Normally, when I had really bad grades, my mother marched into school and grilled my teacher. Sometimes this embarrassed me, and sometimes it was fun to watch. But when I showed her this grade, she just sighed.
The boredom of school stretched out beneath an overcast sky. Surviving twelve years of it seemed impossible. Without my father, life became as silent and tense as a classroom during a math quiz.
But then, four days after my mother took us to our new home—a brown house at the top of a steep driveway, on a forest road—I woke to find my father eating breakfast, my mother silently preparing our lunches on the counter. He just said hi and smiled. I sat across from him, and he told me about a lobster at his fish store that was the size of my arm, and how he’d saved it so we could eat it together. I asked if maybe it was prehistoric, and he said, “Maybe.”
Over the next few days, I expected fights, shouting, or slammed doors, but he moved in so unnoticeably it seemed planned. Our family was always verging on disaster, and then the danger passed, and very little changed.
✴
THAT FRIDAY, HE picked me up from school shortly after my mother dropped me off.
“I’m taking you fishing,” he said, his face lined and grim, as if our outing were a form of punishment. “We’ll come back in the afternoon, and I’ll leave you in the playground before she gets here. Just pretend you went to school. You won’t tell her about this, right?”
I nodded, this lie by far the most extreme ever. I loathed the idea of standing in the playground as the other kids stared and wondered where I’d been all day. But I felt guilty for having left him. I also wondered if I might get special treatment, and after a few minutes on the highway, I asked for a lesson in swearing—something I’d requested fairly often—and amazingly, he agreed.
“Fuck,” he said, “well, fuck means a lot of things. Fuck off means go away right now. Fuck you means I really hate you. Fuck just means you’re angry. You know what shit is, and damn, well, damn’s not that bad.”
“What about cocksucker?” I asked.
“You should probably stay away from that one,” he told me and then was silent. Swear words gave me the feeling that good stories did, a sense of disembodiment, of being carried away, beyond rules, beyond everything. But suddenly he said, “Your mother wants to leave, you know.”
I looked at him, but he stared at the traffic ahead.
“She wanted to abandon you guys. I barely convinced her not to.”
He finally glanced over, checking my reaction.
“If she has to go,” he said, “she can take your brother and sister, but you can stay with me. We’ll get a motor home and travel the country and do nothing but fish.”
Maybe this was why he’d moved in with us, because she’d decided she’d had enough and was planning on running away. I tried to console myself with the idea of fishing trips and that he might like me best. He rarely spent time with my sister, and my brother didn’t care for fishing. I wanted to smile, but the muscles of my face tensed up as if they were doing the thinking.
“What about school?”
“You can take a year off. It won’t change anything. You never liked school, and I didn’t either. Look at me. I didn’t need it.” He pushed his jaw forward confidently. “You don’t let yourself get picked on at school, do you?”
“No,” I lied.
“Because,” he said, “if you stay with me, I’ll make sure you’re one tough goddamn kid.”
“Really?”
“I’ll teach you how to fight. I was a good fighter. I could’ve been a boxer. I just had no direction. But I’d give you direction. I’d teach you how to kick some ass.”
An image of me came to mind, my fists swirling like bugs around a light bulb as all the school bullies fell. My father once tried to teach my brother and me to box, making us put on gloves in the living room, but my mother had been furious and he’d relented, his expression strange, almost embarrassed. It was the only time I’d seen him surrender to her anger. I struggled to believe that she was leaving. Though he was fun to be with, I couldn’t imagine a day without her. My clothes would stink and my grades would all be Fs and I’d starve to death. But then again, life with him might be very, very fun.
“Even if I learn to fight,” I asked, “can we still travel and fish?”
“Yeah.”
I was picturing our motor home climbing a mountain road and then pulling onto the gravel above a shimmering river.
He exited the highway and we soon arrived where we often fished, off the broken rocks near the Lions Gate Bridge, where everyone tried to snag salmon while keeping a lookout for the warden. He gave me my rod, but once fishing, I kept catching the lure in seaweed because I was watching the others or trying to see salmon in the water.
A damp, irregular wind blew in along the rocks. I drew my chin down and breathed into my collar. The towers of the bridge were fading into low clouds.
A man hooted. I reeled in my line and climbed onto the rocks. He’d hooked a salmon, and as he brought it close, the fish fighting wildly in the shallows, he asked my father to use a metal gaff lying near a tackle box.
My father took it and crouched at the edge of the water. He swung it as the fish thrashed. He swung three
