The other week, G hit me up with a question I wasn’t expecting. “Can I buy a kayak?”

Now, it wasn’t completely out of left field.

He started working at a white water rafting company this summer, just like Steve did during his high school summers, and although he’s doing the grunt work now, I did expect him to start to have an interest in kayaking, eventually, just not quite at 11 a.m. on a random Tuesday.

What he had been shopping for wasn’t a white water kayak, though. He wanted a fishing kayak. Apparently, he’d been shopping for one for the better part of a year. He informed me that the make and model that he wanted was at its lowest price in a year.

Although he had to purchase it directly from the company, the company was cashing in on online sales driven by Prime Day. He had saved up enough to purchase the kayak without the discount, but he realized that by purchasing it while it was on sale, he would be able to add a few more bells and whistles to it.

I know nothing about kayaks. Until this conversation, I was unaware that you used a different type of kayak for fishing. As G threw a bunch of facts, figures, and different modifications he could make to the boat at me, my eyes started to glaze over.

If he had been patient enough to wait an entire year for the right boat, and intelligent enough to realize that by waiting for a good sale he could afford to buy more accessories, that was really all I needed to know about the transaction.

After he placed the order, he got a phone call from customer service to arrange the delivery of the kayak. Apparently, it was shipping directly from the manufacturer and needed to be met and signed for by the purchaser.

When G told me the anticipated delivery date, I assured him that I would keep the day free and clear so that we could meet the delivery driver at the end of our half mile driveway. The customer service rep had told him that it would come via tractor trailer, and we had to plan around that.

No sooner did we have a plan in place to get the 12.5-foot-long kayak from the road to the storage shed, than customer service called back and said they could have it delivered in 3 days. Well, this created a problem because it was a day I was scheduled to be on-site for work and that I had several other appointments booked with A.

My initial reaction was to call them back and ask for a later delivery, but I could tell by the look on G’s face that he was super excited that he’d be able to get out on the water a few days sooner. So, I told him that if he could figure out a way to get it back to the house, or was willing to sit with it in the parking lot until I could get there, that he could keep the earlier delivery.

Well, the next two days were spent deep in thought, and I came home one afternoon to find the trailer hooked up to the quad. He was “pretty sure” he could drive that contraption down to the end of the driveway and back, with the kayak on it. I had my reservations, but once again, we were in uncharted territory for me, so I said sure, he could try it, and tried to mentally figure out how to get to all my appointments, get my work finished, and manage to still be available so he didn’t have to sit by the side of the road with his kayak for too long.

Lo and behold, as A and I left for his afternoon appointment, here came G up the road with the trailer, and its precious kayak cargo. He handled it perfectly. He then proceeded to spend the next two days going over every inch of it and adding various mounts and stabilizers until he had what he proclaimed was “the perfect fishing boat.”

As he gleefully loaded it onto the roof rack of my SUV, I could see his wheels continuing to turn. He had many more plans for that kayak, I could tell. I’d already survived one boat project in the family, I know how these things go. But, for that afternoon, he was content to take it over to a state park and just get used to handling the kayak.

Within no time at all, he had it up on the roof rack, and all his gear stowed in the back. While I was gratified to see that he’d thrown a life jacket in without me prompting him, I also realized that he’d only thrown one jacket in the car. I wasn’t going along for this ride. It wasn’t just the life jacket, I’d been ignoring the single seat and not much room for anything else side of the kayak for a week.

It was tough watching him paddle off across the lake, using one of Steve’s old paddles on top of everything else, but it was even harder to swallow how maturely he’d handled the entire process, from saving his money, to shopping around, to getting it delivered to the house, it was like he didn’t even need me anymore.

I keep telling myself that when Steve was his age, he’d have been doing the same exact thing, and that not only is this is a great activity for G in its own right, but it’s an even better way for him to stay connected with his Dad. I was never meant to be a part of this process, it should have been Steve here supervising this and calling the shots.

Just as I started to drive back home, feeling more than a little obsolete, the phone chimed. “What’s for dinner?” he asked, from the other side of the lake. Instead of retorting that it was whatever he caught and cooked, I simply answered the question, and enjoyed still being needed. Just a little.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing columnist who appears weekly in the Times News.