I unwrapped it, and my knees near went, because it was a photo album, the little kind with the padded cover, and Della had written HOWARD across the front of the wrapping paper in marker like I was a boy at a birthday party.
Thirty-four photographs in it. One for every opening day since 1991.
Me at thirty-six in a canvas coat holding two crappie. Me at forty-one with our son on the bank at Piedmont, both of us squinting. Me in 2009 the year I had the shoulder and couldn’t cast, sitting in a lawn chair at the water anyway. Me last April, sixty-nine years old, holding nothing at all, just standing there with the fog coming off it.
She was there every one of those mornings. I never once thought about how she got to the lake at six in the morning to take a picture of a man who did not ask her to come.
Underneath each one she wrote the date and the place and one line.
1994, Clendening, first fish for Denny, cried about the hook. 2003, Salt Fork, cold and mean, he blamed the boat. 2016, Piedmont, first year he brought coffee for two.
Thirty-four little lines in her handwriting, and I read every one of them standing in the shed with a five-dollar box open at my feet.
The last page has no picture on it. There’s a spot for one and it’s empty, and under it she’d already written the caption before there was anything to put there.
Leave a page. Take the boy this year. I’ll be somewhere close by and you won’t have to look for me. — D.
Leave a page.
I said you really splurged, huh, and let her hear the edge in it, and set that box out in the shed, and she just looked at me. I have thought about that look every day for eleven months and I could never read it, and now I can. She was not hurt. She was waiting on me to open it.
A month later her heart went in the night and the house has been quiet since.
My grandson is nine and his name is Howard after me, which was Della’s doing and which I fought her on in 2016 like a fool.
We went out at Piedmont the first Saturday in April with that rusty box between us and a rod he can barely handle. He caught a bluegill the size of my hand and made me hold it up too.
My daughter-in-law took the picture. It’s in the last slot now, and I wrote the line underneath myself, in handwriting nowhere near as good as my wife’s.
2026, Piedmont, took the boy. Fog on the water. She was somewhere close by.