there. Makes me feel like a kid. Doesn’t help you’re so tall.”
Crouching down, I ask, “Is this better?”
Aidy bumps her shoulder into mine. “Yep.”
Her red and white bobber dips almost immediately.
“Think I got something,” she says, slowly reeling. “Oh, yeah.”
She reels faster, pulling and reeling and pulling and reeling, until a little Blue Gill rises from the water, attached to her hook. He flops around and she carefully reaches for him.
“Aw, he’s so tiny,” she says, gently pulling the hook from his mouth. Leaning down, she lets him go.
There’s a tug on the end of my line, and it feels sizable. I don’t waste any time reeling mine in and am silently pleased when I spot a good-sized crappie on the end. This’ll be good for frying. A couple more of these and we’ll have ourselves a nice dinner tonight.
I grab the stringer from the tackle box, and from the corner of my eye, I see Aidy baiting her hook. For a brief moment, I’m sucked into a distant memory. I took Kerenza here once, despite the fact that I knew damn well she wasn’t outdoorsy. She hated the fresh water. She hated the mosquitos and the pine-scented air. She hated the crickets and thought the quietude was borderline disturbing. Most of the time she’d hole up inside, sitting in front of a fan and flipping through the latest issue of Vogue and complaining about the lack of cell service every chance she got.
“So you’re the oldest of five boys?” Aidy asks out of nowhere.
“Right.”
“I can’t imagine having five sons. I’d probably go insane. My aunt had three boys. I used to babysit them and they were bouncing off the walls constantly. So crazy. I don’t know how your parents did it, but kudos to them.”
Smirking quietly, I nod. “Yeah. We were pretty crazy. Mom kept us in line though. Most of the time.”
“What about your dad?”
I pause, staring at a soft ripple of water ahead. “He wasn’t really around. And when he was, he was drunk.”
Aidy turns to me, her stare heavy. “I’m sorry.”
Shrugging, I brush it off. “It’s okay. He’s been gone a long time now. His liver quit on him by the time I hit junior high. Honestly don’t remember that much about him. Feels like forever ago.”
“I feel the same way about my dad sometimes,” I say. “But he’s alive and well. Living it up in Kansas City, Kansas with his new family.”
“New family?”
“Yeah. He didn’t waste any time replacing us after he left Mom,” she says. “Even produced a couple of new kids, both daughters, with his new wife. We get Christmas cards, and sometimes he’ll call when he remembers a birthday, but we’ve pretty much gone our separate ways.”
“That’s terrible. You’re his daughter.”
Aidy laughs. “Yeah. It is pretty terrible when I say it out loud. Jesus, he’s an asshole.”
“Do you keep in touch with your half-sisters?”
She shakes her head. “I’ve only met them a handful of times in my life. His new wife keeps them on a short leash. She’s one of those helicopter moms. Never lets them out of her sight. Kind of makes it challenging to get to know people that way, you know?”
I slip another worm on my hook and laugh through my nose. “Growing up, I always wanted one of those helicopter moms. Don’t know why. I guess maybe we always want what we don’t have.”
“Preach.”
“My mother worked two jobs for as long as I can remember. She never made it to any of my games. Fed us frozen dinners most nights. Taught us how to do our own laundry by the time we each turned eight.”
“Interesting.” I feel her gaze on me. “I’m sure she was just doing what she had to do to keep food on the table. Can’t imagine it’s cheap to feed five growing boys.”
“Yeah, no. She was a great mother,” I say. “Never missed a birthday or a holiday. Made dinner on Sundays and invited half the neighborhood. Encouraged us to follow our dreams, no matter how ridiculous they were at the time. She was just kind of in survival mode all those years.”
“How is she now? Only working one job, I hope?”
Laughing, I say, “Yeah. She’s retired now. She was a schoolteacher for thirty-five years, so she has a pension. She quit waiting tables at night as soon as my youngest brother graduated high school. She’s good now.”
“Where are you from?” she asks.
“Jersey,” I say,
“You don’t have an accent.”
“We don’t all talk like wise