“It’s okay if you’re bad at it,” she said. “I was terrible. Everybody’s first cast goes in a tree. Mine went right in Grandpa’s ear. He had to go up to the house and get the pliers.”
Gale looked up at her for the first time. “Did it hurt him?” he asked, very quietly, like he was worried about a man he had only met a handful of times.
“He said it didn’t,” Iris said. “But he said a word I’m not supposed to say.” And Gale laughed.
Just a little, but I heard it from up the hill, and Nan stopped breading and looked at me with her eyebrows up.
Iris brought him out to the end of the dock and put her new rod in his hands.
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
Her three-hundred-dollar rod, the one she would not even let me carry in from the truck. She handed it to that boy without a second thought.
She stood behind him and put her hands over his on the handle.
I could hear her voice drifting up the hill, patient as anything, the same words my dad used to say to her on the johnboat when she was four years old.
“Finger on the line. Now open the bail. Bring it back over your shoulder, slow. Now swing and let go of the line when it’s pointing at the water. Don’t throw it hard. Let the rod do it.”
His first cast went about eight feet and landed with a plop right in front of the dock.
He turned around, red in the face, ready to quit. Iris clapped like he had just won the biggest tournament in the state.
“That’s good,” she said. “That’s way better than mine. Do it again. Same thing, just let go a little sooner this time.”
He did it again. And again. She stood beside him the whole time, not touching the rod anymore, just talking.
Close the bail. Reel slow. Keep the rod tip up a little. Watch your line, not your feet.
By the twentieth cast he was throwing forty feet, and he had stopped looking back at her after every one. He was looking at the water.
He had a look on his face I had never seen on him, a kind of quiet grin, like the lake had told him a secret.
Erica came and stood beside me at the top of the hill. She had her arms crossed tight over her chest.
She did not say anything for a while, and when I looked over, there were tears running down her face.
“He’s never done that,” she said. “Not once. Not for anybody. He won’t even hold a rod when his dad is in the yard.”
I put my arm around her, and we stood there and watched our two kids on the end of that crooked old dock, the girl teaching the boy, both of them so serious about it.
Forrest came down the hill about four o’clock.
I did not see him pull in. He must have parked up by the shed and walked down past the fryer, because the first I knew of him he was standing at the land end of the dock, right where Gale had stood that morning, with his hands in his jacket pockets and that camo cap pulled low.
He did not call out to his son. He did not say a word.