Free Hothouse by Chris Lynch Page B

business would ever be necessary.
    It was a great location, that shop, with big front windows facing onto two big streets because it sat on a prominent corner, an arrowhead of a building shooting right through the heart of the intersection. Now it’s a cell phone shop.
    My mother went to see Mrs. Kotsopolis at the hospital, asked me if I wanted to go. I didn’t. She brought a lemon cake she made from scratch, but they wouldn’t let her in.
    Every Labor Day I would go fishing with my father, if he were not on duty, and he was rarely on duty because that was our day. It was the one date he actually turned the world over to get away from the job because we decided that was our day—more than Christmas or my birthday—that was not to be broken. Labor Day meant summer was over and I was about to go back to school and so in a meaningful way the calendar was turning over and we were both noticing that. The one Labor Day I remember he did have to work, he wound up saving a kid’s life, pulling him out of our very river and squeezing the water right up out of his lungs. It was on the news and everything. Christ, I hated that kid.
    It was, and it is, the intake of breath before going back up into the outside world for another year.
    â€œAnother year,” he said to me, last year, the last year, as he cast his line way out over the churning river, in the shadow of Ozzie’s Bridge.
    â€œAnother year, Dad,” I said, doing the same.
    â€œAnother step, further out there,” he said.
    â€œOut where?”
    â€œOut there,” he repeated, without any other signal.
    â€œI guess,” I said.
    â€œSoon enough, Russ, you’re probably not going to want to do this anymore.”
    â€œDon’t be stupid,” I snapped.
    I was really angry, that he said that. But he just laughed at me for being angry, for being a kid.
    This year, the first year of out there , I wake up to a Labor Day I just want to skip. I feel like while I was sleeping somebody crept in and pressed a bazooka flush against my chest and just blew me out. I feel it, it is nothing there and it is also huge and it is a nothing that hurts brilliant and new like hurt was just concocted.
    There is a knock at my door. I can’t even recall the last time there was a knock at my door.
    It sounds so strange, so foreign and out of place here, and now I sit up, stupid, staring, working out just exactly what a knock at a door is.
    There is another knock, because I am taking too long working it out, so I haul myself over there and open the door with great effort.
    DJ is standing there. With a fishing rod.
    I should be ecstatic. Any normal person would be ecstatic.
    I lose it instead. I am a seventeen-year-old male, a man, a fireman for christsake, and I cannot stop doing what I do not want to do. I want to say hello old friend. I want to say, what a pleasant surprise. I want to slap DJ on the shoulder and talk about stupid frigging fish. I try, actually, to do each of those things, but words don’t come out of me and tears do, and I actually cover my mouth and stare at him for a while, silent and mental until it seems like half a day’s good fishing has been lost.
    DJ is patient. He has always been that.
    â€œGot it together now?” he says as I dig in the back of the closet for my gear.
    â€œYeah,” I say, gesturing for him to lead the way out.
    â€œGood, ’cause if you keep that shit up I’m not going fishing with you.”
    â€œWhy are you going fishing with me?”
    â€œSomebody’s got to go with you, right? It’s the day. Labor Day, right? Can’t have you sitting around crying all Labor Day can we?”
    â€œNo. We can’t have that.”
    And so we don’t. DJ, who never went on these fishing dates with me and my dad, who never went fishing at all, as far as I know, who never even ate fish in my company, turns out to be about the second best fishing companion you could