Todd had the cooler in one hand and his coffee in the other when he stopped at the top of the dock and looked down at my son the way you look at a motor that will not start.
“Asher stays on the bank, Kel,” he said. “He’ll scare the fish. You know how he gets with the questions, and I’m not spending my morning untangling lines.”
Asher was standing right beside me in his gray life vest, holding the little rod he had practiced with in our backyard every evening for six weeks. He heard every word. Asher always hears every word.
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Todd’s boys were already in the boat. Newell was eleven and Rollo was nine, and they were good boys, the kind who say thank you for a juice box without anybody reminding them.
They looked at Asher and then looked at the floor of the boat.
“He’s been practicing,” I said, keeping my voice low and even. “He’ll sit still for you. He promised me in the car, and he keeps his promises better than most grown men I know.”
Todd shook his head and stepped down into the boat. “Maybe next year, when he’s older. This is the one weekend my boys get with me all summer. I want it done right, and I want them catching fish, not babysitting.”
Then he yanked the cord, the motor caught on the second pull, and the three of them went across the lake toward the far point with the sun climbing up out of the pines behind them.
Asher stood and watched until the boat was a speck. Then he turned to me and said, very seriously, “Fish don’t have ears on the outside, Mom. They feel sound through a line on their sides. It’s called the lateral line.”
“I know, baby,” I said. “You told me in the car. You told me at the gas station, too, and the lady behind the counter said it was the most interesting thing she’d heard all week.”
“So Uncle Todd’s motor is louder than me,” he said. He was not being smart.
He was only telling me a fact, because facts are how Asher makes sense of a world that does not always make sense back to him.
I did not have an answer for that. I took his hand, and we walked down the shore to a flat spot by a birch tree, and I sat on a cooler lid while he cast his bobber into the weeds.