He just stood there and watched Gale cast, and watched Iris stand beside him with her hands in the pockets of her hoodie, and I watched Forrest’s face, and I could not read it.
Nan saw him and set down her tongs. Elwin saw him and straightened up from the table, and I saw Elwin decide to stay where he was.
This was not his to fix. He had already said his piece in that driveway at midnight.
Gale cast one more time, a nice one, out past the brush pile Elwin’s dad sank off the dock forty years ago.
He let it settle and started to reel, slow, the way Iris had shown him.
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And the rod bent double.
“Iris!” Gale yelled. It was the loudest I have ever heard him. “Iris, he’s on! Iris, he’s on, he’s on!”
She did not grab the rod. I want that known, because every grown-up I know would have grabbed it, me included.
She stood right beside him, close enough to touch, and she kept her hands in her pockets.
“Reel,” she said. “Keep your tip up. Don’t horse him. You’ve got him, Gale. You’ve got him. Just keep reeling nice and steady.”
The fish ran under the dock and Gale squealed and Iris said, “Walk him out, walk him out,” and Gale stepped sideways along the boards with the rod held high, and the fish came back out into open water, and Gale reeled like his life depended on it.
It came up right at the end of the dock, a largemouth bass maybe two pounds, green and gold in the late sun, its mouth wide open.
Iris dropped to her knees on the boards and lipped it with her thumb, quick and clean, and swung it up onto the dock between them.
Gale just stared at it. Then he looked up the dock at his father.
I will never forget his face. It was not pride exactly. It was the look of a boy checking whether he was about to be yelled at, and hoping, with everything in him, that he was not.
Forrest started walking. He came down the length of that old dock slow, one board at a time, and the boards creaked under him.
Nobody up in the yard said a word. Even the grease in Nan’s fryer seemed to go quiet.
He stopped in front of the two of them. He looked at the fish, and he looked at his son, and then he looked at my daughter, and he reached up and took off that camo cap and held it in both hands in front of him.
“Iris,” he said. His voice was not steady, and he had to stop and start over.
She looked right back at him. She did not look away and she did not look mean. She just waited, the way she had waited for the lake to give her rod back.
“I’m sorry about your rod,” he said. “I’m sorry for what I did. There’s no reason good enough. I was sore about the fish and I was sore about the guys and I took it out on you, and you’re eleven years old, and you didn’t do one thing wrong except outfish me.”
He swallowed hard. “And then you came down here and did this. With Gale. I couldn’t get him to hold a rod in two years. You did it in an afternoon, with the rod your mama had to buy twice.”