Page 11 of Fishing for Keeps

"I told Gary I'd decide by Tuesday," she whispers.

"The derby's Saturday."

"I know."

"Fish it with me first." I hold out my hand, palm up, the way you do when you're asking, not taking. "Whatever you decide after, I'll drive you to the signing myself and I won't make it weird. But you fish that derby, Josie-girl. You finish what Gus started. You owe him that. You owe you that."

She looks at my hand for a long, long moment. The lake glitters through the window behind her.

Then she puts her hand in mine, and she doesn't let go too fast.

She doesn't let go at all.

"Partners," she says.

"Partners," I say, and pull her in, and we stand there in the burnt-pancake smoke, holding on.

Chapter Eight

Josie

Derby morning, the whole town shows up.

The marina is chaos by seven—folding tables and coffee urns, kids from the fishing camp selling donuts, forty-some boats jockeying at the start line while an announcer tests a bullhorn. There's a banner over the registration tent: MERCURY RIDGE END-OF-SUMMER PAIRS DERBY. On the prize table sits the trophy—the Golden Gill, a spray-painted bass on a wooden base that has visibly been re-glued several times—next to a certificate for a year of free pizza.

Aileen runs the official scale, clipboard in hand, "for science." Rayna and Chrissy have made signs. Dani has made matching shirts. Joel, Ace, and Forrest are fishing it too, paired off with each other's better halves, but everybody knows what today is really about, because two docks down, Liam and Tommy Brandt are doing synchronized stretches like Olympians.

"You're going down, old man!" Liam hollers.

"You recruited a minor!" Trent hollers back.

"Scoreboard!" says Tommy, who does not yet have a scoreboard.

Trent hands me into the Lucky Penny, and just before the horn, he goes still and looks at me. Today's the day. Tomorrow's Tuesday-eve. Neither of us has said the word Gary all morning.

"Hey," he says. "Whatever happens out there—"

"Don't you dare get sentimental before the horn," I tell him. "Rule twenty-six."

He grins so wide it hurts to look at. "That's my girl."

The horn blows. The boats scatter.

And for five straight hours, we catch nothing.

I mean nothing. The lake, which has handed me fish all week like party favors, goes silent. Trent tries every spot he knows—the drowned timber, the north basin, the channel edge. Around us, radios crackle with other teams' luck. At the noon check, Liam and Tommy are leading with a six-and-a-half-pound largemouth, and Liam does a bow.

At one-thirty, Trent sets his rod down and looks at me, and for the first time all summer, he's out of jokes.

"I'm sorry, Rookie. I wanted this one for you so bad."

The sun is high and the water is glittering and somewhere behind us the town is laughing around the weigh station, and I think about Grandpa, who fished this lake for decades and never once came home unhappy.

And I know what he'd do.

"Give me the box," I say.

Trent's eyes widen as I open Gus's green tackle box and take out the copper spoon, polished bright as a new penny. My hands aren't shaking. He motors us, without a word, to the mouth of Half-Moon Cove… to the water in front of Grandpa's dock, where he taught me to cast when I was nine, where Trent taught me again at twenty-nine.