Nate didn’t want to come. When I called that night, he said he couldn’t. I told him Arnie Sorensen wasn’t charging a penny, and his father had left something on that boat with orders attached. He was at the dock at five-thirty Saturday morning, eyes red, hands in his jacket. Arnie handed him the bread bag and the oars, then went up to the cabin and left us alone.
We drifted out to the point where Gary always fished walleye. Nate read the letter aloud. His dad had written it after the stent, four summers back. He said he’d put the boat in Nate’s name so it would be his to keep or sell, no guilt either way. A boat is just aluminum, he wrote. The mornings were the point. The key opened locker nine at Doug’s bait shop. Nate folded the letter and cried harder than he had at the funeral, and then, finally, he slept for an hour with his head on the life jackets while I watched the loons.
Locker nine held Gary’s lure collection and a coffee can of cash. Two thousand three hundred dollars, saved in fives and tens for a new motor he meant to surprise Nate with. Nate drove straight to the green cabin and offered Arnie all of it for the boat. Arnie took exactly seven hundred fifty. He said he’d spent five years looking for a Buick and wasn’t going to let a young man do the same.
The boat sits beside the garage again, back on its yellow rectangle, and the grass has started growing around the tires. Nate bought the new motor with what was left. Every other Saturday, he picks up Arnie at the green cabin before sunrise, and I send a pan of Special K bars along. They come home smelling of two-stroke gas and minnow water, arguing about walleye.
