Caleb held her in the water at the ramp with his hand under her belly, facing her into the current, until her tail kicked and she slid out of his fingers and was gone into the green. He watched the place where she had been for a long time.
“She was six two,” he said.
“She was,” I said.
“Last week I caught a three-pounder off the bank and thought that was huge.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Dad, is Uncle Rick a liar?”
I sat down on the concrete beside my son, because that was a fair question and I owed him a fair answer.
“Your Uncle Rick made a bad call,” I said. “I think he knew it was wrong while he was making it. I don’t know why yet. But you caught that fish, you caught it alone, and nobody gets to take that out of your hands, not even the man with the microphone.”
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“Everybody’s going to think I cheated.”
“Everybody who was there saw you land her. Everybody who wasn’t will hear it from somebody who was.”
That was true, but he was twelve, and it didn’t help much.
We drove home with the jon boat on a borrowed trailer behind the truck and a silence in the cab I could have cut with a fillet knife. Caleb watched the hills go by out the window. Halfway home he said, in a small voice, “It was the best day of my life, until the last part.”
I pulled over on the shoulder of Highway 270 and sat there with the engine ticking, because I couldn’t see the road.
My wife Dana was on shift at the hospital in Hot Springs, twelve hours, a nurse. I texted her one line: “Caleb caught a 6-2. Rick threw it out.” She called from the break room anyway and listened to all of it. “Do not do anything in front of that boy you’d be ashamed for him to repeat,” she said. “But do not let this go either.”
I should say something about my sister, because I know how this sounds.
Lorna is two years older than I am, and she raised me, in a way, after our dad left when I was nine and Mom took a second job at the poultry plant in Mena. She taught me to tie my shoes and drive a stick and fish.
She is the reason I fish at all. When she married Rick Bohannon in a church in Mount Ida, I was the groomsman who cried too hard at the reception, because I thought she had found a good man.
He was a good man, mostly. For sixteen years he was good to her, and good to Brady, and loud and generous at every cookout. He coached Little League. He drove a school bus on the side. He ran the weigh scale, and he cared more about that club than almost anything.
That is exactly why it hurt. I could have lived with it from a stranger.
Lorna called that night. I let it ring through twice, and then I answered in the kitchen with the light off.
“Travis, I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what happened out there.”
“You were standing right there, Lorna.”
There was a long silence. I could hear the television behind her, and Brady’s voice, and then a door closing.
“I know where I was standing,” she said, and her voice was very small. “I’ve been trying to figure out why I didn’t say a single word.”