The Rod She Handed His Son

I did not think about it past that. I was a mother sending a picture of her kid to her husband.

Elwin was so proud he forwarded it to everyone he knew, which included the group of men his brother fishes with on Thursday nights.

He wrote something like, “Iris schooling Forrest this morning.” He meant it as a brag about his daughter. He was not thinking about his brother at all.

After that, Forrest’s phone did not stop buzzing.

It sat on the console in a little rubber holder and lit up every couple of minutes.

I could not read the messages, but I could read Forrest’s face, and every time he picked the phone up his jaw got tighter. Once he laughed, but it was not a laugh I liked.

“Jasper wants to know if she’s running the trolling motor too,” he said to nobody.

Iris did not hear it, or pretended not to. She had snagged her crankbait on a rock and broken it off, and she laid her rod down on the front deck to tie on a new one, very careful, the way she does everything with that rod.

Forrest’s phone buzzed again. He read it. He put it face down on the console.

Then he stepped over, picked her rod up off the deck by the handle, and flipped it out over the water.

He did not throw it hard. He tossed it, the way you would toss a stick for a dog, and that was somehow worse.

That is the whole thing. It took about two seconds. Everything else in this story is what came after, and it is the part that matters.

When the rod went under, I looked at Forrest and he looked at the console, and I thought about all the things I could say, and every one of them had a cuss word in it, and my daughter was standing eighteen inches away.

People have asked me since why I did not make him go after it. The water off that point was twenty-five feet deep and murky, and nobody was going to find a rod down there.

And I was four miles from my truck, on his boat, with my child between us.

I was not going to start a fight on the water with Iris in the middle of it. I was not going to teach her that the way you answer a man being small is to get loud.

Grandpa never got loud. So I zipped my jacket and put my arm around her and kept my mouth closed.

Forrest ran us back to the ramp wide open. Nobody said a word over the motor.

Iris held my hand the whole way, and her hand was cold, and I kept rubbing her knuckles with my thumb because it was the only thing I could think to do.

At the ramp he loaded the boat by himself, and I let him. Iris and I sat on a picnic table by the restroom building while he winched it up.

The sun was all the way up now and it was going to be a pretty day, which felt like an insult.

Before we left, Forrest came over and stood a few feet from the table. He had his cap in his hands. For a second I thought he was going to say something real.

“She’s got to learn to lose a little,” he said. “Life’s not all four-pounders.”