I unwrapped it, and my knees near went, because it was a boat key on a white foam float, and folded around it was a title with my name typed in the owner’s line.
A 1974 Starcraft, sixteen foot, hull number I could recite in my sleep. My boat. The boat I sold to Vern Halstead in September of 2016 for twenty-eight hundred dollars.
I sold it the month after Della’s cardiologist in Toledo used the word procedure and then used the word deductible. I told her the thing leaked, that the trailer bearings were shot, that it was more trouble than it was worth. I stood in the driveway and watched Vern pull it out to the road and then I went in the house and told my wife I’d gotten tired of it.
She let me have that lie for eight years.
Under the title, held with a paper clip, was the rest of it. A bill of sale, notarized at the bank in Napoleon, Vern Halstead to Della, seven hundred dollars down. A yellow legal pad page with payments written in her hand, seventy-five dollars at a time, some weeks fifty, one week twenty-five, forty-one lines of it. And a stack of little receipts from Vern for barn storage, twenty dollars a month, thirty-one of them.
Alterations. Hemming pants and taking in wedding dresses for people out of our dining room, and taxes for the Hendersons in the spring, and every dollar of it going into a coffee can for a boat she had never once ridden in without complaining about the wind.
The title transfer is dated the twenty-second of April. Our anniversary was the eighteenth. She was gone a month later.
The note was in the bottom of the box, under the tray, folded into a square.
You didn’t get tired of it. You sold it for me and thought I couldn’t add. It’s in Vern’s barn under a blue tarp, bearings packed, and there’s a boy in this family who’s never once been out on that water with his grandpa. Take him. Don’t you dare sell it again. — Della
I drove out to Vern’s that same afternoon. He was in the barn before I got the truck door shut, like he’d been waiting eleven months for me to show up, and he pulled the tarp off it himself and would not look at me while he did it.
He said she came out every few weeks with cash in an envelope. Said she made him swear on his mother. Said she asked him to check the bearings twice because she didn’t trust that he’d done it right the first time.
I said you really splurged, huh, to a woman holding a five-dollar box with a boat inside it, and I let her hear the edge in it, and she just looked at me. I have thought about that look every day since, and now I know what was behind it. She wasn’t hurt. She was waiting.
Cole is nine. We had that Starcraft on Lake Erie the first Saturday of June, and he caught a walleye he could barely hold up, and he keeps his hooks in a rusty box with the latch that barely holds.