I walked down the steps and stood beside him at the end of the driveway, my apron still on. Doris leaned forward in her lawn chair. Wade and Curt went quiet by the curb. Gary’s hands shook so badly that the paper rattled when he unfolded it, and I saw he had not written a word on it himself. It was typed and official, with a gold seal in the bottom corner.
“Read the first line,” he said quietly. “Out loud, so they hear it too.” I took the page. My eyes landed on the top line, and my voice stopped working. It said Certificate of Title, and the owner’s name printed beneath it was not Gary’s. It was mine. Behind us, a truck turned onto our street, hauling an empty trailer, and slowed to a crawl.
I read it out loud, and my voice cracked on my own name. Gary had driven to the county office that Friday and put the boat’s title in my name alone, so nothing could happen to it without my signature. The page underneath was a bill of sale with the buyer’s line left blank. “It was never mine to sell,” he said. “I never should have bought it with your money. You decide.”
The truck at the curb belonged to Hal Dietz, who ran a marine shop in Newton. He said he had offered Gary eight thousand two hundred dollars, cash. Gary had called him in the rain on the eighth night, right after I said I’d be in that seat. Then Wade stepped forward with an envelope. The co-op crew and the fishing buddies had passed a hat, and it held thirteen hundred dollars. With the boat money, the kitchen fund was whole again, all nine thousand five hundred. Nobody had asked them. They did it because Gary had climbed poles for them for twenty-seven years.
I looked at my husband, and for the first time in nine days I had nothing planned. He had said he might die without owning one thing that was truly his, and I didn’t want that for him either. So I asked Hal about the small aluminum fishing boat on the back of his trailer. It cost nine hundred dollars, and I paid it from the jar where I’d saved my own spare change for years. “Not taken away, Gary,” I said. “Just smaller, and bought together.”
Doris clapped first, and then the whole street joined in. Hal hauled the green-and-silver boat away before dark, and the driveway looked strangely wide. By October the contractor had torn out the 1978 cabinets, and every burner on my new stove works on any setting. Our maple table is back inside where it belongs. Gary fishes Saturday mornings in his little boat and is home by noon, and sometimes I ride along with a thermos. Every night we eat across from each other, and he looks at me the whole time.
