“Hat,” Amber finished, and she covered her mouth with her fingers. I held the photograph up to the lamp. A parking lot at dusk. A pickup. Kyle, in his fishing cap, handing a thick envelope to a heavy man in a cream colored cowboy hat and mirrored sunglasses. Ray had printed the date on the back in his careful capitals, along with a sentence. “Dutch Sorrell. Runs the card game behind the marina. Kyle owes him sixty thousand dollars.” I put the picture down on the kitchen table and looked at the man who had married my daughter, who was staring at the floor.
Gunny Hollis cleared his throat from the doorway. “Mrs. Walsh,” he said, “I did not look at what was inside. I only saw the tape and the case and I thought it should go to the owner. But I will tell you, when I took it off the boat, I found it was not the first time somebody had gone looking. The live well had been pried open with a screwdriver.” Amber put her face in her hands. “Kyle did it the week after Daddy died,” she said. “I saw the marks on his hands. He told me he had been working on the truck.”
I read the letter of Ray aloud, because my hands needed something to do. “Dearest Jo,” it said. “If you are reading this, I am gone, and Kyle has been after the boat. I should have told you sooner that the boy gambles. I found out in 2021 when Dutch Sorrell came to the marina and asked for me by name. I paid part of the debt and told Kyle never again. He swore on his mother. Then I found the second note. I could not bring myself to hurt Amber, so I hid this. The account in the statement is yours. Two hundred twelve thousand dollars. I put it aside a dollar at a time, so you would never worry.”
A man can put away a little at a time for sixteen years and still leave his wife a surprise.
Two hundred twelve thousand dollars. I sat very still. Ray had been a plumber for forty years, and I had thought we were comfortable, no more. I had balanced the checkbook every month. But he had a way of stretching a dollar until it sang, and apparently, he had been putting a little aside in a bank across the river, in an account in my name, for sixteen years. “Dutch knew,” Amber said in a hollow voice. “Kyle told him about it. He said his mother in law had a nest egg and an old boat, and that she would be easy.” She looked up, and her eyes were furious. “He was going to use you, Mama.”
Gunny, who had been silent, laid his hat on the table. “Mrs. Walsh,” he said, “forty years in the Corps, and then thirty years as a deputy in Garland County. I know Dutch Sorrell. We have been trying to put him away since 2009.” He took out his phone. “With your permission, I would like to call the sheriff and give him that photograph.” I gave it. I did not hesitate. By nine oclock that night, two deputies were sitting in my kitchen drinking coffee out of my best cups, and the photograph was in an evidence bag.
They arrested Dutch Sorrell the following Tuesday in the back room of a bar in Hot Springs, with eleven thousand dollars in cash and a ledger. The ledger held the names of forty three people who owed him. Kyle was among them, in neat blue ink, with the figure sixty one thousand and a note that said, Collateral: mother in law boat. The sheriff called me himself. “Mrs. Walsh,” he said, “your husband took a photograph that has put a man in prison for fifteen years. I wish I could shake his hand.”
Kyle came to my door on a Thursday evening, alone, hat in his hands, thinner than he had been. He did not ask for anything. He said, “I have signed up for the program at the church in Little Rock. I start Monday. I have sold the truck. I owe you the truth, Miss Jo, and I owe it to Ray. I knew about the account. I knew about the case. I tried to get to them first.” His voice broke. “I am so ashamed.” I looked at him for a long time. “Kyle,” I said, “you can start by mowing my lawn.” He nodded, and he went to get the mower.
Amber moved in with me for the winter. She did not leave Kyle, exactly. She told him that if he finished the program, and kept the faith for a year, she would think about a conversation. I told her I thought that was wise. We spent the cold months cooking and sorting the fishing tackle of Ray into labeled boxes. In January, she found a drawer I had missed. Inside, under a stack of receipts, was a small notebook in which my husband had recorded, in pencil, every fish he had ever caught. Four hundred and twelve bass. Next to each, the date, the weight, and the same two words. With Jo.
In April, Gunny asked if his grandson might borrow the boat. He had been working on the boy, he said, for months. I said it was no longer my boat, since I had sold it, and that I would have to ask the owner. He grinned and said the owner thought it was a splendid idea. So on a Saturday in May, the four of us went out onto Lake Ouachita before sunrise, Gunny, his grandson, Amber, and I, in that seventeen foot bass boat, with the lucky lure of Ray swinging from the wheel.
The young man, whose name was Caleb, sat in the bow with a pole across his knees, saying nothing. The mist lay thick on the water. Then his line tightened. He gave a short cry, and the pole bent, and for ten minutes, we all shouted advice while he fought a fish the size of a loaf of bread. When he finally hauled it over the side, he looked up at me with the first smile Gunny said he had worn since coming home. “Mrs. Walsh,” he said, “thank you for the boat.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “Honey,” I said, “it was always meant to go to somebody who needed it.”