for a loop. Most of my life I had hated Dodge. From the beginning he had embodied everything I hoped not to be, and the older I got, the deeper grew my antipathy for him. But recent events had shown him in a different light from what I was used to. When Jill was bleeding to death, Dodge was the one fast on his feet, helping me get her in the car. When I found Elias in the barn, it was Dodge who didn’t get hysterical but instead called for emergency services—something we never did around here—stayed calm and kept the women back from his body. At every turn Dodge commanded a sense of order and authority.
And it was a damn good thing, because under stress all I could see were the ways I had failed in the task of becoming a man. My failure as a provider had nearly cost Jill and TJ their lives. In the chaos of it, I blamed Elias but showed no leadership. And then on the terrible morning when I found my brother laid out on the filth-covered floor of the barn, his limp arms and missing face making him look like a scarecrow made of blood, what was the first thing I had done? I admitted defeat, and shouted for Dodge.
I sat on the hard dirt outside the campfire ring and rested my back against a fallen tree. The lake glittered just ahead. It was amazing to look at—a flat silver pool set deep into the black earth that crumbled at its edges like cake. I shoved the hair out of my eyes and sighed from the bottom of my lungs.
After a minute, Dodge came over and sat down beside me. He wore a ball cap with a fishing hook looped into the brim. His dirt-worn jeans were slung low and held up by a leather belt that had seen better days, but still carried an army of items at the ready: keys, buck knife, Leatherman tool.
“Fishing’s gonna be good,” he said. “I can feel it in the air. They’ll be jumping.”
I nodded and twisted a green stick until it split open into threads.
“It’s gotta beat my last big fishing trip, for sure.”
“How do you know?”
Dodge grinned. Beneath the brim of his ball cap his eyes crinkled up at the corners, and his missing side tooth exposed a dark hole. “Told Candy I was coming up here and then took my ass straight to the clinic. Got snipped, checked into a motel, spent three days with an ice pack on my balls and drove home. Bought some fish at the market on the way back and stuck ’em in the cooler for her. Done and done.”
I took a moment to process all this, then burst into a laugh. “You got a vasectomy?”
“Sure did. I got all the kids I can handle. Don’t you ever tell her, though. She’d shit a brick.”
“No kidding. She’s always telling Jill how we need to have this ‘full clip of babies’ or something.”
“Quiver-full family. She can want it all damn day, but somebody’s got to pay for it. The day I tap my maple trees and money runs out like the slots in Atlantic City, then me and God will have a talk. Till then, he can want me to have thirty kids, and I can want a nice camping trailer, and he and I can call it even.”
I laughed hard. “Well, your secret’s safe with me.”
“You ready to do some fishing?”
“Yeah, sure. I warn you, I’m not very good at it.”
Dodge clapped me on the back. “Comes as no surprise, boy.”
* * *
I kept in good spirits through the time spent fishing and into the night, but over the next couple of days my thoughts got bleaker and bleaker. Dodge seemed to sense this, but it also didn’t seem to surprise him—after all, that was the whole reason we were here in the woods. My brother had died. I needed to grieve. I’d get it all out of my system and return home ready to face life without Elias. I wasn’t sure how that was possible, but it was the goal.
On our second-last night there, we ran out of beer. The next morning after breakfast Dodge set out to replenish the supply. After he drove off I scraped the skillet from breakfast and buried the food scraps to keep animals away. I pulled off my dirty T-shirt and exchanged it for the one I’d left drying on