8. Chapter Eight
Chapter Eight
Josie
Derby morning, the whole town shows up.
The marina is chaos by seven—folding tables and coffee urns, kids from the fishing camp selling donuts, forty-some boats jockeying at the start line while an announcer tests a bullhorn.
There's a banner over the registration tent: MERCURY RIDGE END-OF-SUMMER PAIRS DERBY.
On the prize table sits the trophy—the Golden Gill, a spray-painted bass on a wooden base that has visibly been re-glued several times—next to a certificate for a year of free pizza.
Aileen runs the official scale, clipboard in hand, "for science.
" Rayna and Chrissy have made signs. Dani has made matching shirts.
Joel, Ace, and Forrest are fishing it too, paired off with each other's better halves, but everybody knows what today is really about, because two docks down, Liam and Tommy Brandt are doing synchronized stretches like Olympians.
"You're going down, old man!" Liam hollers.
"You recruited a minor!" Trent hollers back.
"Scoreboard!" says Tommy, who does not yet have a scoreboard.
Trent hands me into the Lucky Penny, and just before the horn, he goes still and looks at me. Today's the day. Tomorrow's Tuesday-eve. Neither of us has said the word Gary all morning.
"Hey," he says. "Whatever happens out there—"
"Don't you dare get sentimental before the horn," I tell him. "Rule twenty-six."
He grins so wide it hurts to look at. "That's my girl."
The horn blows. The boats scatter.
And for five straight hours, we catch nothing.
I mean nothing. The lake, which has handed me fish all week like party favors, goes silent.
Trent tries every spot he knows—the drowned timber, the north basin, the channel edge.
Around us, radios crackle with other teams' luck.
At the noon check, Liam and Tommy are leading with a six-and-a-half-pound largemouth, and Liam does a bow.
At one-thirty, Trent sets his rod down and looks at me, and for the first time all summer, he's out of jokes.
"I'm sorry, Rookie. I wanted this one for you so bad."
The sun is high and the water is glittering and somewhere behind us the town is laughing around the weigh station, and I think about Grandpa, who fished this lake for decades and never once came home unhappy.
And I know what he'd do.
"Give me the box," I say.
Trent's eyes widen as I open Gus's green tackle box and take out the copper spoon, polished bright as a new penny.
My hands aren't shaking. He motors us, without a word, to the mouth of Half-Moon Cove…
to the water in front of Grandpa's dock, where he taught me to cast when I was nine, where Trent taught me again at twenty-nine.
"Right there," Trent says softly. "Off the point. Gus's spot."
I load the rod. Snap the wrist. Let it fly.
The Penny sails out in a clean arc and drops beside the sunken log, easy as breathing, and I let it flutter down and start my retrieve, and the whole lake holds its breath.
Three cranks in, something hits it hard.
The rod bows double. Line sings off the reel. Trent shoots to his feet yelling "FISH! FISH! BIG FISH!" loud enough to be heard at the weigh station, and then his hands hover at my shoulders—not taking the rod, never taking the rod, just steady behind me while the fight goes on and on.
"Tip up. Let him run. You've got him, Josie, you've got him—"
"Net!" I scream.
"Netting!"
The bass comes up out of the water green and gold and furious, and Trent scoops him into the net, and then we're both on our knees in the bottom of the Lucky Penny, staring at the biggest fish I've ever seen in my life, whooping loud enough to scare the loons.
Trent grabs my face and kisses me, and the boat rocks, and he pulls back with tears flat-out running down his face.
"Rule one of fishing," he says, wrecked and laughing.
"It starts before you want to be awake?"
"No. That's the fake rule one. Real rule one." He looks at the fish, then at me. "You never keep a moment this good to yourself. Come on. Let's go show your grandpa's town."
At the scale, Aileen weighs him official: eight pounds, one ounce.
The crowd loses its mind. Liam takes off his hat and, to his credit, eats a small ceremonial bite of the brim while Tommy Brandt films it.
And when Jared hands me the Golden Gill and asks over the bullhorn if I've got anything to say, I look out at all of them—Dani and Mikki and the crew and the whole loud, nosy, wonderful town that knew my grandfather's name—and the words are just there.
"This is for Gus Barlow," I say, "who entered this derby every year and put my name next to his. It took me too long to come back. But I've got some news, and since it's Mercury Ridge, you'd all find out by breakfast anyway."
Beside me, Trent goes very, very still.
"I called my realtor this morning." I find Trent's eyes and hold them. "The cottage is off the market. I'm staying."
The town roars. Rayna bursts into tears. Ace yells "I HAD SATURDAY IN THE POOL!" and money changes hands all along the dock, which we will be discussing later.
Trent doesn't cheer. He crosses the stage in two steps and lifts me clean off my feet, trophy and all.
"Say it again," he says against my ear.
"I'm staying. I love you, Trent. I'm home."
"I love you, Josie-girl." He sets me down and rests his forehead on mine, and behind us the bullhorn crackles and the crowd whistles and the lake throws gold light over everything. "For the record, I was gonna love you either way. But I'm real glad I don't have to learn to like the city."
"You'd have hated it. No lake."
"No lake," he agrees, shuddering. "Nightmare."
I kiss him, right there on the stage, holding the ugliest trophy in North Carolina, in front of everyone—while somewhere, I swear, an old man with a tackle box laughs and laughs.