The father of Tara is named Gil Rutledge, and he retired from the post office after thirty one years, and he read the warranty deed under his breath as if saying a prayer. When he finished, he put it down very gently on the patio table and removed his glasses. “Lucille,” he said. “You are the owner of this duplex. And this one.” He pointed with his chin at the other half, where a porch light had come on. “You bought it in August, and all this time the boy has been telling you the rent was going up, and handing you notices.” I said that was right. Kyle sat very still with the can of beer going warm in his hand. “And the boat,” Gil said.
“The boat,” I said. “A 2019 Ranger, red, with a Mercury two fifty on the back. Ray fished every tournament on Lake Ouachita in that boat. The title was in my name.” I took out the DMV printout and laid it on the table beside the catfish. “Hull number RNG 4528 L919. Sold in May to a dealer in Benton for thirty one thousand dollars. The seller signature says Lucille Bledsoe. I have not signed my name to anything but a church bulletin in two years.” I looked at my son. “Kyle, I would like you to tell me what happened to the boat of your father. And I would like you to tell me with your own mouth.”
Kyle put the beer on the table. He is forty seven, a big, soft man who coaches high school wrestling, and for a minute he seemed to be searching for a coach to tell him what to do. “Mom, I owed money,” he said at last. “Thirty one thousand dollars. To a man in Little Rock. I got into a game, a poker game, online, and I thought I would win it back. And then I owed more, and he said he would come to the school.” He wiped his face. “The Jeep was a trade in. I put the money down so Tara would not ask why the account was empty. And the boat was the only thing I had that was worth that much.”
An empty boat trailer stood in a carport beside a patio full of guests and gave one motel widow the evening to bring her son back to the lake.
Tara was crying. She is thirty eight, a dental hygienist, and she had been sitting with her hands in her lap and her mouth shut for ten minutes. “Kyle, you told me it was your tax refund,” she said. “I bought a dress for the trip.” She turned to me, and I saw how young she was. “Mrs. Bledsoe, I am so sorry. I would never have let this go on if I had known.” I assured her that I believed her. I had known many liars in my life, in the motel business, and Tara was not one. Her mother, who had said nothing all evening, reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “I told her,” she whispered. “I told her he was a good boy.”
“He is a good boy,” I said. “That is the trouble. A bad one would have been easier to be angry at.” I looked out at the lake through the pines. The sun had slipped down behind the hills, and the water was the color of tarnished silver. The ski boats had gone in. There was a moment, a very quiet one, when I thought of Ray in that red boat at dawn with a thermos and a rod, and I felt him beside me. “Kyle, your father would have been ashamed of what you did. But he would have been more ashamed if you had kept doing it. Go to the meeting. Tell the man in Little Rock that you are done.”
I told them my terms, there on the patio, among the plates of catfish and hushpuppies. The thirty one thousand dollars, I would pay the man in Little Rock myself, through my lawyer, on the condition that Kyle never speak to him again. The Jeep would be sold. Kyle would see a counselor in Hot Springs, twice a month, and Tara would be told every word.
“And the boat,” I said. “I want it back. It is at a dealer in Benton, and it is still for sale, because the man cannot get the title clean.” Kyle looked up. “You will pay me back for the boat out of your salary, and I will buy it back myself, and it will be yours to fish from.”
He stared at me. “Mine?” “Not yours to sell,” I said. “Yours to keep, in your driveway, where the friends of your father can see it. When your boys are old enough, you will take them out on Lake Ouachita before the sun comes up and show them how to cast.” Kyle bent forward in his chair and sobbed. It was a great, heaving, boyish sob, the kind a man has when something that has been holding him up for a long time is finally taken out. Gil Rutledge, who is not a demonstrative man, came around the table and put his hand on the shoulder of my son. He said nothing. He just stood there, like a wall that is also a door.
The rent, when we finished, was the one thing I did not touch. Kyle would stay in his half of the duplex as my tenant, at a fair six hundred dollars, written in a lease, signed by both of us. I would move into the other half, the one with the porch light, which was empty. I could not tell you why I felt such a deep calm. Perhaps it was only that for the first time in two years I was in a place with my name on the paper. Gil carried my suitcase over himself. Tara followed with a lamp and the kettle. At the door she hugged me and said, “May I come for tea?” I said she might.
Kyle paid off the man in Little Rock by Easter, through an agreement my lawyer drew up, and by June he had saved enough for the first installment on the boat. We went to Benton on a Saturday, the two of us, to the dealer lot off the highway. It was sitting in the back row, under a blue tarp, with its Mercury lifted. He pulled off the tarp himself. The red paint was dull, and there was a scratch along the hull. He ran his hand over the side, quietly, the way a man touches a horse, and said, “Dad.” That was all he said. The salesman, to his credit, went around the corner and left us alone.