I opened the brown folder, and the first thing out of it was the contract from the marina company in Atlanta. Eight point nine million dollars, with my signature in blue at the bottom, the same crooked signature that had been signing bait shop receipts for twenty six years. Mark read it with his lips moving. Jimmy leaned over his shoulder and said a word that I will not repeat in front of a church. Kelly sat down on the nearest kitchen chair as though somebody had let the air out of her. Trent, over by the sink, set his glass of sweet tea on the counter with a very careful click.
“You own the docks?” Mark said. I nodded. I told them how it had been in 1998, when the whole marina was falling into Lake Hartwell, and your mother and I put every dollar we had into sixty rotten slips and a roof that leaked on the coffee pot. I told them about the mornings I had spent on my back under the docks with a drill, and the winter I slept in the shop to keep the pipes from freezing. “You said you were poor,” Kelly whispered. I answered that I had never said any such thing. I had only never said otherwise.
Then I took out the second thing in the folder, a stack of bank pages that my lawyer had pulled on Friday, after I told him about the sliding glass door. The account was in the name of Kelly Brennan, at a credit union in Greenville. Every deposit from Mark and Jimmy was there, to the day. And every one of them was followed within a week by a payment to a company that builds swimming pools and another to a truck dealer. I laid the pages in a neat row on the table, beside the platter of fried crappie, where everybody could read.
A spiral notebook of bait shop receipts balanced a family books better than any hearing test could.
Trent walked over and looked down at the pages. He is a big, red faced man who sells insurance, and I watched the color go out of him from the neck up. “Kelly,” he said. “You told me your father paid for the pool. You told me he gave it to you for your birthday.” Kelly opened her mouth, and closed it. “I said he helped,” she said. “In a way.” Trent picked up the page with the last payment, and held it so that it trembled. “I told the whole neighborhood,” he said, slowly. “I stood in my own yard and thanked your father for the pool.”
Jimmy, my quiet one, who lives in Charlotte and fixes elevators, put both fists on the table. “Kel,” he said. “Three thousand dollars. I skipped the trip to the Outer Banks with Dana to send that money. I thought Daddy could not hear his own grandkids.” His voice cracked. “I told people at work my father was going deaf. I felt sorry for him.” Kelly was crying now, quietly, with her shoulders hunched. I let the silence run for a while. Out beyond the sliding doors, a mockingbird started up in the dogwood, the same song over and over, as if it had not heard any news.
I laid my hands flat on the table. “Here is what is going to happen,” I said. “Mark and Jimmy are getting back every dollar, today, from me, with interest. Kelly, the pool is going to be sold, or the truck, or both, and every cent goes to the bank. You will tell the people in your neighborhood the truth. And you will come out to the docks on Saturdays, with a bucket, and learn what your father does for a living.” She looked up. “Daddy, I cannot,” she said. “I mean, in front of everyone.” I said that was exactly the point.
She came. The first Saturday she stood on the end of the dock in a pair of rubber boots two sizes too big, holding a crappie by the lip with an expression of such deep disgust that I almost laughed. The second Saturday she cleaned forty fish without complaining. By the end of the summer she was running the register, knowing every regular by name, and a retired Navy man told her she had the best smile on the lake. She sold the pool in September, to a couple with triplets, and cried when the truck came to fill it in.
The company from Atlanta bought the slips and the ramp and the dry storage, as agreed. But in the contract, in the last paragraph, I had kept back the old tin roofed bait shop, with the coffee pot and the night crawler cooler, and a ninety nine year lease at one dollar a year. I still pump gas into boats that belong to other people. I still wear the sun faded cap and the white rubber boots. The new owners are very polite about it. The vice president told me, shaking his head, that he had never met a man who sold a marina and kept the minnows.
That Christmas, all three of my children came out to the lake. We cooked a fish fry on the dock, in the cold, with a propane burner and a big iron pot, and the whole marina stopped by with a casserole or a bottle. The kids of Mark ran up and down the boards in their life jackets. Trent brought a thermos and apologized to me twice, once in front of everyone, and I told him it was all right. Kelly stood beside me at the end of the dock with a paper plate, and the sun was going down behind the water, orange and violet.
“Daddy,” she said, softly, “I owe you something I cannot repay.” I put an arm around her shoulders. “You can start by speaking up,” I said. “I do not hear as well as I used to.” She looked at me in alarm, and then at my face, and then she burst out laughing, loud and long, and I laughed too, and the sound carried out across the water to the other shore. I heard every word of it. I heard it all the way home, and long after the lights went out.
