Nineteen
I'm on 131 by eight with the sun coming up flat over the fields on my right. Thermos on the seat. Radio off. I don't play the radio on this drive. I never have.
The black square under my bumper rides north with me. I let it.
Past Cedar Springs the farms thin out and the pines start. Past Big Rapids it's all pines, jack pine and red pine in rows somebody planted seventy years ago, and the road goes up and down over the old dunes. I drive the limit. Seventy, and the cruise on, both ways, every year. A kid in a Charger goes by me at ninety like I'm parked.
At the Marathon in Cadillac I fill up. I don't need to. I always do. I stand at the pump with my hands in my jacket and the wind coming off the lake behind the station, and when the handle clicks off I get back in the cab and take out my phone and text her.
Checked in. Booth's a mess.
It says Delivered. I put the phone in the glovebox and shut it. It stays there till I'm home.
North of Cadillac it's two lanes. Then County Road 612, eleven miles, no lines painted on the last four. The trees close over it. Aldine is a blinking light and a post office and a bar with a Stroh's sign in the window that hasn't been lit since I was a kid, and the Party Store.
The Crane Lake Party Store opens at five-thirty for the fishermen. Worms in a cooler by the door. Pop, beer, bread, propane, a rack of chips, a coffee station against the back wall with four pots on burners. I pour two mediums, black, and put lids on them, and carry them up to the register.
The woman at the register has been here eleven years. Gray braid, reading glasses on a cord. Her first October she asked if I was meeting somebody. I said yes. She hasn't asked since. She rings up the two coffees and I give her a five and she gives me the change and says, "Nice one out there today," and I say it is.
I haven't had a drink in nineteen years. The coffee's the only thing I buy up here.
The landing's a mile on. Gravel lot, concrete ramp, the county dock going out straight into the lake. Nobody's here. I park facing the water and sit a minute with the engine off, ticking. Then I take the two coffees and walk out.
The county did the dock boards five years ago. Pressure-treated, green when they went down, gray now, and they didn't pre-drill near the ends, so half the end grain has split out around the screw heads. It'll hold. I liked the old boards better. They were cedar and they'd gone silver and soft and you could read the grain with your hand.
I sit at the end with my boots over the water. I set the coffees down on the boards, one on each side of me, both lids on. The water is clear enough to see down about six feet, tan sand and a few sticks and a dead leaf turning over slow. Past that it goes green and then it goes dark.
It's twenty to eleven by the sun, give or take. I don't check.
Then I don't do anything. That's the job. I sit.
You'd think after this many years there'd be more to it. There isn't. You sit on a dock and drink a coffee and the day goes over you. The wind comes up around noon and goes down around three. I don't pray. I don't know how and I wouldn't know who to ask. I sit where she was going.
At noon I take my cap off, and the sun is warm on my scalp and the wind cold on my ears, both at once, and I put it back on.
The paper said she was rowing to the landing. This one.
Across the water on the west shore, most of a mile down, I can see my father's boathouse. Brown stain, green roof, the doors shut. Leah wants it empty by the first. There's a lift in there with nothing on it. There's a coffee can on a shelf over the workbench. I don't look at the boathouse long.
There's a paper in my jacket I don't take out.
My father and I had it out at dinner. Money, college, a job at the lumberyard in Cadillac he'd already asked about for me without asking me. By ten-thirty he was asleep in his chair with the TV on. The Old Overholt was in the cabinet over the fridge and I took it down to the boathouse steps and drank most of a pint of it in the dark. It was cold. I let the lift down slow so it wouldn't groan. I didn't put the lights on, because his bedroom looked at the lake. I ran across wide open, the cold coming through my shirt, the engine loud enough to fill my whole head, and I turned north up the far shore. Then the crack. Hollow. Like a boot going through a crate. The bow went up and came down. I cut the engine and the boat swung and it was quiet. There's a sound. After the sound there's more, and I don't go there. Then the engine again, and west, and the lift, and the boathouse. I sat on the floor of the boathouse with my back against the wall until three.
I know where every switch on that boat was. I could find them now with my eyes shut.
At seven he was down on the lift in his robe, looking at the bow. Starboard side. The fiberglass was stove in and cracked back in a star and there was paint in it that wasn't ours. I stood in the boathouse door. He looked at the bow a long time and then he looked at me.
"You were in bed," he said.
He went up to the house. By nine the pontoon was gone off the lift. We never talked about it. We didn't talk about my mother either. That was how he did it. We don't discuss it, he'd say, if you tried, and then he'd go out and mow something.
Thursday, back home in Grand Rapids, there was a Traverse City paper on the kitchen table. He'd driven somewhere to buy it. He left it folded open, which he never did, he always took the paper to his chair. I read it standing up. Her picture wasn't in it. Her name was. Eleanor Garrity, 17. Same as me. It said the boat had been found in the reeds on the south end. It said investigators believe the girl's rowboat was lit by a battery lantern. I put it back folded the same way. When I came in from school that afternoon it was gone and I never saw it again.
