Part 3 — The Red Lure
The little flip phone beeped again, and a second message crackled out over the sizzle of the fryer.
“Booker, I carved that red lure the winter your mother died. It has a hollow belly and a screw eye in the tail.”
“The paper is rolled tight in there. Take the lure out of the tray and unscrew the tail.”
I had never sorted the lures I bought back. I had only paid ten dollars and carried the tackle box home. But a neighbor named Tyrell had already fetched it from my truck, and he set it on the picnic table in front of Jody.
The red lure sat in the second tray, cedar-colored, with a tiny brass eye in the tail. I twisted it, and a thin roll of paper slid out into my palm.
It was a transfer-on-death deed, signed by Pop and witnessed by two neighbors, recorded at the county office eleven months before he died.
The two acres by the lake went to me. The deed said so in plain print.
The buyers agent read it over my shoulder and quietly closed her folder. “Mr. Booker, this transfer takes effect the day your father passed. The sales contract was never valid.”
Jody set down the frying basket. He said, in a voice that was nothing like his usual one, that he had only wanted to pay off a debt.
The third message on the phone was short, and it was for him.
“Jody, you came into this house a scared fifteen-year-old, and I never once treated you as less than my own. The boat is yours. I want you to have it. Just do not sell what is not yours to sell.”
The fryer popped. Nobody spoke.
The agent explained what happens next. Eighty-seven thousand dollars of earnest money had to go back to the buyer within days. A power of attorney ends the moment the person dies, and the county attorney would want to hear about the contract.
Jody asked me, with his eyes on the grease, what I wanted done.
I told him I wanted the deposit returned in full, the contract cancelled in writing, and Pops bank envelope on my table by Monday. If he did that, I would tell the county attorney that it was a mistake he had corrected.
Monday morning he was on my porch with the envelope, the gun cabinet key, and a check from his own savings to cover what the deposit fell short.
The neighbors ate the fish that day, every plate of it, and nobody left angry.
The next Saturday before daylight I carved my first lure from a cedar scrap. I handed it to Jody at the end of Pops dock, and he turned it over in his big hands.
“A good lure is not for catching fish,” I told him. “It is for catching a Saturday.”