The old tackle box had not been opened since the week we buried Vernon. It sat on the shelf in the back of the garage, a green metal thing with a cracked handle, dusty with the sawdust of three winters. I carried it into the kitchen and set it on the table, where Kyle was waiting in a chair with his big sunburned hands clasped between his knees. He had come back at noon, with his son asleep in the truck. I lifted the lid. Hooks and bobbers and sinkers lay in their tidy compartments. I lifted the top tray and set it aside.
Under the bottom tray was a flat envelope, brown and soft with age, tied with a piece of fishing line. It was addressed in the neat engineering handwriting of Vernon to a P.O. box in Tucson, Arizona. It had never been sent. On the front, in a different hand, a shaky one, was a scrawled message. Hold for Roy. I felt Kyle go rigid beside me. “That is the name of my father,” he said. “Roy Prescott.” I could hear my pulse in my ears. I untied the line. Inside were twelve more envelopes, each postmarked from Tucson, each addressed to my husband in the same shaky hand.
I laid them on the table in order of date. The first was from August of 1991. I opened it with fingers that did not feel like my own. Dear Vernon, it began. I do not know how to thank you. I am writing from a motel in Flagstaff, and I have been sober for six days. I will not forget what you did. I will not forget your hat. Please tell nobody where I am. One day, when I am well, I will find the courage to go home. I could hardly read the rest. Beside me, Kyle made a sound deep in his chest.
I read it aloud. The letter said that on the afternoon of July 14th, 1991, Vernon had been sitting alone at the end of the dock at Spirit Lake when he saw a man on the shore. A thin, disheveled man in a canvas bucket hat, standing very still at the water edge, staring at the deep. Vernon had known the look. He had seen it once on his own brother. He rose and walked down the bank and sat beside the man. He said nothing, and for an hour they simply watched the minnows. At dusk, Roy broke down and wept.
A stranger on a dock, a quiet hour, and a borrowed hat can turn a man from the edge of the water back toward his own life.
The letters told the story in pieces. Roy Prescott had been a salesman, a heavy drinker, a failure at everything. His wife had told him to leave. He had been convinced that his son would be better off without him. That day at the lake, he had gone to the water meaning to walk in. Vernon talked to him, gently and without judgment, and then did something Roy never forgot. He took off his own faded blue hat, with its dozen pins, and set it on the head of the man. “Luck,” he said. “It is a lucky hat. Keep it a while, and I will take yours.”
Vernon had taken the old hat of Roy and worn it home. It was the plain tan one with the State Fair pin that a seven year old boy had pinned to it. Vernon had written his own initials inside the brim, over those of Roy, and then forgotten it, until his wife mentioned that it did not look like his. He had hung it in the garage, thinking he would return it. But Roy had never come back, and Vernon had kept it, as a promise. He had given Roy his own hat that day and sent him away with a prayer.
I turned to the last letter. The postmark was from three years ago. Dear Vernon, it said. I have been sober for thirty one years. I own a small hardware store in Tucson. I have remarried, a good woman named Maria. I keep your hat on a shelf in the shop window. People ask about it. I tell them it saved my life. But I have never forgiven myself for leaving my boy. I have written to him forty times and burned every letter. I cannot bring myself to send them. If you ever find a way to tell him I think of him, I would be in your debt.
Kyle sat there with his big hands over his face. His shoulders moved. I got up and went to him and put my arm around his broad back, and he leaned into me like a child. “All these years,” he said, “I thought he left because of me. I thought I had done something wrong.” I told him that was not true. I told him a man in despair does not know how to love. “But he got better,” I said. “He kept a hat in his window. He thought of you every day.”
We called the number on the last envelope that afternoon. It was a hardware store. A man picked up on the second ring. His voice was old and gruff, with a rasp of tobacco and a trace of Iowa. Kyle could not speak. He held the phone and shook his head. I took it from him. I said, “Is this Roy Prescott?” and there was a long pause, and a breath. “Who is this?” he said. “My name is Marion,” I said. “I am the wife of Vernon. I have your hat. And I have somebody here who wants to talk to you.”
I pressed the phone into the hand of Kyle. He brought it slowly to his ear. “Dad?” he said. A silence. Then, in a voice I had never heard from a grown man, high and broken and shaking, “Dad, it is me. It is Kyle.” He turned away and leaned against the counter. I went out onto the porch to give him privacy. Through the screen I could hear a murmur, then a sob, then a laugh. Then silence again. His son woke up in the truck and stuck his head out of the window and asked, “Is Dad crying?”
Roy flew to Spirit Lake the following month. I met them both at the dock on a warm Sunday morning, and the three of us stood in a row, Roy and Kyle and the little boy, looking out across the water. The old man wore a canvas hat on his head, the faded blue one, with a dozen pins on it. I had sent it to him in the mail. The son of Kyle was wearing the tan one. As the sun came up over the water, I heard Roy whisper, “Vernon, you old fox. You did it after all.”