headed), but I didn’t complain. Instead, I listened to my father whistle, and I imagined how awesome it would be to show my fishing pole to my best friend, Logan, who lived next door, and who couldn’t stop bragging about the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 game he’d gotten for his birthday.
After about ten minutes the woods opened up to the edge of a highway. My father held tight to my hand, looked both ways, and then jogged across the road. Water sparkled, like the way my mother’s ring sometimes made light dance on the ceiling. There was a fence, and a white sign with black letters.
“What’s NO TRESPASSING?” I asked, sounding it out.
“It means nothing,” my father said. “No one owns the land. We’re all just borrowing it.”
He lifted me over the fence and then hopped it himself, and we sat side by side at the edge of the reservoir. My father’s fishing rod was rusty where mine was gleaming. And mine had a red and white bobber on the line, like a tiny buoy. I sat on my knees, then on my bottom, and then got up on my knees again. “The first rule of fishing,” he told me, “is to be still.”
He showed me how to release the hook from the eye where it was safely tucked, and then he reached into the plastic bag to pull out a worm. “Thank you,” he said under his breath.
“For what?”
He looked at me. “My Native American friends say an animal that gives its life to feed another animal should be honored for the sacrifice,” my father said, and he speared the worm onto the hook.
It kept wriggling. I thought I might throw up.
My father knelt behind me, and put his arms around me. “You push the button here,” he said, pressing my thumb against the Zebco reel, “and you hold it. Swing from right to left.” With his body flush against mine, he swayed us in tandem, and at the last minute he let go of the button so that that line arched over the water, a silver parabola. “Want to try?”
I could have done it myself. But I wanted to feel my dad’s heartbeat again, like a drum between my shoulder blades. “Can you show me one more time?” I asked.
He did, twice. And then he picked up his own fishing rod. “Now, when the bobber starts going up and down, don’t pull. There’s a difference between a nibble and taking the bait. When it goes down and stays down, that’s when you pull back and start reeling in.”
I watched him thank another worm and thread his hook. I held my rod so tightly my knuckles were white. There was a wind coming out of the east, and that made the bobber bounce around on the water a little bit. I worried that I might miss a fish because I thought it was the breeze. But I also worried that I’d reel in my line too early; that my worm would have given its life for nothing.
“How long does it take?” I asked.
“Rule number two of fishing,” my father said. “Be patient.”
Suddenly there was a yank on my line, as if I had woken up from a dream in the middle of a game of tug-of- war. I nearly dropped the pole. “Itsafishitsafish,” I cried, getting to my feet, and my father grinned.
“Then you’d better bring it in, buddy,” he said. “Nice and slow…”
Before he could help me, though, he got a fish on his line, too. He stood up as the fish zipped further into the middle of the reservoir, bending the tip of his pole like a divining rod. Meanwhile, my fish broke through the surface of the water with a splash. I had reeled as far as I could; the fish was thrashing and flailing inches away from my chest.
“What do I do now?” I shouted.
“Hold on,” my father instructed. “I’ll help you as soon as I get mine in.”
The fish was a perch, tiger-striped, with tiny jagged edges along its fins. Its eyes were glassy and wild, like those of the porcelain doll that used to belong to my mom’s grandma and that she said was too old and special to do anything but sit on a shelf. I tried twice to grab the perch, but it slithered and flapped out of my grasp.
But my father had told me to hold on, and so, even though I was afraid those spikes on its fins would poke into me, even though the fish smelled like the inside of a rubber boot and slapped me with its tail, I did.
My fist closed around the fish, which was no bigger than six inches long, but which seemed huge. My fingers didn’t fit all the way around its belly, and it was still struggling against me and trying to dislodge the hook in its mouth, which broke through the silvery skin of its throat and made me feel sick to my stomach. I squeezed a little harder, to make sure it wouldn’t get away.
But I guess I squeezed a little too hard.
The eyes of the perch bulged, and its entrails squirted from its bottom. Horrified, I dropped my fishing rod and stared at my hand, covered with fish guts, and at the dead perch still hooked to the line.
I couldn’t help it; I burst into tears.
I was crying for the fish and the worm, which had both died for no good reason. I was crying because I had screwed up. I was crying because I thought this meant my father wouldn’t want to fish with me again.
My father looked at me, and at the remains of the perch. “What did you
“I killed it,” I sobbed.
“Well,” he pointed out. “You were going to kill it anyway.”
This did not make me feel any better. I cried harder, and my father looked around, uncomfortable.
He was not the parent who held me when I was sick, or who calmed me down when I had a nightmare-that was my mother. My father was as out of his element with a terrified kid as I was with a fishing pole.
“Don’t cry,” he said, but I had crossed the line of panic that small children sometimes do, where my skin was hot and my breath came in gasps, a punctuation of hysteria. My nose was running, and that made me think of the slime of the fish between my fingers, and that made me cry even harder.
He should have hugged me. He should have said that it didn’t matter and that we could try again.
Instead, he blurted out, “Did you hear the joke about the roof? No? Well, it’s probably over your head anyway.”
I don’t know what made him tell a joke. A bad joke. But it was so awkward, so different from what I needed at that moment, that it shocked me into silence. I hiccuped, and stared up at him through spiked lashes.
“Why do doctors use red pens?” he said, the words fast and desperate. “In case they need to draw blood.”
I wiped my nose on my sleeve, and he took off his shirt and used it to gently wipe my face and settle me on his lap. “Guy walks into a bar with a salamander on his shoulder,” my father said. “The bartender says, ‘What’s his name?’ And the guy says, ‘Tiny. Because he’s my newt.’”
I didn’t understand any of the jokes; I was too young. And I’d never really thought of my father as a closet comedian. But his arms were around me, and this time there was no casting lesson involved.
“It was an accident,” I told him, and my eyes filled up again.
My father reached for the knife he carried in his pocket and snipped the line, kicked the remains of the fish into the water, where I wouldn’t have to see it anymore. “You know what the dad buffalo said to his kid when he went to work in the morning? ‘Bye, son.’” He wiped his hands on his jeans. “Rule number three of fishing: what happens at the pond stays at the pond.”
“I don’t know any jokes,” I said.
“My grandfather used to tell them to me when I got scared.”
I could not imagine my father, who thought nothing of wrestling with a wolf, being scared.
He helped me to my feet and picked up my rod and his. The wisps of loose fishing line flew through the air like the silk from a spider.
“Did your dad tell you jokes, too?” I asked.
My father took a step away from me then, but it felt like a mile. “I never knew my dad,” he said, turning away from me.
It was, I realized, the one thing we had in common.
I’m sitting in the dark in my father’s room, the green glow from the monitors behind him casting shadows on the bed. My elbows rest on my knees, my chin is cupped in my hands. “How do you know Jesus likes Japanese food?” I murmur.
No reply.
“Because he loves miso.”
