The Bait Shop That Opened at Four

Why I Never Called

I will give you the honest reason, not the one I told Junia.

A man who has said a sentence like that cannot be wrong. If he is wrong, then two brothers from Flint died to teach him nothing, and his cousin’s ruined life was only a story about a life jacket.

It is far easier to wait for the boy to fail. If he failed, I was right.

He did not fail. By his second season he was booked through September. By his third he had a waiting list and a second boat.

Roscoe would come in with the Bay City paper, and there would be my son holding a twelve-pound walleye next to a man in a Tigers cap. Roscoe would lay it on the counter and say nothing, and I would say nothing back.

I got through nine of the ten digits of his phone number more mornings than I can count. I was afraid that if I called, I would have to say a word I had never said to anyone, and he would not take it.

So I did the one thing I could do without saying anything at all. In the second winter, a customer asked whether I knew a good walleye guide on Saginaw Bay. I stood there with a scoop of shiners and could not make my mouth say a stranger’s name.

“Kregel,” I said. “Trevonne Kregel, out of Au Gres. He’s the best there is.”

“Any relation?”

“He’s my son,” I said.

I had not said that aloud to a living person in two years. It came out so easily, and the man looked so pleased, that my hands shook afterward.

I could not stop. I started keeping a stack of index cards by the register, and on each one I wrote in block pencil, Trevonne Kregel, Saginaw Bay walleye, best I know, with his number under it.

I handed them out with the change. I never put my own name on a card. I did not want it to look like I was asking for anything.