The Ferry Dock Was Closed for the Winter

The road to the ferry dock had been plowed just wide enough for one car. I knew because I’d delivered mail down it for thirty-six winters and spent most of them hoping nobody would come the other way. On Saturday, my husband turned down it without signaling, which was how I knew he’d been thinking about the turn for a while.

“The ferry’s closed,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Did you leave something down here?”

Walt put both hands on the wheel. “That’s one way of putting it.”

He parked above the landing. Beyond the windshield the lake was gray, with a strip of open water between the ice and the pilings. He got out and went around to the trunk. I followed him, taking the long way around a patch of ice. At seventy-two I had finally learned that taking the long way was faster than getting up.

Walt lifted out a wool blanket and a little speaker with a leather handle. The blanket had been in the back seat on the day we got married. We’d signed the papers in the county clerk’s office and taken the ferry over for lunch. On the way back, my sister had put on a song she said we ought to dance to. We’d tried it by the railing, wearing the good shoes we’d bought that morning. Then the ferry came into the slip, the deckhands called everybody back to their cars, and my sister pocketed her phone without thinking.

I’d forgotten about the song by the time we got home. At least I’d told myself I had. It used to come on at the hardware store and I’d find something in the next aisle that needed looking at.

Walt carried the blanket down the shoveled path and shook it out over the bench. Snow fell off the slats in two little strips.

He set the little speaker on the bench and asked, “Do you remember where the song cut out?”

“Right when you stepped on my foot,” I said.

“You’d put it in an unreasonable place.”

He fished his phone out of his coat and tapped it twice. I heard the first few bars and then nothing. He tapped again. This time we got as far as the singer taking a breath.

“Battery,” he said. He tried one more time, then turned the speaker over as though the rest of the song might be stuck to the bottom.

“We can go home and plug it in.”

Walt sat on the blanket. A button on his coat was hanging by a thread. He pulled at it until I asked him to stop.

“I wanted it to be here,” he said.

I sat beside him. Down at the slip, a loose chain hit a piling and then let go. He said that when my sister started the song on the ferry, he had been about to tell me something. After the interruption he kept waiting for a chance to say it without making a speech of it.

“You could say it now,” I said.

“I was going to say I wasn’t scared anymore.”

He said that so matter-of-factly I almost answered too quickly. He’d proposed while I was putting away the dishes, and I’d said yes before I put the last plate down. I’d thought his silence on the ride to the clerk’s office meant he was worried about the roads.

“What were you scared of?”

“That we’d get to the other side of the lake and you’d decide you’d only said yes to be kind.”

I looked at the water. It was the same crossing I’d made with mail sacks, wet mittens, and once a birthday cake I’d had to hold level all the way across. I knew how far it was without being able to tell you in miles.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been that kind,” I said.

He laughed into his scarf. I stood up, checked the pavement with the edge of my boot, and held out my hand.

“What about the song?” he said.

I hummed the bit I knew. He came in too early, so we started over. For the turn he took one small step to his left and gave me room to put my feet wherever I could find a dry spot.

We got to the place where the ferry had pulled in. Then we kept going.