Part 3 — Hank Says Hello
“It was Warren,” said Hank from the white side of the bait shop, and the picture flickered. The man in boat shoes stopped moving. He stood beside the keg with a plastic cup in his hand, and every head at the marina pavilion turned toward Warren Pike of Lakeside Holdings, regional vice president, who had spent the whole afternoon shaking hands.
Hank went on, young and sunburned, leaning on the counter of the shop in the glow of the old film. “Summer of 1998. He was seventeen and he worked the register. He took the deposit bag, eighteen thousand dollars, the best week of the year. I could have called the sheriff, and I did not, because his father had just passed and his mother was in a bad way. I wanted him to be able to make something of himself. If you are watching this, Warren, I hope you did.”
Warren set the cup down on the cooler. He was fifty-one years old, with a nice haircut and a quarter-zip pullover, and he looked about twelve. “I came here today to buy this land,” he said quietly. “I told myself it was only business. But I have known for twenty-eight years that I owed this man something, and I never had the nerve to look him in the face.”
He took out his checkbook there on the picnic table, in front of all of us. Not the checkbook of the company. His own. He wrote it out slowly, and I watched his hand shake. Eighteen thousand dollars with twenty-eight years of interest came to $51,000. He handed it to me and said, “Mrs. Kettering, I am sorry. Hank was a better man than I deserved to rob.” Then he called his office from the parking lot and withdrew the offer in writing, before the sun went down.
Boyd explained the rest to the crowd, in his slow courthouse voice. In 1998, Hank had put the land into a trust, with Joyce and himself as lifetime beneficiaries and Boyd as trustee. No one could sell a square foot without the written consent of Joyce. A power of attorney, even one signed in an emergency room, could not reach inside a trust. The $310,000 that Lakeside had wired to the account of Tanner was recalled by the bank in three days, minus $41,000 he had already spent.
Tanner sat on a cooler until the sun went down, with his head in his hands. His wife Ashlyn went to her car without a word and drove away in the new Lexus. I looked at my son, forty years old, who had lost a job and a lot of money and his compass in the same year. I did not feel hate. I felt the heaviness of a mother who knows exactly how her child got lost.
In the spring Tanner pleaded guilty to misuse of a power of attorney. The judge gave him probation and ordered him to repay the $41,000, and she added a condition that I liked a great deal. His community service would be done at the bait shop, six days a week, under my eye. He mends nets and sweeps the dock and fills the minnow tanks before dawn. He is a good worker when he is shown what to do. Hank had made one patient promise to himself in 1998, and it was still working in 2026.
Ashlyn sent me one polite message from Kansas City and a pair of earrings she had borrowed. I have no quarrel with her. Some people only know how to stand next to money. I hope she finds somebody who teaches her something else.
I hugged Boyd for a long time at the pavilion that day, my cane hooked over my wrist. “Hank, you rascal,” I said out loud, to the screen, to the lake, to the whole sunburned afternoon. People laughed. The man from the Lake Sun took my picture standing next to the old Bell and Howell projector. The next day, the headline read, BAIT SHOP SAVED BY A HOME MOVIE.
On Memorial Day weekend I opened the bait shop again, with the lights on and the Coke cooler cold. The line of customers went out the door. Crickets, nightcrawlers, shad. A little boy asked me for a worm and then asked if he could hold it, and I said yes. Tanner swept the dock at the back without being told.
Every Saturday night in the summer now we show the last film of Hank on the side of the shop. People bring lawn chairs from all over the lake. Children sit in the front on blankets. Hank crosses his arms and winks at the camera at the end, and says, “Hello, Joyce,” and the whole crowd says it back to him.
I keep the other films in their Folgers cans in the walk-in cooler, behind the frozen peas, the way he left them. Some nights after closing I sit on an overturned bucket in the cold and read the labels on the lids. Opening day. The first crappie of our boy. The flood of 93. Sixty-some years of a man looking at the person he loved.
