The man with the gravelly voice at the Army Corps office in Somerset said, Maam, I have been waiting a long time for someone to call about that one. Your husband did something in 1981 that half the lawyers in Kentucky have forgotten you can do. You are not going anywhere.
The lease in the ammo box behind the fuel tank was not from the marina. It was from the United States Army Corps of Engineers, which controls the water itself. A ninety-nine year lease on that slip, signed in 1981, in Hanks name, with a clause covering the slip and its successors, meaning me.
The resort company out of Atlanta had bought the marina. But the marina never owned the water or that slip. The Corps did, and Hank had locked up the rights to our slip until the year 2080, transferable to his widow, decades before a golf cart ever rolled down the dock.
He told me in 1981 it was for the day the marina changes hands. I thought he was dreaming. He was forty-three years ahead of a man in a golf cart.
The Corps sent the resort company a letter that I am told was very short and very clear. They could build their luxury slips around me, but my slip was federal, leased, paid, and mine until 2080, and the boat was not being towed anywhere.
The man who would not get out of his cart, who told me Hanks boat did not meet his new standards, learned that his new standards do not apply to a slip the federal government leased to my husband before that company existed.
I still live on the forty-foot houseboat Hank rebuilt from the hull up. It is the only home I have had in forty-three years. This Fourth of July the fireworks crowd gathered at my slip, same as always, luxury docks or no luxury docks.
Hank said that boat was for the day the marina changed hands. Turns out the whole lake was, too. He just never got around to mentioning he had out-thought them all.