Because inside, where the basket and the stem should’ve gone, Nadine had packed my passport.
Renewed. Photo taken at the drugstore in April, which I have no memory of and which she must have talked me into on some errand while I was thinking about something else entirely.
Under it, in a freezer bag, was a folded confirmation from a place called Kesagami Wilderness Lodge, out of Cochrane, Ontario. Six nights, one cabin, September the fourteenth through the twentieth. Paid in full. Two names on it.
Under that, a page out of a legal pad: a packing list, in her hand, with rain gear and long johns and “the ugly hat you love” on it, and at the bottom, “call Rudy about somebody to feed the dog.”
Thirty-five years I have talked about that trip. Not a trolling motor — that was this spring’s noise. The real thing, the thing I have been saying since about 1994, is a week of northern pike where the float plane drops you and nobody can reach you.
I said it so many times it turned into a joke in this house. Somebody would ask what I wanted for my birthday and my daughter would say Ontario, and everybody would laugh, and I’d laugh too.
Nadine was not laughing. She had been putting money aside out of the grocery envelope since 2021.
The percolator was because I have complained about the coffee at every camp I have ever been to in my life, and she’d found a stovetop pot at the secondhand store for ten dollars so I could make it my own way over a propane burner and quit whining about it.
She was going to hand me a dented old coffee pot and let me be ungrateful about it, and then watch me unscrew the bottom.
I never unscrewed the bottom. I said “real practical, hon,” in that voice, and I shoved it in the pantry.
She heard the voice. She always heard the voice.
A month later I woke up next to her and she was gone.
Taped to the passport was an index card:
“Thirty-five years of hearing about this trip, Emmett. Pack the ugly hat. I’m coming with you and I don’t even like fish.”
The lodge still had the reservation. The woman on the phone — her name is Fern — said they’d been trying to reach us about the balance on the float plane and had not wanted to keep calling.
I went in September. Alone. I could not think of one other person on this earth to take.
The coffee was terrible and the pike were about what you’d expect and I sat out on that dock at five in the morning with a dented percolator and a woman’s packing list in my shirt pocket.
The swing’s on the porch. I sit on it in the evenings, which is not what I built it for either.