I had been counting.

There were forty-one canoes and a handful of kayaks at the La Farge landing by eight. People had trucks backed down to the water, coolers on tailgates, kids running around in water shoes. Somebody had a radio going with polka music.

The entry fee was twenty dollars a boat, and it went to the volunteer fire department. They had a folding table under a canopy with a coffee urn, a box of donuts from the gas station, and a woman with a clipboard checking names.