- The Last Cast
- The leaves were turning gold and scarlet along the shore of Shagawa Lake when Harold turned eighty-five.
- We didn’t throw a big party at the diner—Harold would have hated that more than a cold breakfast—but Clara baked a three-layer chocolate cake with buttercream frosting, and half the high school hockey team came in after practice just to shake his hand and wish him a happy birthday.
- Later that afternoon, after the rush had cleared and the shadows were stretching long across the floorboards, Harold sat in his corner booth with his final cup of coffee.
- The diner was quiet. The low hum of the refrigerator, the faint sound of a country song playing on the small radio behind the counter, and the rhythmic breathing of Duchess asleep by the door.
- “Birdie,” Harold said, not looking up from his cup.
- “Yeah, Harold?” I asked, wiping down the counter with a clean towel.
- “You ever take that old cedar boat out on Vermilion anymore? The one your dad kept in the boathouse?”
- I stopped wiping. The cloth felt heavy in my hand. I hadn’t been out on the water with a rod in five years—not since Ed’s hands got too stiff to hold the oars and the boat started taking on water through the seams.
- “Not in a long time,” I said honestly.
- Harold looked up, his eyes bright and clear in the late afternoon sun streaming through the front window.
- “You should,” he said simply. “The smallmouth are running heavy near the narrows this time of year. Just like they used to when we were kids.”
- I looked at him—this old soldier who had walked out of the North Woods with a dog and a pocketful of history, who had carried my father’s voice through forty years of silence—and I felt something inside my chest loosen, like an anchor being hauled up off a muddy bottom after a long night on the lake.
- “Alright,” I said, resting the towel on the edge of the counter. “Next Sunday. If the weather holds.”
- Harold smiled, a slow, deep crease of lines around his eyes that looked just like the map of every road we’d both traveled to get here.
- “Good,” he said, lifting his coffee cup in a quiet, solitary toast. “Tell your dad I said hello.”
- “I will, Harold,” I said. “I’ll tell him every single word.”
- THE END..!
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