“No sense in finishing it if I can’t get my wife to step foot in the front door,” I said, and Boon’s expression changed, his eyes telling me he had no idea.
“She wants to sell it,” I confessed. “Keeps talking about starting over somewhere new. You know, without all the . . . stuff attached to it. Memories or whatever.” I cleared my throat, suddenly exhausted.
The door opened and Kat walked out. Her eyes darted back and forth between the two of us, her smile fading. But Boon grabbed her and swung her around. She giggled and wobbled when he placed her on her feet.
“You know who’s been asking for you?” he asked Kat.
He whistled, and seconds later, a tiny, hairless dog bolted from around the corner, and Kat ran to meet it.
“Kitty!” Kat squealed, bending to pick up the miniature dog, who jumped in her arms and crawled up her front, resting her head on Kat’s shoulder.
“Can you take her in and get her some water?” Boon asked.
Kat nodded and carried the dog inside.
“That’s a dog?” I asked.
“I take her for rides in the truck, and I’m in Karen’s good graces for the week.”
Karen was his girlfriend, a tiny woman who wore colorful scarves and had a paint-your-own-pottery business in town. They’d been dating for more than a year, a record for Boon.
“Kitty?”
“It’s named after her favorite country singer.”
I let it drop, unable to muster the energy to needle him.
“Why’d you call anyway?”
“To see if you wanted to go fishing.”
“I fish for a living, Boon.”
“Well, sit in the chair and drink beer, and I’ll fish.”
“So I can watch you fuck up the line and not catch anything? I’ll spend my whole day untangling your mess.”
He didn’t argue with me. He knew it was true.
“Come over to the house instead. Kat can play in the pool, and I’ll flip you a burger.”
“I’ve got to patch things up with Hope,” I said. “Clean up the mess from last night. And when the mess is clean, I’ve got a stack of traps in the back of the truck that need fixing.”
He squinted at me. “This is what I’m talking about. Let me hire some high school kid to fix them for ten bucks an hour.”
“They’re my traps. I fix them.”
He sighed. “Do me one favor. Okay? I know you, and I know you like to handle your own shit. But promise me you’ll come to me before things get out of hand with the house. Banks aren’t fooling around now. The recession and all. They’re snatching up homes like it’s a game of monopoly. I can help, you know. . . . I want to help—”
“You’ve helped enough, Boon,” I said, remembering pulling out my checkbook to pay for Maddie’s funeral services only to find they’d been paid in full; the envelope of cash Boon claimed had been left on his desk for me from an “anonymous donor”; the new engine for the boat he’d said he won in a poker game.
Boon started to argue with me, and I put my hand up; we both knew I wouldn’t borrow money from him to dig me out of this hole. That was a rock bottom I wasn’t willing to hit. If I did, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get back up.
Pigheaded. Stubborn. That’s what Boon called it. Maybe it was. Or maybe it was just Pop, his words in my head from all those years ago, remembering when I’d brought home a slingshot from school when I was a boy, the wood sanded smooth, glossy from a fresh coat of varnish. I’d gone down to Pop’s boat to show it off.
“Where’d you get that?” Pop had asked.
“I borrowed it from a friend,” I said, anxious to dig one of the rocks out of my pocket and give it a try.
“Give it here,” Pop said, and held out his hand.
“It’s not dangerous,” I argued. “I’m only going to shoot them into the water.”
“Listen to me,” he said, taking it from me and putting it gently on the sorting table. “Give this back first thing in the morning.”
“Why?” I whined.
“Because first you borrow, and then you beg,” he told me. “There’s some wood down below. Go sort through it and find a piece without knots.” Two days later, after a long night in Pop’s workshop, my fingertips raw from all the sanding, I owned a slingshot.
Now, Boon stepped back and threw up his hands. “You know where to find me if you need anything.” He stuck his hand out for me to shake, and when I took it, he pulled me into his shoulder, held me there in a grip.
“Hang in there, brother,” he said. I tipped my head and he slapped me on the back and stepped through the door.
Kat came out a minute later, the dog on her heels. She reached down and held the tiny animal with one hand and closed the wood-trimmed screen door with the other. The dog stood on her hind legs, clawed at the screen, and let out a flood of high-pitched barks that ended in a low, humanlike whine.
“Don’t cry, Kitty. I’ll see you soon,” Kat crooned.
We walked down the dock, Kat’s footsteps matching my own. She reached out and grabbed my arm and swung from it like Tarzan, the braids in her dark hair twisting like vines with the motion. When her feet hit the gangplank, she looked up at me and smiled at the loud noise it made.
Her eyes stayed on me too long, though, and I knew she was watching me, like she had been all year. Watching, waiting, I guessed, for me to make everything better. There were no words to fix it, though. At least none that I owned.
In the weeks after Maddie died, with Hope holed up in our bedroom, and my mother-in-law in the kitchen, baking, mixing, and icing, as if our sanity could be salvaged by a cupcake, or a homemade crumb cake, or a slice of carrot cake, if I could have, I would’ve slept on the boat.
I didn’t know what to say to the girls back then. Especially Kat’s questions about Maddie. Why did she just stop breathing? Where was she now?
Of course we didn’t mention the necklace.
How do you tell a seven-year-old that her baby sister died choking on the necklace she got for her seventh birthday? You don’t. You lie. You say she just stopped breathing. You tell her sometimes that happens to babies. You say she’s safe in heaven now. You say too much. You say too little.
And still she asks and then you stop saying anything because no matter what you say, there’s that same broken look on her face. So you work twelve-hour days on the water. Hours when there are no questions.
On the boat with Kat, I pushed all of it out of my mind. All that mattered now was putting this past year behind us. I focused on that thought, untied the line, and shoved us off the dock into the black water.
Above us, back at the shop, the dog named Kitty carried on, her cries following us, her high-pitched whine calling over and over for my daughter to come back.
The sun had burned through the morning fog, and the sky was cloudless now. Kat sat on the seat and raised her face to the sun. The skiff moved smoothly over the water, and when I looked over at Kat again, she was curled up on the seat, her sweatshirt under her head as a makeshift pillow, her eyes closed.