I laid the knife on the bench, made myself keep my voice easy, and asked the man where he had gotten it. A flea market, a while back, no idea whose it was. Then I called the sheriff, because that groove under my thumb was my fathers, and my father had been gone four years.
The sheriff still had the file, and the groove was in it, described just as my father had filed it, deep and smooth for his thumb. They traced the knife backward, flea market to yard sale to a name, and what they found was not what four years of wondering had made me fear.
My father had not met foul play out on that water; he had drowned, the plain and terrible way the lake takes men, and the truth had simply taken four years to float back to us.
The man he drove out with that morning in 2020 had told a story that never quite fit, and for four years I had let myself believe the worst of him. But the worst of him was only guilt. They had been fishing, the two of them, and my father had stood to move and the boat had gone over in cold water far from shore, and the other man had barely made it in himself. He had panicked. He had told the story wrong out of shame, not guilt, and he had carried it badly ever since.
My fathers knife had gone into the lake with him, and years later a fisherman had snagged the old tackle box it was in, and not knowing what he had, sold it on with a lot of other junk. From there it wandered, box to box, all the way to my bench, and to the one thumb in the world that knew that groove.
Knowing it was an accident does not sound like much comfort. But you would be surprised. For four years my mind had built terrible things in the dark. The truth, when it came, was only sad, and sad you can lay to rest.
With the knife came the last piece the divers had needed. They went back out to the water it came from, and that autumn they brought my father home. We buried him in the ground, in the daylight, next to my grandmother, with a preacher and every cousin we have.
I keep the knife over my bench now, oiled, the groove up. My father filed it forty years ago so his own hand would always know it. In the end, it was that groove that knew the way back to us, and brought him home off the water at last.