The Jon Boat We Took to His Mother

Then she walked me down two more pews and sat down beside me, and Gage sat on her other side, and Ferris stood in the aisle alone for what felt like a long time.

He sat down by himself. I could see the back of his neck from where I was. It was red all the way up.

I did not feel good about that. I want to be honest. I did not want him shamed in front of the church.

I had dreamed about something like it all through August, scrubbing skillets, and when it came, I only wanted it to be over.

We sang “Shall We Gather at the River” that morning. I do not know if Oleta asked for it, or if it was just the hymn the pianist had picked. Oleta sang every verse, holding my hand, and I could not sing a word of it.

After church, in the parking lot, two of the men who had stood by Ferris’s tailgate in August came over to Gage and shook his hand.

They did not say anything about the water. They just shook his hand and asked about our calves.

An older woman named Inga, who has played the organ at funerals for forty years, came and hugged Oleta and then hugged me, hard, and whispered, “Good girl,” in my ear like I was twelve.

Ferris drove off alone, without stopping to talk to anybody.

On Wednesday, Ferris moved Oleta back home. The basement was still wet, and the furnace would need replacing, but the main floor was dry, and she wanted her own bed. He put in a new bottom step on her porch himself.

Before she left, Oleta hugged me in our kitchen for a long time. She smelled like my soap and her own powder.

“You held my hand all the way across,” she said. “I won’t forget that.”

“You told me about your wedding,” I said. “I won’t forget that either.”

Then a week went by. Just a week. Not a phone call from Ferris. Not a word. I told myself that was fine.

I told myself we had done what you do, and that was the end of it, and what a man did with it was up to him.

On Saturday morning, the last Saturday in September, it was cool and bright, the first real fall morning.

Gage was out by the corral, setting a new gate post where the old one had rotted off at the ground. I was on the porch with a bowl of beans.

Ferris’s truck came up our lane.

He parked by the shop and got out slow. He had something in his hand. I could not see what it was.

He walked right past the porch, right past me, and nodded once to me without stopping, and went straight across the yard to Gage.

Gage straightened up from the post hole with the digger in his hands. He set it down, leaned it against the fence, and waited.

I set my beans down. I did not get up. Whatever this was, it was between the two of them, and I knew it.

Ferris stood in front of my husband for a long time. Then he held out his hand. In it was a bank envelope, white and fat.

“That’s twenty-four hundred dollars,” Ferris said. I could hear him from the porch. His voice was rough. “It’s yours. It was always yours. I don’t know why I did it.”

Gage did not take it right away.