I knew that story. Everybody in our family knew it. Nobody ever talked about it.
“And then,” Brittany said. She stopped. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve.
“And then what, Brit?”
“And then she said, ‘Don’t tell Jess. Jess will be fine. Jess is always fine.’”
We sat there on the dock for a long time without saying anything.
The sun was almost down now. The light on the water was red. The redwing blackbird had stopped singing. Somewhere far off, one of Vern’s cows bawled.
“I almost called it off,” Brittany said. “The wedding. That night. I lay in bed at the Inn and I couldn’t breathe. I almost called you. I had my phone in my hand. I had your name up.”
“Why didn’t you?”
She shook her head.
“Because there were two hundred people coming,” she said. “Because Tanner’s whole family drove from Nebraska. Because the deposit was paid and the band was booked and the flowers were ordered. Because Mom was so happy.” She was crying now. “Because I was a coward, Jess. That’s why.”
“And then you stood up there,” Brittany said. “In that sage dress. And you smiled. In every single picture. And I kept looking at you and thinking, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know I’m standing here in a dress that was paid for with her half of Grandpa’s land.”
She put her face in her hands.
“I couldn’t look at you,” she said. “For two years. Every time I saw your name on my phone, I felt sick. Every time Mom said ‘Jess is fine,’ I wanted to throw up.”
I didn’t say anything for a long time.
I wanted to be angry. I want to be honest about that. Part of me was. Part of me wanted to stand up and walk off that dock and drive away and never come back.
But I looked at my little sister. Twenty-eight years old. Crying into her hands on Grandpa’s pond in her brand-new white sneakers.
And I remembered her at six. Sitting on an overturned bucket on that bank, crying because a bluegill swallowed her hook. Grandpa kneeling down beside her to get it out. Me holding her hand.
“Brit,” I said. “Look at me.”
She lifted her face.
“You were twenty-six,” I said. “Mom got you drunk on a dock a week before your wedding and dumped all of that on you. That’s not on you. That’s on her.”
“I could have told you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You could have.”
She flinched.
“But you’re telling me now,” I said.
Chapter Eight: The Lawyer
I called a lawyer on Monday.
I knew what she was going to say before I even dialed. But I needed to hear it.
Her name was Margaret Pohl. She did estate law in Creston. Not the same lawyer Mom and Dad took Grandpa to. A different one. A gray-haired woman in her sixties who’d been doing wills and probate in Union County for thirty-five years.
I met her in her office above the bank on a Wednesday afternoon. I brought Brittany. She drove down from Ankeny and took a personal day.
We told her everything.
Margaret listened without interrupting. When we were done, she took off her reading glasses and set them on her desk.
“I’m going to be honest with you girls,” she said. “Because I think you’d want me to be.”
“Please,” I said.
“What you’re describing sounds like it could be undue influence,” she said. “A parent with a terminal diagnosis, on hospice, on morphine. Children who benefit from the change, driving him to the lawyer’s office. A prior will that went the other way. If you’d come to me two years ago, I’d have said you had something worth looking at.”
“But,” I said.
“But,” Margaret said. “In Iowa, you have a limited time to contest a will. Generally, the later of four months after the second publication of the notice to creditors, or one month after the notice is mailed to you. Did you get a notice in the mail? From the estate?”
I thought about it. I remembered a letter. November. From the lawyer in Creston. I’d opened it at the care center on a break and read it and put it in my locker.
“Yes,” I said.
“Then the deadline passed a long time ago,” Margaret said gently. “Probably before the wedding.”
Brittany made a small sound.
“And even if you could contest it,” Margaret said, “the land’s been sold. To a good-faith buyer. Mr. Akers paid a fair, if low, price, and had no knowledge of any of this. A court isn’t going to take the land back from him.”
“I wouldn’t want them to,” I said.
Margaret looked at me for a long moment.
“Then what do you want?” she asked.
I didn’t know how to answer.
I’d been thinking about it since Saturday night. Lying awake in my apartment above the hardware store.
What did I want? The money? The land? Most of it was gone. The wedding was spent. The truck was being driven. The pontoon was floating on West Okoboji.
I didn’t want to sue my parents. I didn’t want to sit in a courtroom in Creston across a table from my mother.
“I want them to know,” I said finally. “That we know. Both of us.”
Margaret nodded slowly.
“That’s not something the law can give you,” she said. “That’s something you’ll have to do yourselves.”
