The Bass The Weigh Master Threw Out

On the second visit she sat at our kitchen table and watched Caleb do his spelling homework and said, almost too quietly to hear, “Brady won’t touch the trophy.”

“What trophy?”

“The first-place trophy. It’s still in the box in the garage. He won’t take it out. He says he won’t put it on his shelf.”

I looked at her for a while.

“What does Rick say?” I asked.

“Rick says he’s being dramatic.” She picked at a thread on her sleeve. “Rick doesn’t say much about anything, since.”

I did not ask her anything else. It was not hers to answer yet.

The replica came back on a Friday, the twenty-third of October, in a long box padded with moving blankets. Nolan Bright drove it down from Hot Springs himself, because he said he wasn’t going to trust a carrier with it. He set it on our kitchen table, took the blanket off, and stood back with his arms folded.

I have been around a lot of fish. I have never seen anything like that.

She was beautiful. Nolan had gotten the green on her back the shade of wet moss, fading to pale gold along her sides, with the dark stripe running to the tail like a pencil line. Her mouth was open the way a bass does at the top of a jump, and he had painted a tiny glint in her eye.

Caleb put his hand on her back and didn’t say a word for the longest time.

“Is that her?” he said finally. “Is that really her?”

“That’s her,” Nolan said. “I got the freckle on the left gill plate from your photo, son. I don’t miss freckles.”

Caleb laughed out loud, a short surprised laugh, the first real one in three weeks. Then his face scrunched up and he turned away and wiped his eyes on the back of his wrist, quick, thinking nobody had seen.

Dana had come in the back door from her shift. She put her purse down on the counter without a word, and she crossed the kitchen and put her hand flat on the middle of our son’s back, and she kept it there.

I paid Nolan the three hundred and forty dollars in twenties. He counted it, folded it once, and put it in his shirt pocket.

That evening I drove up the highway to Earl Pruitt’s bait shop with the fish on the seat beside me, wrapped in a moving blanket, belted in like a passenger. Caleb rode in the back seat with his knees up, holding a roll of tape and a Sharpie like a boy carrying a sword.

I should tell you about the shop.

Pruitt’s Bait and Tackle is a low cinder-block building at the bend where the road drops to the marina, with a screened porch full of minnow tanks and a bell over the door. Inside it smells like cedar shavings and live crickets. Over the register, for as long as I can remember, hung a framed picture of a crappie that Earl’s father caught in 1964.

Every fisherman in three counties has stood at that register. Every one of them has bought minnows or nightcrawlers or a hook there. It is the one place in the county where you cannot avoid being looked at.