“I didn’t come to tell you anything,” Mr. Lund said. “I live here. Your mother hired me for the morning, and I’ve been paid in full.” He nodded at the middle seat. “You’re there. Your mother’s in the bow.”
I had not planned on being in the bow. I said so.
“Boat seats three,” Mr. Lund said. “And I’m not leaving Mike’s wife standing on my dock for four hours in October. Get in, the both of you.”
So I got in. The hull boomed under my boots the way it always had. Tyler stood on the dock above us with his hands opening and closing.
“Ty,” I said. “It’s a boat. Step down.”
He stepped down. He sat on the middle seat with his back to me and his face to the motor, exactly where he’d sat from the time he was four years old, and I watched his shoulders come up around his ears.
Mr. Lund squeezed the primer bulb until it went hard. He pulled the choke, cracked the throttle, and yanked the rope. Nothing. Again. Nothing.
“Third pull,” Tyler said, not turning around. His voice was thick. “It never goes till the third pull. And you’ve got to talk to it.”
“What do I say?”
“Dad always said, come on, old girl.”
“Come on, old girl,” said Mr. Lund, perfectly serious, and pulled. The Evinrude caught and rattled and coughed out a cloud of blue smoke that hung on the flat water behind us. He pushed the choke in. That smell came forward over the boat, gas and oil and cold lake, and I saw my son put his hand flat on the aluminum seat beside him and leave it there.
We ran out to the point. Mr. Lund didn’t ask where the fish were. He just looked at Tyler, and Tyler lifted his arm and pointed, and then pointed again a little left, and then held his palm down flat to say slow, slow, here. Mr. Lund cut the motor. In the quiet you could hear the water ticking against the hull.
“There’s a break off this point,” Tyler said. “Twelve feet dropping to twenty-two. They sit right on the edge of it when the water cools off.”
“Your dad’s spot.”
“Everybody’s spot. Dad just thought it was his.”
That was the first thing he’d said in two weeks that sounded like himself.
Mr. Lund lowered the coffee can anchor over the side, hand over hand. We fished jigs and fatheads on the bottom. I caught a perch the size of a clothespin and Mr. Lund said it was the nicest one he’d seen all year, and Tyler made a sound that might have been a laugh. Mr. Lund poured himself coffee from my thermos and ate a Special K bar for breakfast and told us about hauling propane to the fish houses in January, backing a loaded truck out onto the ice with the door open and one foot on the running board in case it went through.
He was good company. He never once asked my son a question.
About eight o’clock he reeled up and looked at his line.
“I’m bit off,” he said. “Tyler, I keep a spool of leader up under your seat there. Reach up behind the foam for me, would you? My shoulder won’t do it.”
There was no spool of leader under that seat. I knew it, and Mr. Lund knew it, and he looked off toward the Bible camp shore like a man with nothing at all on his mind.
Specialty: Quiet Comebacks & Personal Justice
David Reynolds focuses on stories where underestimated individuals regain control of their lives. His writing centers on measured decisions rather than dramatic outbursts — emphasizing preparation, patience, and the long game. His characters don’t shout; they act.