On the way out, she stopped us at the door.
“There’s one more thing,” she said. “The prior will. The 2015 one. You said your mother found it in your grandfather’s desk.”
“That’s what she told Brit.”
“If it was properly executed,” Margaret said, “the lawyer who drew it up may still have a copy in his files. Lawyers are supposed to keep them. It won’t change anything legally now. But you might want to see it.” She paused. “Sometimes it helps to see it in writing. What someone actually wanted.”
“Who would’ve drawn it up?” Brittany asked.
Margaret almost smiled.
“Earl Kessler,” she said. “Came in here in March 2015, about a month after his wife’s funeral. Sat in that chair right there. Wanted to make sure his granddaughters got the pond.” She went to her filing cabinet. “I’ll have to check. But I believe that was me.”
Chapter Nine: In Writing
She found it the next day. She called me at work.
A copy of Grandpa’s 2015 will, in a manila folder in her files. Signed by Earl Kessler. Witnessed by her secretary and the Iowa State Bank teller who came up to notarize it.
She mailed us each a copy. With a letter on her stationery saying she was sorry for our loss, and that she was sorry the copy came too late to matter.
I opened mine in my apartment, sitting at the kitchen table.
It was simple. Four pages. Most of it was about his savings account and his pickup and who got his guns.
But on page two, it said:
I give my farm real estate, consisting of eighty acres in Section 14, Lenox Township, Taylor County, Iowa, to my granddaughters, Jessica Ann Morgan and Brittany Lynn Morgan, in equal shares, as tenants in common.
And then, right under that, in Grandpa’s own handwriting, in the margin, in blue ink, with an arrow pointing to the paragraph:
The pond is the part that counts. Fish together.
I sat there at my kitchen table and read that line twenty times.
Then I called Brittany.
She answered on the first ring. She was crying already. She’d gotten hers too.
“Did you see it?” she said. “The note? In the margin?”
“I saw it.”
“Fish together,” she said. “Jess. He wrote fish together.”
We didn’t say anything for a long time. Just breathed on the phone, a hundred miles apart.
“Sunday,” I said finally. “Mom and Dad’s. Dinner. Both of us.”
“Both of us,” Brittany said.
That Sunday, we drove up to the house together. In my Malibu. Brittany had driven down from Ankeny the night before and slept on my couch above the hardware store.
Mom and Dad live in a split-level on the edge of Lenox. The black Ram 2500 was in the driveway. The pontoon was on a trailer next to the garage, covered with a gray tarp for the season.
We sat in the car for a minute.
“You okay?” I asked.
“No,” Brittany said. “You?”
“No.”
We got out anyway.
Mom was thrilled to see us. Both girls home on the same Sunday. She hugged us in the doorway. She’d made a roast. She’d made a pie. Cherry, Brittany’s favorite.
Dad was in his recliner with the Twins game on. He got up and hugged us too. He smelled like Old Spice and the cab of a new truck.
We sat down at the dining room table. The same table. Mom carved the roast. Dad buttered a roll.
Then I took the copy of the 2015 will out of my purse. I unfolded it. I laid it on the table, next to the mashed potatoes, turned so they could both read it.
Brittany laid hers down right next to mine.
Chapter Ten: Between the Roast and the Pie
Mom stopped carving.
She looked at the papers. Then at me. Then at Brittany.
Her face went white. Not pale. White. The knife was still in her hand.
Dad leaned forward and read the first page. Then the second. He stopped at the line in the margin. The handwriting in blue ink.
He set down his roll.
“Where did you get this?” Mom said. Her voice was very quiet.
“Margaret Pohl,” I said. “In Creston. She drew it up. In 2015. A month after Grandma died.”
“Jessie…”
“Brit told me, Mom,” I said. “What you told her. On the dock at Okoboji. The week before the wedding.”
Mom looked at Brittany. Brittany looked back at her. She didn’t look away.
“You promised,” Mom said.
“I know I did,” Brittany said. “I shouldn’t have.”
The Twins game was still on in the living room. Somebody hit a double. The crowd cheered. Nobody at the table moved.
“It was legal,” Mom said finally. “The new will. The lawyer asked him if he understood. He said yes.”
“He thought I was you, Mom,” I said. “In August. Every time I came in to sit with him on my break, he called me Sheryl. He asked me if I’d brought the potato salad for the threshers. He thought it was 1962.”
Mom didn’t answer.
