“I mean the lake, son,” I said, and I set the old brass dock key on the teak table, beside the champagne bucket. “We are on my signature. Anywhere we float is fine.” The Second Wind rocked gently on the afternoon water of Lake Pend Oreille, forty feet of white fiberglass and chrome, and for a moment nothing in the world moved but the light. The father of Kristen, a courtly retired banker in a navy blazer, gripped the rail with both hands. The mother of Kristen lowered herself onto a cushioned bench and fanned her face with the Seattle letter. The seagulls wheeled over us in the silence, crying at their own affairs.
Kristen held the loan papers, and her hand was quite steady. She was thirty eight years old, a pediatric nurse with a calm gray gaze, and I had always liked her in a vague way that I had never been given the chance to deepen. “Jason,” she said, “I would like you to tell me, right now, in front of my parents, how a boat that you said was a work bonus has the name of your mother on the promissory note.” Jason did not answer. He was staring at the water, at a small chip of sun on the wave, with the fixed look of a man hoping to dissolve into it.
“Evelyn,” said her father, in his grave, measured voice, “I am a retired banker. I recognize a co borrower signature when I see one. May I?” He took the papers. He read them in silence for a full minute, turning the pages slowly. “Ninety thousand dollars. A truck loan of thirty one. A credit card of fifty.” He looked up. “These are your signatures?” I said, “They are signatures that look like mine. I have never seen those papers until this week. I only learned about them when the lender called me.” He closed his eyes. “Dear God,” he said, almost to himself. “Jason.”
A drawer under a galley sink held loan papers for a boat and gave one marina owner the afternoon to bring her son back to the dock.
Jason sank down on the stern seat. His broad shoulders folded in, and he looked, suddenly, nine years old, the age when he had fallen off the dock into the cold water and come up sputtering and furious. He had refused to be rescued. He had paddled to shore, shaking, and pretended it was nothing. “Mom,” he said, hoarsely, “I was going to pay it back. Everyone has debt. Everyone I know has a boat. I thought, you were going to be fine. You had the marina. You were going to leave it to me someday. I only got ahead of the paperwork.” I said, “Ahead of me, you mean.”
He covered his face. I looked at the lake, the deep blue of it, the pines coming down to the shore. I had pumped gas on that water for thirty years. I had known the weather by the color of the sky. I had known when a man was lying by the way he tied his boat, and when he was honest by the knot. And I had not known my own son. I took a long breath. “Jason, I will tell you something I have never told you. When your father died, I wanted to sell the marina and move to Florida. I was too tired to go on.” He lifted his head. “And then you came to the dock one morning, nineteen years old, and said, Mom, I will help you. And you did. For one whole summer.”
“I never forgot that summer,” I said. “It was the best thing I ever got from you. You were happy, then. You laughed. You came home smelling of lake water and sunscreen.” He was crying openly now. “Somewhere along the line, you decided that happiness was a thing you could buy. And I let you.” His wife, quietly, put her hand on his back. The father of Kristen looked out over the water. Kristen said, in a low voice, “Jason, I am not going to leave you. But I am going to need you to be honest, from this day on, about every single thing.” He nodded, helplessly. “I will,” he said.
I laid down my conditions. The boat would be sold. The proceeds would pay off the loan on the boat, and the remainder would go toward the truck. Jason would sell the truck, too, and drive a used car. He would put the credit card on a payment plan that I would supervise. He would repay me the cost of the credit report and the lawyer. And in the spring, he would come to the dock, my old dock, now owned by the resort, where I had been given a lifetime consulting contract, and he would work the gas pumps every Saturday morning, in a marina T shirt, in front of anyone who cared to look.
He did. The Second Wind sold in October, to a retired dentist from Sandpoint, who paid cash and said it was a beauty. Jason signed the papers with a steady hand and did not look back. In April, he showed up at the dock at six in the morning on a bright Saturday, in the old orange T shirt that said Carlson Marina, with a bait bucket in one hand. Boaters rolled in off the lake, one after another, and he pumped their gas and wiped their windshields. A man in a bass boat said, “Hey, arent you the guy who used to have the big yacht?” Jason said, “I used to.” He grinned.
By midsummer, the regulars had begun to call him Captain. By August, he knew every slip by name. One afternoon, I found him on the end of the dock, with his legs dangling over the water, eating a sandwich and watching the sun lower over the lake. I sat next to him. “Mom,” he said, “I think I understand why you stayed.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Because it is the only place on earth where nobody asks what you are worth. They only ask if you have bait.” I laughed so hard that I nearly slid off the dock.
On the first anniversary of that Saturday, Kristen and Jason invited me out on the water for a picnic, in a small borrowed rowboat, with a hamper of sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. Jason rowed. Kristen sat in the stern with a blanket over her knees. We drifted out to the middle of the lake and shipped the oars. The water was glass. Jason poured the coffee, and I took a sip, and he lifted his cup. “To the Second Wind,” he said. I said, “The boat?” He smiled. “No, Mom. The second chance.”