The paper said she had a lantern. I didn't see one. That's the part I let myself have.
Mine is the one on the left. It went cold an hour ago and I drink it anyway, slow, to the bottom.
The first time I came up here I was eighteen. October fourteenth, a year to the day. I took my father's car without asking and bought two coffees because I didn't know what else to do with my hands in the store, and I sat here till dark. I poured the second one out because I couldn't drink two and I wasn't going to carry it home. That's all the reason it had. The next year I did it again the same way. Nobody made the rule. It made itself. You do a thing twice in the same place and it's a thing you do.
My father didn't say anything when I brought the car back, which is how I knew he knew where I'd been. After that he called me every October fifteenth, in the evening, about the Lions or the gutters on the cottage or a guy he knew who needed a mantel. Eighteen years of fifteenths. He never asked where I'd been the day before and I never said. This year there's nobody to call on the fifteenth.
I stopped drinking that same fall.
Eighteen, nineteen, twenty. The year I went to work for Hal Visser in Rockford and learned how to cope a crown. The year I bought his truck. The year I met her, and the first October I told her Lansing, and every October since. I count them on the drive up, like a stack of boards, and the stack is nineteen now.
A little after two there's someone in the trees above the landing.
Up on the ridge, in the pines, where the old two-track runs. A shape against a trunk, darker than the trunk. Charcoal, with the hood up. It wasn't there and then it's two trees over from where it was, and then it doesn't move. I know what a person standing still looks like. You spend enough years walking into people's houses and you learn to see where they've put themselves, whether they're in the kitchen door or back by the stairs, whether they want you to find them.
I don't look again.
I run the Halloran bookcase instead. Two end panels, three-quarter poplar, ninety-four and a quarter. Four fixed shelves, dadoed. Face frame, pocket screws from the back. Scribe strip on the wall side, leave it a half fat. I go through it twice, every part, in the order I'll cut them. Then I start on the stair treads.
I look at the water and I don't turn my head. My neck gets stiff with not turning it and I leave it stiff. A man launches a johnboat off the ramp and asks if anything's biting, and I tell him I'm not fishing. The shape up in the trees stays where it is. I know it does without looking. You can know that about a thing.
The afternoon goes over. The pines lay their shadows down the bank and out along the dock until they reach past me onto the water. It gets colder. I put my collar up.
A little after four I pour the second coffee out over the edge, slow, and watch it go brown and then gray and then just lake.
The sun goes down behind the ridge at five to seven and the water goes gray and then no color at all, and one window comes on in a house on the east side, and I get up on my stiff knees and walk out the last few feet to where the new boards stop and the old pilings go down under them into the dark, and I stand with my boots on the edge the way I've stood every year since I was eighteen, and I say the word, once, out loud, not loud, one time so it stays one word and doesn't turn into what came after it, and it goes out across the water toward the middle where there's nothing to stop it, and it never comes back, and I stand there until I can't hear it anymore, which is right away, which is always right away, and I stand there anyway.
Then I turn around and look up at the trees.
The pines are black against what's left of the sky, and the spot two trees over from where the shape stood is black like the rest. I look at it for about as long as it takes to set a hinge. Nothing moves up there. It isn't supposed to.
I carry the cups back up the dock and start the truck. The headlights swing across the trunks and I don't slow down to see what they show.
At the Marathon in Cadillac I fill up again. I don't need to. My hand goes to the inside pocket of my jacket, where the paper is, and stays on the outside of the canvas while the numbers on the pump go around. I haven't taken it out today. I stand with the wind on my neck and look south down 131 where the taillights go. Then I drive the limit home. Seventy, the cruise on, close to three hours. Nobody passes me going ninety.
It's twenty after ten when I come up the drive. Her Subaru is parked where it always is, nose in.
Going past it to the side door I put my hand flat on the hood. It's warm. Under my hand the engine ticks, small, the way metal does coming down off a long run. I stand there a second with my palm on it. Then I go in.
The kitchen's dark. I turn on the light over the sink and get a glass of water and drink half and leave the glass on the counter and leave the light on. I took the phone out of the glovebox coming in. Nothing from her all day. She never texts on the fourteenth. I put it on the counter by the glass.
I go up in the dark. The bedroom door's open. She's on her side, facing the wall, the covers up over her shoulder. I say, "Sleeping, Marsh?" and she says "Mm" to the wall.
I stand in the door. Then I undress and get in on my side, careful, and lie on my back with the lake on my hands. The furnace comes on and goes off. After a while I turn toward her and put my hand on her hip, over the blanket, and leave it.
Her hair is wet on the pillow. It's cold where it touches my wrist.
I leave my hand where it is.