“…the other thing your husband left with me,” Mr. Guidry had said, and I followed him slowly down the weathered planks of the dock, with the frame of my first dollar still tucked under my arm. The salt wind was blowing in off the Gulf, and the pelicans on the pilings watched us with their old men faces. Behind us came a long procession. Old shrimpers in white boots. Women from the tackle store. Two deckhands with cigarettes. And at the very back, Rene, in his pressed fishing shirt and his expensive sunglasses, with his realtor trotting at his elbow.
The harbor office was a small tin roofed shed at the end of the pier, with a screen door that slapped, a calendar from a marine supply, and a green metal filing cabinet that had been there as long as I could remember. Mr. Guidry sat down at his desk with a groan. He was eighty nine years old, with white eyebrows like caterpillars, and he moved as slowly as a tide. He opened the second drawer, and drew out a manila folder tied with a faded shoelace. On the cover, in Lucien block capitals, were three words. For Connie. Only.
He laid the lease on the desk first. It was a single page, typed on an old Smith Corona, dated March 1986. Lucien Thibodeaux hereby leases one boat slip from Constance Breaux, for the sum of one dollar per year, payable on the first of June. At the bottom, in Lucien careful hand, was a receipt for every year since. Thirty six little pencil check marks. Rene took a step closer. He read the lease, and his sunglasses slid down his nose. In a small voice, he said, “Dad never told me it was your slip.”
A dollar bill in a frame, a lease for one dollar a year, and a letter written on the back of a fishing license.
“There is more,” said Mr. Guidry. He drew a second paper from the folder, a bank statement, stamped Paid in Full, from the Grand Isle Marine Credit Union. It was dated November 2021. Lucien had taken out a loan of ninety thousand dollars in 2019, he said, against the dock, to repair the hurricane damage. He had asked Rene to co sign, because the bank required two names. Rene had signed without reading. Lucien paid that loan off, every penny, from the sale of his shrimp boat, before he passed. The dock, said Mr. Guidry, was as free and clear as the Gulf wind.
Rene stared at the statement. He took off his sunglasses. He looked, for a moment, exactly like the thin, nervous teenager who had followed Lucien into my bait shop in 1984, with his hands in his pockets, afraid to say good morning. Then Mr. Guidry took out the last paper in the folder. It was a letter, in Lucien handwriting, on the back of a fishing license. He gave it to me. I could not read it at first. My eyes had filled with tears. I handed it to Rene. I said, “Son, I think this was meant for you, too. Read it out loud.”
Rene cleared his throat. He read in a rough, unsteady voice. Connie, if you are reading this, then I am gone, and Rene is surely making noise about the dock. Do not fight him. Be kind. He is a good boy who lost his mother too young and has been afraid ever since that there would not be enough to go around. The slip is yours. The shop is yours. It was always yours, and you are the best thing that ever happened to me. Tell Rene I was proud of him. I never knew how to say it. Lucien.
The dock was silent. Even the gulls seemed to hush. Rene folded the letter, very slowly, along its old crease. His shoulders began to shake, and he put one hand across his eyes, a big man of fifty two crying in front of the whole marina. I did not say anything clever. I did not say I told you so. I walked across the little office, and put my arms around my stepson, and held on tight, and the smell of fuel and sunscreen and old shrimp came up off his shirt, the same smell as Lucien.
Rene called off the listing that afternoon. The realtor drove away with her shoulders slumped. Rene stayed. He sat with me on the porch of the shop until sunset, drinking a warm soda, saying very little. At last he told me that he had not been able to sleep since the day of the memorial. He said he had a mortgage in Houma, a failing boat dealership, and a wife who wanted him to sell. He said he had thought, if he took the dock, he could fix everything. I said, “Rene, you cannot fix a house by selling the porch.”
We worked out a plan. The shop and the dock would stay mine for as long as I lived, and then pass to a family trust, with Rene as one of three trustees, along with my niece Marie and Mr. Guidry grandson. Rene would manage the new boat storage business that I had long wished to open. He would receive a fair salary, and in time, a share of the profits. He wept again when he signed. Mr. Guidry, standing at the window with a cup of coffee, said, very softly, “Lucien would have laughed himself silly.”
On the first of June, I hung the framed dollar back on its nail above the register, where the morning sun strikes it first. Rene stood beside me, in a pair of rubber boots, with a bucket of live shrimp. Under the glass, I had added one more thing. A small brass plate, etched by Mr. Guidry nephew in Houma. It read: First sale, June 4, 1981. Connie Breaux. Built together with Lucien and Rene Thibodeaux. Rene looked at it for a long time. Then he took a single dollar bill from his wallet, and slid it into the till. “First sale of the day,” he said.