“I worked nights at the care center,” I said. “I sat with people on morphine for three years. I know what it looks like. You know he didn’t understand.”
Dad hadn’t said a word. He was staring at the margin of the will. At the blue ink.
The pond is the part that counts. Fish together.
“Roger,” Mom said sharply. “Say something.”
Dad looked up. Not at Mom. At me.
“I told her not to,” he said.
Everybody turned and looked at him.
“In August,” Dad said. His voice was rough. “I told her it wasn’t right. Taking him in like that. I said, Sheryl, he’s not himself. Let it go. The girls should have it.” He swallowed. “She said if I didn’t drive him, she’d drive him herself.”
“Roger!”
“And I drove him,” Dad said. “God help me. I drove him.”
He put his face in his hands. His big farmer’s hands, with the knuckles cracked from forty years of winter.
“And then the place at Okoboji wanted thirty thousand,” he said into his hands. “And we’d already signed. And I didn’t have thirty thousand. I had the operating note at the bank, a hundred and seventy thousand behind on it, three bad years in a row.” He shook his head. “So I called Vern. And Vern said it was too low, and I said I don’t care, Vern. Just write the check.”
“Dad,” Brittany whispered.
“I paid off the operating note,” Dad said. “I paid for the wedding. And I bought a truck and a pontoon, because I told myself I deserved one thing after forty years of eating dirt.” He looked up at me. His eyes were red. “And every time I drive that truck past Earl’s eighty, I want to drive it into the ditch.”
Mom stood up. She put the carving knife down on the platter with a clatter.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “Either of you.”
“Then tell us,” I said.
She stood there by the table in her Sunday apron. Her hands were shaking.
“I was twenty-one,” she said. “Pregnant with you. And my father wouldn’t come to my wedding. He wouldn’t come. To the courthouse. On a Tuesday. He said I’d shamed him.” Her voice cracked. “I didn’t have a dress. I wore my church skirt. Roger’s mother took one picture with a disposable camera. That’s my wedding. One picture.”
She looked at Brittany.
“And then he spent twenty-five years walking you girls down to that pond with cane poles,” she said. “Telling you it was all for you someday. His granddaughters. Never me. Never once in my life did he tell me anything was for me.”
Nobody said anything.
“So when you got engaged, Brit,” Mom said, crying now, “I thought, she’s going to have what I didn’t. She’s going to have a dress and a tent and a band and two hundred people. And I didn’t care where the money came from.” She wiped her eyes with her apron. “I didn’t care. I wanted my baby to have a real wedding.”
“And Jess?” Brittany said quietly. “What did you want for Jess?”
Mom looked at me.
I watched her face. I watched her try to find the answer.
“Jess was always fine,” she said finally. Very softly. Like she was just hearing it for the first time.
“No, Mom,” I said.
I stood up.
“I wasn’t fine,” I said. “I was working three jobs. I slept five hours a night for three years. I drove a car with no heat. I paid for my own bridesmaid dress out of café tips.” My voice was shaking. “I wasn’t fine. I just never asked you for anything. Because I learned a long time ago that in this family, there’s one kind of girl who needs things and one kind who doesn’t.”
Mom’s face crumpled.
“I was fine because I had to be,” I said. “That’s not the same thing.”
Chapter Eleven: The Part That Counts
We didn’t eat the roast. Or the pie.
Brittany and I left about an hour later. Mom was crying at the kitchen sink. Dad walked us out to the car. He stood in the driveway next to his black Ram with his hands in his pockets.
“I’m going to make it right,” he said. “I don’t know how yet. But I’m going to.”
“Dad,” I said. “I don’t want money.”
“I know you don’t.” He looked at the pontoon on its trailer under the gray tarp. “That’s what makes it worse.”
He sold the pontoon in May.
Thirty-one thousand dollars. To a man from Sioux City. He drove it up to Okoboji himself and handed over the keys.
Then he drove down to Corning and found me on my lunch break at the hospital. He handed me an envelope. Inside was a cashier’s check for fifteen thousand, five hundred dollars.
And another one, made out to Brittany, for the same amount.
“Half the pontoon,” he said. “Each. It’s not much.”
“Dad…”
“It’s not half the eighty,” he said. “I can’t ever give you that. But it’s something.” He looked at the hospital parking lot. “And I’m going to keep trying.”
I didn’t cash it for a month. I didn’t know what to do with it.
Then I knew.
