My husband Ray had a little fishing boat he kept at the lake, a sixteen-footer he had owned since before we married. He spent more mornings on that water than I could count. It was his church, he used to say, only half joking.
Ray passed in the spring. Heart, sudden, on dry land, which he would have found ironic.
I kept paying the slip fees for almost a year because selling the boat felt like selling a piece of him. Finally a buyer came who seemed right, an older man who teared up a little when I told him about Ray. Before I handed over the keys I went to clear out Rays things. The tackle, the cooler, the ridiculous lucky hat.
The bow storage compartment was jammed. Ray had always struggled with it. I worked it open with a flathead. Inside, under the life jackets, wrapped in a garbage bag to keep the damp out, was a small fireproof box.
I sat down on the dock beside the boat, the buyer waiting patiently in the parking lot, and opened it. Inside was a ring box, and travel papers, and cash. A lot of it, in an envelope, banded and counted.
The ring was not new. It was my mothers ring, the one I thought had been lost in the move to the lake house eleven years back. I had cried over losing it. Ray had let me believe it was gone. He had it cleaned and reset, and he had been holding it.
The papers were a brochure and a printed itinerary. A cabin on a lake in Montana, the kind of trip we talked about for thirty years and never took because there was always a reason not to. He had circled a week in September. Our anniversary week. This year would have been forty years.
There was a card, his handwriting, blocky and careful.
Forty years and I still cannot believe you said yes. Time we finally went. No more excuses, old girl.
He had been planning to surprise me. He had hidden my mothers ring in the bow of that boat so I would not find it early, saving up in cash so no bank statement would give him away, sitting on the whole thing waiting for our anniversary. He died in April. The trip was for September. He never got to hand it to me.
I did not sell the boat that day. I walked up to that kind man in the parking lot and told him I was sorry, but I could not, not yet, and he nodded like he understood exactly.
In September, I went to Montana. I stayed in the cabin Ray picked. I wore my mothers ring. I sat on the dock up there every morning at the hour he used to fish, and I told him about the water, and the light, and how right he was about the whole thing.
He was still finding ways to take me somewhere. That man. Even now.