The Boy Who Sat Still At Sunrise

The weekend

My name is Kelli Haug. I was thirty-six that summer, a dental assistant at a small practice two towns over from ours, and I had been married to Trevor for eleven years.

We had one child, and he was the whole sky to us.

The Haug family fishing weekend had been going on longer than I had been part of the family.

Trevor’s mother started it when her boys were in grade school: the last weekend of June, the same rented cabin, the same lake up in the northern Wisconsin woods.

She ran it like a church supper. Everybody had a job. She made pancakes on Sunday morning in a cast iron pan she brought from home, and she kept a spiral notebook of every fish anybody caught, with the weight and the date in pencil.

She had been gone four years now. After the funeral, Todd took the weekend over. He booked the cabin, made the grocery list, and texted everybody the times.

Nobody argued with him, because somebody had to do it, and Todd liked being the one.

Trevor was supposed to be there with us. He works nights at the plant, running a packaging line from ten at night to six in the morning, and he had put in for the Friday and Saturday off clear back in March.

Two weeks before the trip, a man on his crew hurt his back lifting a pallet, and the supervisor pulled every time-off request on that shift.

Trevor came home that morning and sat on the edge of our bed in his work boots and said he was sorry about four times.

“Take Asher anyway,” he said. “Dad will be there. Todd’s got the boat. It’ll be good for him to be out on the water with his cousins, and good for Dad to see him.”

I believed that. I packed the car with Asher’s clothes, his headphones for loud places, his fish book with the cover taped on, and the rod and reel we bought at the farm store for nineteen dollars.

Asher was diagnosed with autism when he was three. He did not talk much until he was four, and then one day he pointed at a picture of a catfish in a library book and said “barbels,” and he has not stopped talking about fish since.

He knows the names of every fish in the Wisconsin lakes. He knows which ones have teeth, which ones build nests, and how many eggs a walleye lays.

When he gets excited, the facts come out fast and loud, and his hands flap a little, and some people do not know what to do with that.

He had a countdown calendar on our refrigerator for that weekend. Forty-one days.

He crossed one off every morning with a red marker before his cereal, and on the last morning he crossed it off so hard he tore the paper.