I drove out to Vern’s place on a Saturday. Brittany came down from Ankeny and met me there. We sat at Vern’s kitchen table and drank his terrible strong coffee.
“Vern,” I said. “Brit wants to buy in. Half the pond.”
Vern looked at Brittany.
“Is that right?” he said.
“If Jess will have me,” Brittany said.
So we did it right.
Margaret Pohl drew up a new deed. Jessica Ann Morgan and Brittany Lynn Morgan, as tenants in common. Equal shares. The same words Grandpa used in 2015.
Brittany paid me half of what I’d paid for it. Four thousand, three hundred and seventy-five dollars. Plus half the survey. Out of her half of the pontoon money.
She signed the deed in Margaret’s office above the bank in Creston. Then I signed it. Then we took it to the Taylor County Recorder’s office in Bedford and they stamped it.
The lady behind the counter read our names.
“Sisters?” she asked.
“Sisters,” we said at the same time.
Mom didn’t call for three months.
Then, in August, she showed up at the pond.
Brittany and I were at the end of the dock. It was a Sunday evening. We’d started coming every Sunday that summer. Brit drove down from Ankeny. Tanner came sometimes. Kayla from work came once. Vern came down most weeks and sat on an overturned bucket on the bank, and didn’t say ten words, and seemed perfectly happy.
That Sunday, we heard a car on Vern’s field road. A door. Then somebody coming down through the pasture.
Mom stopped at the fence.
She was wearing jeans and her old gardening sneakers. She was holding a covered dish. She stood at the gate in Vern’s new fence for a long time, looking at the pond.
At the cattails along the east bank, tall and green now, with brown heads starting to form. At the cottonwood. At the dock. At her two daughters at the end of it, holding cane poles.
Brittany looked at me.
I got up. I walked down the dock and up the bank to the gate.
“Hi, Mom,” I said.
“Hi, Jessie.” Her voice was small. She held out the dish. “I made potato salad. I didn’t know if you’d want it.”
I took it.
“Can I come in?” she asked.
I looked at her. My mother. Fifty-five years old. In her old gardening sneakers, standing at a gate in a cow pasture, holding her breath.
I thought about one picture from a disposable camera. A church skirt at the Taylor County Courthouse. A father who wouldn’t come.
I opened the gate.
Chapter Twelve: Fish Together
She didn’t come out on the dock that first time. She sat on the bank, on the overturned bucket Vern usually used. Vern took one look at her and went to get another bucket from his truck.
She didn’t say much. Neither did we. We fished. The bobbers sat on the still water, red and white.
Around sunset, Brittany’s bobber went under.
“Brit!” I said. “Brit, you’ve got one!”
She yanked the cane pole up. A bluegill came flying out of the water. Fat and flapping, gold and green in the evening light. It swung in a big arc over the dock and landed in my lap.
Brittany screamed. I screamed. Vern laughed so hard he almost fell off his bucket.
And on the bank, my mother laughed. A real laugh. I hadn’t heard it in two years.
Then I remembered the tackle box.
It was still sitting on the dock, where Vern set it down that first Saturday in April. I’d brought it back every Sunday since. I hadn’t opened it. Neither had Brittany.
We’d both been waiting. I don’t know for what.
I looked at Brittany. She looked at me. Then she looked up at the bank, at Mom.
“Mom,” Brittany said. “Come here. Please.”
Mom came out on the dock. Slowly. Like she wasn’t sure it would hold her.
She sat down between us. Not close. A little space on each side.
I pulled the tackle box over. Old green metal, rust around the hinges. I put my hand on the latch.
“It was Grandpa’s,” I told her. “Vern found it in the shed.”
Mom looked at it. Her mouth trembled.
“I know whose it is,” she said. “He had it when I was a girl.”
I opened the lid.
The top tray was full of what you’d expect. Hooks. Sinkers. A spool of line. A rusty pair of needle-nose pliers. A jar of salmon eggs from about 1998.
I lifted out the tray.
Underneath, in the bottom of the box, there were three bobbers. Red and white. The old-fashioned kind, with the little spring clip on top.
Each one had a strip of white tape wrapped around it. With a name on it in Grandpa’s handwriting.
JESS.
BRIT.
And the third one.
SHERYL.
Mom made a sound I’d never heard her make.
She picked up the third bobber. She held it in her palm. Her hand was shaking so hard the little spring clip rattled.
Underneath the bobbers, folded in quarters, there was a piece of paper. Yellowed. Soft as cloth.
