Given Chances

Dick Socha and Kimmy Carter didn’t grow up with much.

Not in the way people talk about it later, like it builds character or makes you stronger. It just meant you figured things out early, or you didn’t.

Most days, they were outside before the sun came up.

Fishing in the summer. Hunting in the fall. Ice fishing in the winter. For both of them, that was their life.

They didn’t say it out loud, but they both understood the same thing.

If they wanted something, they were going to have to get it themselves.

Dick got his first boat before he had any business owning one. The motor cut out if you pushed it too hard, and it leaked just enough to remind you not to trust it.

Kimmy helped him fix it anyway.

Piece by piece. Trial and error. Mostly error.

But it worked.

That was how it always went.

Dick had the ideas.

Kimmy made them real.

That was the deal.

They weren’t just friends. They were partners.

That was the part Dick could say out loud.

The rest of it he kept.

He had loved her since before he had a word for it. There was a morning, years back, when he had it all the way up in his throat and ready to go. He said something else instead. He never told anybody what.

After that he worked it out the way he worked out everything, by instinct, and the instinct said this. Say it and he could lose her. Don’t say it and he never could.

He kept her close enough to see every morning, and far enough to keep it safe.

He called it being partners.

It held for twenty-five years. That’s what it was. Nothing more.

Not for lack of chances. He was given chances. A slow afternoon at the counter with nobody else in the store. A drive back from the Cities with the radio off. A New Year’s when everybody else had somebody, and the two of them standing outside in the cold, not talking.

Every one of them a door standing open.

He talked about the weather.

Then they both started making plans for a life with somebody else, and neither one of them said a word about it.

Dick Socha had never walked away from anything in his life.

But he was about to walk away from a lifetime with her, and he was going to do it without once saying it out loud.