I pried the lid up, and my stomach dropped clean to the floor — because nestled in cotton wadding, row on careful row, were fishing lures. Old ones. Beautiful ones. Hand-painted wooden bodies and glass eyes and hardware gone soft with age, the kind I’d only ever seen behind glass at a sport show. Dozens of them, every one pristine, never tied to a line.
I sat down on the bench seat of that little boat and lifted them out one at a time, and I started to understand what my quiet old neighbor had really been doing all those mornings. Pete had been collecting his whole life — hunting down the rarest antique lures, the early ones, the ones serious men chase across the country and pay sums for that would buy a truck. He’d kept the best of them hidden in a rusty first-aid tin under the life vests of a boat his own daughter called junk.
I took a few to a dealer in the city, just to know. The man’s hands actually trembled. One lure alone — a little hand-carved frog older than Pete himself — he valued at more than the boat, the trailer, and Pete’s old house put together. The whole tin was a fortune, sitting in a side yard, one dump run away from being lost forever.
But it was the little card folded under the cotton that broke me. Each lure had a tag in Pete’s spidery hand, and the card explained them. “Every one of these marks a morning worth remembering. The frog, the day I married Marge. The copper spoon, the day she passed and I went out anyway because the water was the only place I could still feel her. And the red-and-white one on top — that’s the morning a new fellow from next door climbed in my boat and asked if I wanted company. I’d been alone three years. After that morning, I wasn’t. You gave me twenty years of not being alone, son. These are yours. You’re the only one who ever understood that the lake was never about the fish.”
I wept in that boat in my side yard until I couldn’t see the water for the tears. The daughter had rolled her eyes and called it Dad’s leaky old tin can, said taking it saved her the dump run. She never knew her father had hidden the treasure of a lifetime in the bow — not just the lures, but a record of every morning that ever meant something to a lonely man, with my own name written on the best one.
I had that red-and-white lure framed, and it hangs over my door. The rest I keep, because some of them I’ll never sell — they’re not worth money to me, they’re worth mornings. And come spring, I take Pete’s little aluminum boat out on the lake at first light, alone but not lonely, and I swear I can still feel the old man in the seat behind me. Some folks leave you a boat. Pete left me twenty years of quiet water, and the truth that it was never the fish he was after. It was the company.