I unfolded it. I held it so all three of us could read it.
It was a note. In blue ink. In Grandpa’s square, slanted farmer’s handwriting. Dated at the top: June 1993.
Sheryl,
I should have been at the courthouse. I was a stubborn old fool and I’ll be sorry for it the rest of my life.
I don’t know how to say it to your face so I’m putting it here, in the box, where I’ll see it every time I go fishing. Maybe someday I’ll get up the nerve to give it to you.
I made this bobber for you. Same as I’ll make one for the baby. If it’s a girl, I’ll teach her to fish. If it’s a boy, same thing.
The pond’s for you too. It always was. I just never knew how to tell you.
Your dad
Nobody said anything.
The sun was down now. The sky over Vern’s pasture was orange and pink. The frogs were starting up in the cattails. The ones I’d planted on my knees in the mud.
Mom held the bobber with her name on it. She held the note. She sat on the end of the dock between her two daughters and cried. Not the way she’d cried at the kitchen sink. Different. Quieter. Like something that had been frozen for thirty years was finally starting to thaw.
“He never gave it to me,” she whispered. “He never said a word.”
“He couldn’t,” Brittany said softly. “He kept it in the box. For thirty years.”
“Every time he went fishing,” I said.
After a long time, Mom wiped her eyes.
She looked at the bobber in her hand. Then at the cane poles lying on the dock. Mine and Brit’s. JESS and BRIT on the tape.
“Is there a third pole?” she asked.
Brittany and I looked at each other.
From up on the bank, Vern cleared his throat. He stood up off his bucket. He walked back up the pasture toward his truck in the dusk without saying a word.
He came back five minutes later with a cane pole. Twelve feet long. Old. The line wrapped around the end.
“Found it in the shed,” he said. “Behind the grease guns. Next to the tackle box.” He handed it to Mom. “Figured somebody’d want it someday.”
There was a strip of white tape around the bottom. The ink was faded almost to nothing. But you could still read it.
SHERYL.
I baited her hook. With a nightcrawler from the coffee can, the way Grandpa taught me. Mom clipped on her bobber. Her hands were still shaking.
Then the three of us sat at the end of the dock. Mom in the middle. Brit on one side, me on the other. Three cane poles out over the water. Three red and white bobbers sitting on the still, dark pond.
Nobody said anything. We didn’t need to.
It’s been four years now.
Brittany had a baby girl in March. Tanner’s parents wanted to name her after his grandmother. Brittany named her Earla. Tanner didn’t argue.
Dad paid off the rest of the operating note last fall. He still drives the black Ram. But he drives it out to the pond every Sunday, and parks it on Vern’s field road, and sits on a bucket on the bank. He brings the nightcrawlers.
Vern is seventy-four. He still sits on the other side of the pond, on his own bucket, and doesn’t say ten words. Last spring, he told me he’d changed his will. He said he was leaving the rest of the eighty to Taylor County Conservation. With one condition. Nobody ever builds on the hill above the pond.
“So you girls always have the view,” he said.
I’m thirty-four now. Charge nurse on the medical floor at Rosary Hospital. I bought a little house in Corning two years ago, with a porch. I drive a car with a heater that works.
Last Sunday was the second Sunday in April. A spring evening. Golden light on the water.
The cattails along the east bank are as thick as a hedge now. Six feet tall. The redwing blackbirds nest in them every year. The cottonwood is leafing out.
I sat at the end of the dock in my green flannel and a ball cap. Brittany sat on one side of me with Earla in her lap, three weeks old, wrapped in a quilt Mom made. Mom sat on my other side.
Dad was on the bank with the coffee can. Vern was on his bucket across the water.
Earla was asleep. Brittany was holding her cane pole one-handed, the way Grandpa used to hold his while he poured coffee from a thermos.
Mom reached into the old green tackle box. Under the top tray. She took out something small and held it out to Brittany.
A new bobber. Red and white. With a strip of white tape wrapped around it.
On the tape, in Mom’s handwriting, in blue ink, it said:
EARLA.
Brittany looked at it for a long time. Then she clipped it on the end of the line of her cane pole. Next to her own.
“For someday,” Mom said.
The sun went down over Vern’s pasture. The frogs started up in the cattails. Out on the dark water, four red and white bobbers sat perfectly still.
Nobody caught anything that night.
It didn’t matter. That was never the part that counted.
