Rick turned over the white envelope and read the name printed in the corner, and then he looked through the kitchen window at the green plastic tackle box on the back seat of his truck, and then he looked at me. My son in law is fifty two, a big, slow, careful man who manages an auto parts store, with a gray goatee and a habit of rubbing his thumb across his lower lip. “Odessa,” he said, “this is a license agreement. Four million, eight hundred thousand dollars.” He set it down as if it might leave a mark. “Sharon. Did you know?”
Sharon sat across the table with her hands in her lap, and I saw her look at the frog on the tablecloth, the green and yellow one with the little rubber legs, and then look away, the way one looks away from a dog that has bitten. My daughter is fifty, a tidy, pretty woman with a sewing room and a cross stitch sampler on every wall, and she smiled a thin, frightened smile. “Mama, that is wonderful,” she said. “We will celebrate. We will take a trip.” “Sharon,” I said, “I would like to talk about the slips.”
I laid the IRS letter on top of the sales contract for the lake lot. “Thirty nine thousand, six hundred dollars,” I said. “Eleven hundred a month, for thirty six months, from the marina to an account ending in 6638. The girl at the front desk said you told her I had moved to a home in Little Rock.” I looked at my daughter. “Baby, I sleep in your sewing room on a daybed, beside a Singer. I am sixty miles from Little Rock. How did you think I would not find out?”
A green rubber legged frog lure lay on a kitchen tablecloth beside a tax letter and gave one lure maker the Sunday afternoon to bring her daughter back to the lake.
Rick did not speak. He picked up the IRS letter and read it from top to bottom, and I watched his thumb move across his lip. Then he put the letter down very gently and turned his chair a quarter turn to face his wife. “Sharon, you told me that money came from the Social Security check of your mother. I have been giving you money from my paycheck every month for the mortgage because you said there was a shortfall.” His voice was low and tired. “I do not know how to ask this. Was there ever a shortfall?”
Sharon began to cry, a thin, rattling cry, the cry of a woman who has been holding her breath for three years. “I was drowning,” she said. “My business. The little shop in Benton, the quilts and the sewing classes. It never made anything. I borrowed against the house. And then the rent from the slips of Daddy started coming to us, and I saw the deposit, and I thought, Mama is old. She does not need it. I will pay it back when the quilt shop takes off.” She wiped her eyes on a dish towel. “It never took off. It never would have.”
I let the clock tick. A bass boat ran up the cove outside, and the sound of the motor rose and fell and was gone. “Sharon,” I said, “do you know what your father said to me the day he finished the slips? He stood on the walkway in the rain, with a hammer in his hand, and he said, Dessa, this is for the girl. For when we are gone. I said, Leon, she has a husband. He said, a husband can leave. A pier cannot.” I took her hand. “He built them for you. And you took from them in secret. That is the part that I cannot get over.”
She put her forehead down on the table and sobbed. Rick did not touch her. I thought, he is deciding. After a while, he reached out and put one hand on the back of her head, lightly, like a man steadying a boat, and he left it there. “Odessa,” he said, “what do you want us to do?” It was the question I had been waiting for, and I had worked out the answer on the daybed over many sleepless nights. “Repay the thirty nine thousand, six hundred dollars. File the correction with the IRS together, with a good accountant. And close the quilt shop before it takes any more.”
“And the slips?” Sharon said, lifting her wet face. “Are they yours?” “They are ours,” I said. “They are going into a trust, with the lake lot, with Rick as the trustee and your name on the paper, and you will not touch the check. Not one dollar. It will go to the taxes, and the upkeep, and the grandchildren. And you will sit with me on that walkway on Sundays, and we will tie frogs.” Sharon laughed through her tears. “Mama, I cannot tie a frog.” “Your father could not either,” I said, “at first. He ruined a whole dozen.”
We started the next Sunday. The three of us sat at a table on the walkway of the slips, under the tin roof, with a thermos and a box of deer hair and a tackle box between us. Rick, who had never held a hook in his life, tied his first frog crooked. Sharon tied hers with the tip of her tongue between her teeth, as she did at nine. Mine took a minute and a half. A bass boat went by, and the man in it lifted a hand. I lifted mine. A big gar rolled in the shallows.
The Lily Pad Frog is in every tackle store in America now, in a package with my picture, and every one carries a little tag that Sharon designed at her own sewing machine. It says, Hand tied the first time on Lake Hamilton, Hot Springs. The marina still pays the rent. The money goes to the grandchildren. Last month Sharon came to my cottage with a glass jar, and inside it, tied with a bit of green ribbon, was the very first frog she ever made, crooked, one leg shorter than the other. “For the tackle box,” she said. I put it in beside the pocketknife of Leon.
