What the Dentist Carried
That is what I was thinking, standing behind my counter on that October Tuesday while Mr. Hasselquist counted out bills for his shiners. I had said my son’s name to a few hundred strangers over that counter, and not one of them had ever brought back an answer.
“He’s a fine man, Doss,” Mr. Hasselquist said. “I mean it. His boat is spotless. He checked the forecast three times before he’d let us leave the dock. When a front came up at noon, he turned us around and fed us lunch at the ramp and never charged a dime for the lost hours.”
“He’s careful,” I said.
“The most careful man I ever fished with. My grandson didn’t say a word all day, he just watched him.”
I had to look at the minnow tank for a while.
“There was a boy on the boat too,” Mr. Hasselquist said. “His son. Tall kid, fifteen, narrow through the shoulders. He ran the net and kept the log. About halfway through the day he held a walleye up to the light and looked at it, and I swear he had your chin.”
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I said, “You’ve met my grandson.”
“You haven’t?”
“Not since he was seven years old.”
The old man did not say anything. He put his wallet on the counter and rested one hand on it, the way a man does when he has been given something heavy to carry and has carried it a long way.
“Doss,” he said. “I did not intend to tell you this. I told myself I’d mind my own business. But he asked me a question at the end of the day, and I have been thinking about it all night.”
“What did he ask?”
“He asked who sent me.” Mr. Hasselquist’s voice was careful. “I told him a friend of the family named Doss Kregel, who runs the bait shop at Tamarack.
“I’d handed him one of your cards that morning at the dock, the one you gave me last spring with my change. He never said a word. He read it and put it in his shirt pocket and fished all day with it. Then at the ramp he asked if I would carry something back to you.”
He opened the wallet and took out an index card. It was soft at the corners and had been folded once and flattened again, the way a card is when it has spent a day in a shirt pocket.
I knew my own block pencil from across the counter. Trevonne Kregel, Saginaw Bay walleye, best I know.
He turned it over and laid it on the counter between us.