Because inside, where the hooks and lures should’ve been, Eleanor had hidden thirty-one months of paper.
Layaway slips. Wentworth Marine, out on Route 15. The little carbon receipts they tear off and hand you at the counter, rubber-banded in a stack about an inch thick, in order, oldest on the bottom.
Twenty dollars. Twenty dollars. Fifteen. Twenty. Forty, the week she did the Hendersons’ taxes for them.
Thirty-one months of a woman putting cash on a nine-point-nine horse outboard motor at a counter twenty-two miles from our house, where nobody we know would see her doing it.
The top slip is stamped PAID IN FULL, the ninth of April, eleven days before our anniversary.
Under the slips was the pickup ticket. Motor’s in the back, tagged with my name, hold until the fourteenth of June.
June the fourteenth is my birthday. She wasn’t done. The tackle box was so I’d have somewhere to put my hands on the day she gave me the box, and the motor was coming eight weeks later, and she was going to let me be disappointed for eight weeks because she thought that was the funniest thing she had ever cooked up in her life.
And I thanked her flat. I want to be honest about that in writing where I can’t take it back. I thanked her flat and I set it in the shed and I did not lift the lid, and thirty days after that she was gone in the night and I never told her I was sorry for my own face on that porch.
Folded into the pickup ticket, in her hand:
“Robert — if you’re reading this before June you got nosy, which means I win either way. Thirty-three years and you still can’t wait for a thing. Go get your motor.”
I drove out to Wentworth on a Tuesday. I had the ticket in my shirt pocket and I could not make myself go in for about twenty minutes.
The fellow behind the counter is named Curt and he remembered her. He said she came in the first Friday of the month, most months, and she would not let him hold it under her name because she said her husband checked the mail.
He’d kept it. Fourteen months past the hold date, in the back, under a tarp, because he said he wasn’t about to sell that motor to somebody else.
It’s on the transom now. It runs the way a new motor runs, which is to say you can hardly hear it.
The rocking chair’s on the porch. I sit in it in the evenings, which I am aware is not what I bought it for.
I take the boat out most Saturdays and I don’t fish much. I just idle out to the middle where it’s quiet, and I sit there with a motor a woman bought me twenty dollars at a time, and I say the thank-you I owed her, out loud, in a voice she’d have called foolish.