I reach over and give his arm a squeeze, kind of glad that he’s going to sleep so we can stop talking about the past. Parts of it still hurt too much to discuss.
8
Eli
I’m not at all sure I like Aaron’s kid. The middle one is adorable, with her big curls and her charming grin. And the little one’s a baby, and you can’t help but love babies. They are untapped potential. But Sam…
I’m struggling to like her, and that fact alone makes me feel bad. Her bare feet dangle over the water as she sits and fishes off the end of the wooden dock. Her bobber floats along aimlessly until I can’t see it anymore.
“Your bobber is gone,” I warn her. I point to beneath the dock, thinking she’ll reel it in and cast it out again.
“Whatever,” she says with a grunt. She holds her pole negligently, like she doesn’t care about it at all. My father would be appalled.
“If you can’t see it, how will you know when you catch a fish?” I ask. I reel my own line in and cast it back out.
“Fine,” she snaps as she reels her line in. Her hook is bare.
“Looks like something stole your bait when you couldn’t see the bobber,” I say flippantly. I hold out the can of earthworms that I dug up this morning. “Put a fresh one on.” I shake it at her, but she just stares into the can. “Something wrong?”
She sets her pole down on the dock next to her. “I don’t like fishing.”
“Your mom loved to fish,” I say quietly. Mornings at the lake are quiet and comfortable, and loud voices that break the silence ruin it all, in my opinion.
“My mom liked to fish?” she asks warily. She looks around like she’s checking to be sure no one can hear her. “You knew my mom?”
“I did. Bess and I used to hang out with her and your dad.”
“My dad doesn’t like to talk about my mom,” she says, her voice tight, her words clipped.
I looked over at her. “What makes you think that?”
She shrugs. “When I talk about her, he gets this look on his face like I’m hurting him. That’s all.”
“It probably does hurt a little,” I reply. “But it also feels really good to talk about people we’ve lost. It helps us keep them alive in our hearts.” I lay my hand over mine. She does the same. “The feel-good part is much better than the hurting part. The hurting part is temporary. The feel-good part lasts forever.” She stares at me like I’m a big old liar. I rush to amend, “Or at least that’s how I feel.”
“Do you know somebody who died?”
I think for a minute. “I’ve known quite a few people who have died. My dad died a few years ago.”
“Do you talk about him?” she asks.
I reach over and pick up her hook, slide a worm onto it, and hand her rod to her. She looks at it for a moment and then casts it into the water. “I do talk about him, but he has been gone for a few years, so it doesn’t hurt quite as much as it did early on. And he was sick for a long time. I felt kind of grateful when he died, because he wasn’t in pain anymore.” I reach over and turn the wheel on her pole. “You have to turn it until it clicks, so the fish won’t be able to pull the line away when you catch one.”
“Your dad was in pain?”
I nod. “He was.”
“Do you miss him?”
“Only every single day. Especially days like this. He used to take me fishing from this same dock.” I reel my line in and recast it.
“Did you catch a lot of fish?”
“We did. You want to hear something funny?” I ask. I hold my breath.
“Sure,” she says warily.
“My dad used to let my friends go fishing with us sometimes, but he refused to take Katie.”
Her brow furrows. “He didn’t like her?”
“He liked her fine, but he didn’t like to fish with her. She would only fish with bread balls as bait because she didn’t want to kill the worms, and she made us put all the fish back. She didn’t like to kill them and eat them.” I point to her twitching bobber. “Something is playing with it.”
Suddenly, the bobber goes under. “Reel it in!” I say loudly. She jumps and starts to spin the handle until the line goes taut. The tip of the rod bends and I reach for the net. When the fish breaks the water, I scoop under it and bring it up so we can both look at it. “That’s a nice fish,” I say, even though it’s tiny.
“What do we do with it now?” she asks, but she’s grinning from ear to ear.
“You have to kiss it.”
Her eyes jerk up to meet mine. “Why?”
“It’s tradition. You kiss the first fish.” I shrug my shoulders. I push the net toward her. “You have to take it off the hook.”
She gingerly reaches into the net and scoops out the little bream. He is much too small to eat, but those little fish are fun to catch. She gingerly removes the hook, wincing all the while. Then she kisses it square on the mouth. She wipes her mouth with the back of her free hand.
“Do we eat it now?”
I shake my head. “I think we should put him back and let him do some growing.”
“Oh.” She doesn’t look unhappy about it. She tosses him back into the water. “My hands are fishy.” She sniffs her fingers and her face scrunches up. “Was my mom good at fishing?” she asks.
“I wouldn’t say she was great at it, but she had a lot of fun doing it. She could sit for hours and never get bored, even though my dad and I were both very quiet when we fished.”
“My mom knew how to have fun,” she says almost in a whisper.
“Yeah, she did.” I reach over and palm the top of her head. It feels natural, and she doesn’t shrink away from me. “You need a fishing hat,” I say when I see that the sun is in her eyes. “I have one in the cabin you can use next time we go fishing.”
“Can we do this again tomorrow?”
“We can do this whenever you want.”
She reels her line in by herself, retrieves a worm, and tosses it back out. “Okay,” she says. “This is fun.”
She looks up at me and grins. And I can’t help but think how lucky Aaron is to have such wonderful children in his life. If Bess and I had ever had kids, we might not be in the state we’re in now. Maybe she wouldn’t hate me quite so much. Maybe she’d be willing to tolerate me, just a little bit longer.
Maybe I’d have lived up to the promises I made the day we got married.
9
Bess
Aaron looks a bit green by the time we get back to Lake Fisher. He slept the whole way back, and he groans when he gets out of the car.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Yep,” he says with a grunt as he walks toward the front door of his cabin. “Thanks for going with me,” he calls out over his shoulder, without really looking back at me.
I have no idea what he would have done if I hadn’t gone. There’s no way he could have driven himself home.