Free The Youth & Young Loves of Oliver Wade: Stories by Ben Monopoli Page B

watched him walk back up the slip
toward the truck. He was rubbing his spine with one hand, the place just above
his butt where he’d had back surgery
last year. I wondered if he’d tweaked something getting the boat down.
    “Dad, hold on,”
I called, tugging the boat back onto the concrete enough to keep it from
floating away and then jogging up the slip. I found him trying to shut the tailgate
with his knee while balancing the heavy oars across his shoulder. I took them
from him, then put my palm on the underside of the tailgate and lifted as he
was lifting . I don’t think he noticed .

 
    Water lapped
the flat front of the boat while I rowed. I always rowed; rowing ha d always been my job .
I rowed fast in the general direction of his pointing, and soon my shining
biceps were strain ing my
t-shirt sleeves. I hoped he was noticing. I liked my muscles; they made me feel
good, secure, someone to be reckoned with no matter who I was.
    The lake was quiet. There was no one else here as far as I
could see, only us and the water striders that skittered across the surface on
needle-thin legs. When I was younger we often had to share the lake with lots
of other boaters, but over the years many had stopped coming. The lake had
grown weedy and too full of the types of fish nobody wanted to catch. We hadn’t
been here in a long time either. I wondered why he had wanted to come.
    My dad casted
here and there; he never seemed to have a strategy. He would watch the bobber
for a minute or two and then reel it in regardless of whether it had bobbed,
though it often did. Within a half hour he’d caught a couple of kivvers, thrown
them back.
    On one cast I
saw him wince—maybe because it was a bad cast, but probably because his
back hurt. The line went half as far as he was probably aiming for, and ended up stuck in a
patch of lily pads. He worked the pole for a minute trying to get it free, then
he sighed and said, “We’re gonna have to go over there.”

 
    I rowed us
while he reeled in the slack that grew in the line. It was a sunny day, hot but
not extreme, with a touch of breeze, enough to cool you but not enough to push
the boat. When we arrived at the patch h e handed me his pole and then, leaning over the side of the boat, he
started pulling at lily pads. I leaned the other way to balance us , though in flat-bottom boats like this tipping was practically
impossible.
    “Goddamnit,”
he grunted. “Can’t see where it’s hooked.” One hand went to his back while the
other yanked at weeds.
    He wasn’t
enjoying himself very much, I could tell—his back hurt and now he was
going to lose a lure somewhere in th at slippery green tangle—but I didn’t get the
sense that he wanted to go back to the truck. He had wanted to come out here
with me today; the fishing may have been an excuse. It seemed reasonable that if there were mother
miles, there were father miles too. Maybe they weren’t quite as long—cat
years to dog years—but they were there. I wonder ed if he felt they
had always been there.
    While I
watched him, thin and struggling, I began to feel like I should tell him about me right here in this boat,
on this lake .For
the first time it felt possible not to do it with a speech, not to wait for the car ride tomorrow, not to say it to the backs of my parents’ heads while we drove, so near to being safely an hour of mother miles
and father miles away .
    He heaved a
mass of lily pads up into the boat—their stems pop-pop-popped as they
snapped beneath the bubbly surface—and pulled them onto his lap. Slimy
green stems dangled against his legs and shoes.
    “You’re
getting wet, Dad.”
    “This is a
good lure.”
    I knew I’d be prouder of myself if I told him here, if I did
it face to face and man to man, if I acted as strong as I looked and as strong
as I wanted to be. Prouder if I found I didn’t need to act , if I was simply up to it . Then the hardest part of my life
would be over. Forever after, no