a fish bigger than any I had ever heard of, he said, trying to smile. Then he asked if I wanted him to leave it alone. I told him no. I walked down that dock for the first time in thirty years with my hand on the rail and my heart in my throat. The boathouse smelled of cedar and cold coffee. There was the desk, the lamp, the tape player humming, and the trapdoor. I knelt on the plywood and told the boy to pull. It took us both, hand over hand, with the rope creaking, and out of the dark water came a steel box.
It was an old Army ammunition can, painted green, wrapped in plastic and sealed with a rubber gasket, and on the lid, in white paint, was one word: JEANNIE. I looked at my own name for a long time. The boy politely excused himself and went to sit on the deck. Water dripped from the lid onto my shoes. Inside, packed in dry bags and tied in bundles, were letters. Hundreds of letters, in the square handwriting of Gil, each dated, each one addressed to me in ink that had not faded. The first was from July of 1994, the summer we bought the lake house.
I opened the first letter right there. “Dear Jeannie, tonight the motor is running so that you will not worry about me. Today I told you the pontoon is not safe, and that is the truth, because there is no pontoon. I am sorry for the lie. The men on the porch said a dangerous man knew our address in Little Rock, and I could not tell you why. So I built a quiet room by the water where I could think, and write, and keep you safe without frightening you. I promise I will tell you everything one day.”
The boathouse held no boat at all, only thirty years of letters from a husband who kept saying next summer.
I read until the lamp flickered and the sun went down over Lake Hamilton. The danger had ended in 2003, he wrote, when the man in question passed away of old age in a nursing home. But by then writing had become a habit he could not break. Every evening he started the cassette, sat at the desk, and wrote to me about his day: the heron that fished off our dock, the way I hummed over the dishes, the Henderson grandkids growing up. “I wanted to give you these when I was brave enough,” he wrote. “I kept thinking, next summer.”
The tape, he explained in one of the last letters, was for my sake. He was afraid that if I ever came down, I would find him weeping over the pages, and he did not want me to see a postal inspector cry. The motor also kept the neighbors smiling instead of curious. “A man who fixes a boat is a man everybody leaves alone,” he wrote. “And a man who is left alone has time to love his wife properly, even if he does it in a boathouse.” I laughed out loud in the middle of crying, and the boy on the deck looked back in alarm.
The filing cabinet held more. In the top drawer were thirty folders, one for each year, and in each folder was a single sheet titled Things I Meant To Say. In the bottom drawer sat a small velvet box. Inside was a thin gold band with a tiny sapphire, and a note: “For our fiftieth anniversary. I could not wait for another next summer, so I bought it in advance.” We had been married forty nine years. I counted it twice on my fingers, and I understood that he had missed it by one summer. I held that ring against my heart and did not cry, because for once, I had been told everything.
The boy came down at last and offered to carry the box up the hill. His name was Tyler, he told me, and he had grown up on this lake hearing everyone talk about the ghost boat of Gil. “Mrs. Hobbs,” he said shyly, “I guess I always wanted to see that boat.” I looked at the water, and the long empty slip, and the lamp still glowing on the desk, and I made up my mind about something that had been waiting thirty years. I did not tell him what. I just thanked him and asked him to come back on Saturday, and he nodded as if he already understood.
The next week I walked into Garrison Cove Marina and bought the best used pontoon they had, white, only seven years old, with a forty horse motor. The owner asked what name I wanted painted on the side. I said, Next Summer. He wrote it down without a single question, and then he said, “Gil would have loved that, Mrs. Hobbs.” He was right, of course. He always said he was fixing it up for me, and in a way, he had. The motor, the letters, and the lake were all his gifts.
On the first warm Saturday of June, I stood on the dock in a sun hat while Tyler started the motor. It caught on the second pull, rough at first, then smoother. The Henderson grandkids, grown now, came running with their own children, all hollering the same words from years ago. “Mrs. Hobbs, when are you gonna take us for a ride?” I smiled, patted the pocket where I kept the letters, and said, “Today, kids. Climb aboard.”
We went out slow across the water, eleven of us crowded on the benches, with the sun low and the lake gold. I took the wheel, and the whole ride I could feel him beside me, the way I used to feel him walking up the hill in the evening smelling of lake water. When the motor idled, I did something I had never done. I sang along. And down in the boathouse, for the first time in thirty years, the tape player was silent, because the real thing finally had its turn.