The Bass The Weigh Master Threw Out

“That’s fair,” I said.

“It’s more than fair. It’s a plain fact on a plain card.” He picked up the broom. “Go home, you two. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Dana’s word on it was, “Take the boy, Travis,” so we got to Pruitt’s at five-forty in the dark, and I parked at the edge of the gravel lot where I could see the door and the long window. Caleb sat beside me with a thermos of hot chocolate in his lap.

It was a Saturday in late October, with frost on the weeds along the highway.

“Dad,” Caleb said. “Are you mad at Uncle Rick?”

“Some.”

“Are you going to yell at him?”

“No.”

“Because Mom says you shouldn’t.”

“Your mom’s right.” I watched the road. “I’m not here to yell. I’m here so he doesn’t have to hear about it from somebody else first.”

Caleb thought that over. “That’s kind of nice,” he said slowly. “For a mad person.”

“I’m working on it.”

At six-oh-four, a gray Silverado pulled into the lot with a boat trailer hitch and a green club sticker on the tailgate. It parked in its usual place by the minnow porch. The engine cut off.

I felt my heart do something heavy.

Then he got out. He walked up the steps of the porch with a blue-lidded bucket in his hand, and I heard the bell over the door ring, and I watched him go inside.

And I watched him look up.

Rick stood there with the dip net in his hand and did not move.

Three men were already at the counter, Hubert Cole and two fellas from the cafe who came for crickets. Nobody said a word. Earl was ringing up a box of hooks and did not look up, and the card hung under the fish, laminated now, bright under the fluorescent tube.

Rick read it. I could see his lips go through the four names. Then he read the weight, and I watched his big shoulders drop about an inch.

“Morning, Rick,” Earl said.

“Earl.”

“Dozen fatheads and a half dozen shiners?”

“That’s right.”

Earl netted them out slow and bagged them, and Rick paid four-fifty in exact change, and neither of them said anything else. Rick took his bucket. He stopped at the door with his hand on the frame.

He turned around and looked at the fish a long time.

“He’s fourteen,” he said, to nobody, in a voice I had never heard come out of him. “It’s his last year. He has come in second to a bigger boat every fall since he was ten. I just wanted him to win one.”

Nobody answered. It was not a thing that could be answered.

Hubert Cole set down his coffee. “That’s the saddest reason I ever heard for stealing from a child,” he said.

Rick opened his mouth, and shut it, and went out. The bell rang behind him. He sat in his truck for a while, and then he drove off with the bucket in the passenger seat, and I let out a breath I had been holding since the first Saturday of October.

Caleb looked at me. “He didn’t say sorry.”

“No.”

“Is that okay?”

“It’s not nothing,” I said. “But it’s not enough either. There’s a meeting Thursday.”