The father of Nicole is a retired high school principal named Walter Keene, a straight backed man with a white mustache, and he sat across from me at the yacht club table with his coffee untouched. “Lionel,” he said, “you have had that white envelope in your jacket since we sat down. You have touched it four times. I counted.” Out the window behind him, the marina was full of white hulls swaying on the gray water of Lake Erie, and the flag on the club pole snapped in the wind. “Is it about the slip?” he asked.
I took it out and laid it on the tablecloth. Todd, my son, who had been telling a story about a fishing trip to anyone who would listen, stopped in the middle of a sentence. He is forty six, a tanned, sandy haired man in a navy yacht club blazer, with the easy charm of his mother and a restless way of watching a door. “Dad,” he said lightly, “whatever it is, we can talk about it at home.” “I would like to talk about it here,” I said. “Slip 42. I rent it from the club. Eight hundred a season. For three years, a man named Gerald Pruitt has been paying you four thousand eight hundred dollars a season to keep a boat in it.”
Nicole, who had been smiling at the children across the room, turned her head slowly. She is forty one, a pharmacist, a patient woman with a high forehead and the habit of listening before she speaks. “Todd?” she said. “Fourteen thousand, four hundred dollars,” I said. “Over three summers. I have a copy of every check. And I have a note from the club manager saying he never knew the slip was sublet, which is against the rules of the club. If he finds out, the slip is gone. Mine. And forty years of my membership with it.” My hand was shaking, and I put it flat on the envelope.
A white envelope lay on a yacht club tablecloth beside a cold cup of coffee and gave one fireworks seller the lunch hour to bring his son back to the water.
Todd looked at his wife and then at his father in law, and the charm went out of his face. “Dad, I did it for us,” he said. “The lessons for the kids. The camp. I thought, it is just sitting there. You only use it two weekends a year.” “I use it every weekend,” I said, “from May to October.” “Not since Mom,” he said, and then stopped, stricken, with his hand to his mouth. The room went still. I sat with it. It was the truest thing he had said all afternoon, and it cut me through.
Bev passed in the winter of 2019. For thirty four years she and I took the boat out on Saturday evenings, to the islands, to watch the sun go down over Kelleys, with a thermos and two folding chairs. After she was gone I could not bring myself to go alone. The boat sat in the slip. I paid the rent. I went to the dock sometimes, in my work boots, and sat in the cockpit for an hour, not starting the engine, and listened to the water slap the hull. Nobody knew that. Todd had guessed it, and used it.
Walter Keene cleared his throat. “Todd,” he said, in a voice that had quieted gymnasiums for thirty years. “You will repay your father. You will return to Mr. Pruitt every dollar he has paid you, and explain. And you will apologize, to your father, and to Nicole, and to me. In that order.” Nicole had still not spoken. She had gone to the window with her arms around herself. “I want to say one thing,” she said quietly. “I did not know. I need everybody to hear that.” She turned. “And Lionel, I am so sorry. Bev was my friend. I should have gone out on that boat with you.”
I stood up. My knees ached. I walked around the table to my son, and he stood too, and he was a head taller than I am, and shaking. “Todd,” I said, “I am not going to tell you that this is all right. It is not. But I will tell you what I want. I want you to take the boat out with me on Saturday. You and the children. Just once. And I want to start the engine.” His face broke. It broke the way Bev used to say it would, the way a pane of ice goes in March.
We went out on the first warm Saturday in May. Nicole made sandwiches. The children, who are nine and six, put on their life jackets and argued about who would sit in the bow. Todd untied the lines. He did it carefully, as I had taught him as a boy, and when he coiled the last one on the dock I saw him stop for a moment with his hand on the cleat. I put the engine in gear. Slowly, we backed out of the slip, 42, past the white hulls, past the club flag, into the open water.
I had forgotten how Erie looks on an evening in May. The wind was light, the water a pale green, the sky going from gold to pink in a long smooth sweep toward the islands. The children shouted at a passing ferry. Nicole leaned back with her face to the sun. Todd sat beside me at the wheel, saying nothing. After a time he said, “Dad, I never knew you came out here to sit.” I told him I had not either. “I think your mother did,” I said. “I think she knew I would come back.”
He repaid every dollar by November. Mr. Pruitt, who turned out to be a decent man, took his boat to another marina without complaint. The next summer, Todd bought a small sailboat of his own and a slip at the far end of the dock, 17, near the fuel pump. On the first Saturday of every month, his boat and mine go out together and anchor side by side off Kelleys. The children swim. Nicole and I sit in our folding chairs. And when the sun begins to go down, Todd comes alongside in the dinghy with a thermos of coffee, too sweet, with cinnamon, the way Bev made it.
