“The night my sister drowned,” said Rena Dalton, turning the thin ring on her finger, “a young man named Arlis Pratt dove into the black water three times to bring her out. He was twenty five. He was drunk, and so was every boy at that party, and he had dared her to jump off the end of the dock into the lake. She was seventeen.
She laughed and said yes. She never came up.” The fireworks over Lake Guntersville burst in red and gold behind her. I sat very still in the captain chair of my husband.
I had known none of it. In fifty three years of marriage, Arlis had never once told me that he had loved another girl, or that a girl had died because of a foolish dare. He had told me only that he had a younger brother who drowned, and that was why he never learned to teach me to swim. I realized now that he had been holding me up in the water for half a century because he had once failed to hold someone else. I felt my heart break and mend at the same instant.
Rena went on. After the drowning, Arlis had come to her family house the next morning and knelt on the porch and begged forgiveness. Her father had thrown him out. For ten years, he had not set foot on the lake. Then in 1972 he had met a young waitress named Lenora at a Fourth of July picnic in Huntsville. “He told me later,” Rena said, “that he could not believe it. The same name. He said he took it as a sign that he had been forgiven, and he asked you to marry him in a month.”
A man who cannot save one drowning girl may spend his life holding up another, and call it love, and be right.
Scotty had sat down on the dock with his head bowed. He had not spoken since the woman began. I looked at my son, a big man of forty five with a belly and a bald spot, and I thought of the boy he had been, with a bucket of minnows and a fishing pole. I said gently, “Scotty, come sit in the chair of your father.” He climbed onto the deck and knelt beside me and laid his head in my lap. He was weeping. He said, “Mama, I called it a floating coffin.”
Rena told us the rest. When Arlis bought the houseboat in 1995, he had painted the name of her sister on the stern, in honor of the girl who had died. He had never told his wife that the boat bore two names, one painted and one beloved. He had driven to Fort Payne in 1996 to find Rena and had asked her to forgive him a second time, now that her father was gone. She had said yes. She had said that no one should carry a thing like that into the grave. From then on, he had paid for slip twenty two.
“Why in cash?” I asked her. Rena smiled sadly. “Because he wanted nothing in writing,” she said. “He said that if you ever found out, he wanted you to hear it from me, not from a bank. He did not want you to feel that your marriage had been a mistake.” I reached across the arm of the chair and took her thin hand. I told her it had not been a mistake. I told her I would have married him again on any ordinary Tuesday.
We sat together on the back deck of the Miss Lenora until the last rocket had fallen into the water. Mr. Lisle brought us coffee in paper cups. Rena told me stories of her sister, who had been funny, and bad at math, and had loved the song about the boll weevil. I told her about my husband, who snored, and who sang off key to the radio. By midnight, we were laughing, and Scotty, with tears still on his cheeks, was laughing too.
In August, on a hot clear morning, the four of us took the houseboat out on Lake Guntersville, Scotty at the wheel in the captain hat of his father, with Rena and me on the front deck and his wife Gina in the galley. For the first time in my life, I stood on the bow in a life vest, and let the wind blow back my hair. We cut the engine at the middle of the lake. Rena scattered a handful of wildflowers on the water, and said the name of her sister, and I said it too.
I can swim now, a little. I float well, anyway. On the last warm evening of September, I walked to the end of the dock at the marina, took off my shoes, and slipped into the lake from the ladder. The water was cool and green and still. I lay back, looking at the sky, and thought that if I closed my eyes I could feel the hands of Arlis under my shoulders. Then I opened them, and a young lifeguard stood on the dock waving, and I waved back, afloat.
