And I crouched there in the dark with my flashlight, and I could not holler up to Darlene, could not even move, because when I got the plastic peeled back off that bundle lashed to the rib of the boat, it was not the thing my mind had already jumped to. It was money, and it was a letter in a freezer bag, and that letter had my situation figured out better than I did.
The cash was rolled and banded, a good bit of it, dry as a bone in its wrapping. The letter was from the man who used to own the boat, the old fella up in the Soo who passed last fall. It was not addressed to anybody by name. It just said, across the top, To whoever gets her next.
He wrote that he and his wife bought that cabin cruiser back in nineteen seventy-one, young and broke and full of plans, and they always said that someday they would take her all the way around the big lake, up through the locks and out onto Superior, and see the Apostle Islands and the Pictured Rocks and all the country you can only reach from the water. And every year something came up. A furnace. A new roof. A kid in braces. Someday, someday. And then his wife took sick, and then she was gone, and someday had quietly run out while he was not looking, the way it always does.
He could not take the trip without her. And he could not bring himself to spend the money they had set aside for it on anything else, because it was their someday, and it was sacred to him. So he sealed it in the belly of the boat, and he wrote this letter, and he left it for the next fool who would love this tired old cruiser enough to crawl down into her bilge.
Do not do what I did. Do not wait on someday. Take her out on the big water and go where we never went. That is what the money is for. That is an order.
I sat down right there in the muck and read it twice, and then I hollered for Darlene after all, and she climbed down and read it over my shoulder, and the two of us cried in a two-foot crawlspace that stank of diesel and lake rot. Because we are those people. Twenty years we have said someday about that same big water. Twenty years we let it turn into furniture.
Not anymore. We are taking her out this summer, the whole loop, the locks and Superior and the Apostle Islands and the Pictured Rocks, every mile that old man and his wife dreamed of and never got to run. We are spending his someday money on it, every last dollar, because he ordered us to, and because somewhere a man who never met us reached out of his own grief and shook us by the collar and told us not to waste what he wasted. We will pour a cup of coffee to the two of them off the deck at the first island we make. And then we will keep on going, for all of us.