And I set the flashlight down and just sat in that boat a long time, because when I peeled back that old canvas tarp, it was not the thing a mind jumps to. It was a strongbox. A gray metal cashbox, the hardware-store kind, wrapped tight and wedged in careful, and it was heavy in my hands.
The lid was not even locked. Inside, in rubber-banded rolls gone soft with the damp, was money. Cash, a lot of it, more than I clear in a year driving my route. And sitting right on top of all of it, in a sandwich bag to keep it dry, was a photograph of a woman on a porch swing, laughing, and on the back one word in ballpoint. Carol.
Now everybody around Waycross had a story for why Ronnie up and vanished. Owed the wrong people. Ran off with somebody. Went out of his mind. I never believed a word of it, and holding that box I understood I had been right not to. A man does not leave his whole life savings wrapped in a tarp in a boat the bank is fixing to sell unless something inside him has come all the way apart.
Carol was his wife. She passed two winters back, I remembered that much once I sat and thought on it, a fast cancer that took her in a couple of months. After that Ronnie went quiet, quit turning up at the Huddle House, let the yard grow over. And then one day he was gone, and the town decided the worst about him, because deciding the worst is easier than worrying.
I could have kept that money. I will be honest with you and say the thought crossed my mind, standing there with a boat I paid next to nothing for and a cashbox nobody living knew about. But that is not the way I was raised, and it is not how a man looks at himself in the mirror after.
It took me three weekends of asking the right people, but I found him. Ronnie was two hundred miles off at his sister place in Valdosta, living in her back room, flat broke, too ashamed to come home to a town he was sure had written him off. When I called and told him what I found strapped up in the bow of his old johnboat, that big man cried right there on the phone. He had forgotten it was even in there. He had wrapped that box up the same week he lost Carol, half meaning to hide it and half meaning to disappear, and then the grief took the rest of the year and he never went back for it.
I drove it out to him myself, every dollar and that picture of Carol laid on top. He tried to press a fat handful of it on me and I would not take a cent. I told him to come home to Waycross, that the Huddle House still poured coffee, and that nobody thought the half of what he feared they did.
He is back now. Fishes with me some Saturdays, out of a different boat. And the picture of Carol rides up on his dash, in the sun, where he can see her the whole way to the water.