Page 550 of Summer Heat
The memories made him miss Olan deeply. “You know,” he said to Cody, “my daddy used to bring me out here sometimes. He taught me to fish, just like I’m teaching you.”
“He did? How come he doesn’t fish with you now?”
“Well, he was old,” Lance said, even though he hadn’t been. Not really. “He died a couple of months ago.”
Cody looked up at him solemnly. “Are you sad?”
“Yeah, I am sometimes.” Lance felt a tug on his line. “Hey, I think I got something.”
He reeled in a little, and sure enough, the fierce weight of a fish tugged back. “Hold on, Cody. We got us a live one.” It might be a big one, too, by the feel of it. Lance carefully reeled in a little, then let it fight and pull out the line, feeling the quick, familiar excitement of a fighting fish on his line. His mouth filled with the anticipation of lemon-drenched rainbow trout.
And beside him, Cody was filled with questions. Why didn’t he pull the fish out of the water? Why did the fish fight? Would the fish die?
Tough questions, but Lance believed in the honor of fishing. He had respect for the creatures, and respected their fight, but he had also grown up on fresh-caught trout. It was a lot more honorable, at least in his view, to come out here and face the fish himself than let somebody else butcher it for him.
Holding carefully to his pole, he knelt next to Cody and helped the boy close his hands around the pole. “Feel that tugging?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Now we’re going to bring him in.” Slowly he reeled the trout, letting Cody help him turn the reel, feeling by the fight and tension on the line that it was going to be an admirable fish indeed.
When at last Lance felt the fish near the surface of the lake, he gently took the reel from Cody’s hands and said, “Watch this. He’s gonna come out of that water and be more beautiful than anything you ever saw.”
With impeccable timing, Lance tugged—and the trout came flapping out of the water, suspended for a moment against the sunlight, silver and flashing and furiously fighting. In exhilaration, Lance whooped. The fish landed on shore. Mercifully, he hit his head on a rock and lay still immediately. Lance knelt and put his hand on the cold fish. He looked at Cody, whose bright blue eyes looked uncertain. “One thing you can do, if you want,” Lance said, “is to tell the fish thank you for giving his life to feed you.”
He waited. Cody finally knelt with fierce concentration. “Thank you,” he said, patting the trout’s silver body.
And there in the clean, crisp morning, with a 4-pound trout at his feet and a beautiful, sweet little boy at his side, Lance was struck with a fierce, all-encompassing sense of fatherhood. The emotion was so deep, Lance almost could not breathe. Love, uncom
plicated and clean and somehow healing, filled him like soda in a glass, effervescent and foaming.
“Good work, kid.”
Cody beamed at him. “What do we do with him now?”
“We’ll put him in this bucket over here, and then we’ll take him home and cook him for supper. You ever had trout baked with lemon?”
“No.”
“Mmm. You’ll love it.”
“I’m hungry.”
Lance chuckled. “Well, we have to wait on the fish, but I did bring some sandwiches and cookies. How about that?”
“Okay.”
They sat on the rocky shores of the lake, looking out at the water. Lance was surprised by the length of Cody’s attention span. He didn’t seem to need to rush and run, just sat quietly eating peanut butter and jelly. Lance was used to Curtis, who couldn’t sit still for three minutes.
And finally, it felt like the right moment to tell him. Lance had been worrying about it all day, but now his mouth just opened and he said, “Cody, what if I told you I’m your dad?”
Cody looked up. “I don’t have a dad.”
“Well, yes you do.” Lance lifted his eyebrows. “I’m your dad.”
“But I don’t have a dad,” he said again, a frown tugging his brows down thunderously. “I only have a mom.”
This wasn’t going the way he’d expected. “You haven’t had one until now,” he said. “But that’s because I didn’t know you were my little boy until now. I would have come sooner if I’d known.”
