The Bait Shop That Opened at Four

The Funeral Lunch

Junia got sick in the fall of 2018, her heart, a valve that had been failing for years without a word. By February she was in the hospital in Alpena. Trevonne drove up every night after he put the boat away, three hours each way, and slept in a recliner beside her.

I sat on the other side of the bed in my good coat and did not speak to him, and she saw all of it.

Five days before she passed, she waited until he went for coffee and took my hand. She weighed less than the quilt.

“Doss,” she said. “You open that shop early. Every morning. Earlier than you ever did. That boy has been a four o’clock boy since he was nine years old. When he comes back, and he will, I want the lights on.”

“He doesn’t need the lights on, Junia. He’s got his own business.”

“That isn’t what the lights are for,” she said, and closed her eyes. She passed on the twenty-second of March, a Friday, a little after six in the morning.

The Lutheran ladies put on the lunch in the church basement. Ham on rolls, scalloped potatoes, three kinds of jello salad, a sheet cake from the Kroger two towns over. Half the county came.

Trevonne sat across from me, hollow-eyed. He had carried his mother’s casket with five other men. Delora sat beside him with Asa, seven years old in a clip-on tie, picking raisins out of his jello.

Trevonne laid a check on the table next to my plate. He had written it to the cemetery for the plot and the stone, thirty-eight hundred dollars.

“Dad. Let me take care of this. Please. Let me do one thing.”

I was fifty-eight years old, my wife was three days gone, and my son was holding out the one thing he knew how to give me. I said:

“Keep it. You’ll need it for the creditors on that boat.”

Roscoe stopped chewing. Delora gripped the edge of the folding table. Trevonne looked at the check. He folded it once, slowly, and put it back in his coat.

He stood up and said to Delora, “Get Asa’s coat.” Then he said to me, very quietly, “I’ll see you, Dad,” in the voice you use when you won’t.

I heard his truck start. I sat with a plate of ham I did not eat, and every person in that basement found something to look at that was not me.

After a long minute Roscoe said, “Doss, that was about the sorriest thing I ever watched a man do.”

“I know it.”

“Do you?”

“I do now.”

I paid for the plot and the stone myself, out of the roof fund. The Monday after, I went down to the shop and did not turn the lock at five. I turned it at four.

I put on the lights over the counter and plugged in the coffee. I stood behind the register in the empty building and heard Junia say, I want the lights on.

I have not opened a minute later since. Not Christmas. Not the ice storm when the power was out and I ran a generator. Not the winter the wind off the lake hit twenty below and nobody came for hours.