The Bass The Weigh Master Threw Out

“Because you’ve been married to him sixteen years and you know what it costs.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Right now,” I said, “nothing. I need to figure out what I’m going to do first. Kiss Brady for me. Tell him he did nothing wrong. He didn’t.”

“He knows it was Caleb’s fish,” Lorna said. “He told me in the truck. He said, ‘Mom, that wasn’t mine.'”

I didn’t say anything to that. I couldn’t.

Neither one of those would hang a six-pound bass on a wall where a twelve-year-old could look up at it.

On Monday I called Nolan Bright, a fish carver in Hot Springs who builds replicas for the lodges and the guide services on Lake Hamilton and Lake Ouachita. He does replica mounts, fiberglass, hand-painted from photographs and measurements, because the lake wants the fish back and so do most of the people who catch them.

“Twenty-one and a half by seventeen, you said?” Nolan asked.

“Yes sir. Largemouth. Six pounds two ounces on a club scale.”

“Three hundred and forty dollars,” Nolan said. “Three weeks, because I’ve got a deer-season rush. Send me every picture you took, and if the boy remembers the color of her back, have him tell me.”

I told Caleb that night at supper. I did not tell him why. I just said we were going to have the fish carved, so there would always be a good copy of the one he caught.

He put down his fork. His face did a thing I don’t have words for. “Like a real one? On a wall?”

“Like a real one. On a wall.”

“Where?”

“I’m working on that part,” I said.

Dana looked at me from across the table. She raised one eyebrow just a little, and I knew she had already guessed.

Three hundred forty dollars is not nothing to us. It was the money we had put aside for Caleb’s winter boots and a new coat. I took it out of the envelope in the junk drawer, where I keep cash for exactly the kind of thing Dana calls a sentimental purchase, and I counted it twice.

The three weeks went by slow and strange.

Word got around the lake the way it always does, from the bait shop to the barber to the church lot. By Thursday the versions had started to line up, because the people who had been there kept telling it the same way.

Hubert Cole told it at the cafe every morning over his eggs. Ellen Pike put the picture she had taken from the pontoon on her own page, a boy standing up in a dented jon boat with a bass over his head and nobody within a hundred yards of him. It got shared three hundred times.

Caleb went back to school on Monday, and a kid named Dustin on the sidewalk asked, “Was it really six pounds?”

“Six-two,” Caleb said.

“Dang,” said Dustin, and it was enough to put my son’s shoulders back about an inch.

Rick did not call me. Not once in three weeks. He ran the fall cleanup at the marina and the Saturday weigh-ins like nothing had happened, and Lorna came by the house twice with a casserole and a lot of silence.