Catch & Release (4 page)

Mom is very concerned that I not get thirsty while I'm fishing because she doesn't trust me to avoid temptation. Temptation in this case being water, which there is usually plenty of wherever trout are found. Beautiful, sparkly water. Trout are seriously picky about where they will live. They like water that is cold and clear—purer in some ways than anything that ever comes out of a faucet. Considering all that, it might seem completely reasonable to flop down and guzzle right out of a trout stream. Wrong. Unless a person wants to lose weight overnight with raging diarrhea caused by beaver fever. I am not in a position to lose weight. Thanks to MRSA, I weigh exactly as much as when I was twelve, boobless and scrawny.

So once again my mom's anxiety is not
entirely
irrational, just mostly.

I have plenty of time to think about that while I am waiting for Odd.

The sun comes up. All the way up. I drink coffee sitting on the porch step. A lot of coffee. I have time to process the coffee and visit the toilet. When Dad gets up, Mom makes me a second breakfast of pancakes and little pig sausages, which is nice because eating gives me something to do while I'm waiting. The sun swings around the sky. Lunchtime comes, and Mom calls me in to sit at the table so my chicken soup won't spill.

Then I go and crash on the couch for my afternoon monster fix. Something that looks like a rogue houseplant terrorizes a girl in a car. She shoots it a whole bunch of times. I doubt that bullets will have any effect, but at that moment I hear tires crunching gravel in the driveway. I can also hear Mom's half-running footsteps to the front door while I pull myself into an upright position and ready for takeoff. I know Mom was wishing Odd would never show up. I'd heard her and Dad go around about it last night. Mom was against me going. Dad thought I should: “She needs to do
something
!” That was the last word on the matter yesterday, but today, if Odd hadn't shown up, that would have been fine with Mom.

“Well hi, Odd honey,” says Mom, managing to remind me, and probably Odd, that we are only children and she is The Mom.

“Missus Furnas!” Odd is smiling and charming and able to grease the gears of etiquette with a pound of cool butter. “I'm sorry I'm late. I couldn't find anybody to take care of Penny.” He opens the door of a big silver-blue car and a squirrelly little dog comes rushing out. It bounds right past him and makes beeline for my mom. Once it gets there, it slithers around her legs a bunch of times before it squats to pee practically on her foot. Mom ignores it mightily.

My mom is not a fan of little dogs. She is not a fan of cats. She is not a fan of goldfish. She grew up on a ranch and is of the opinion that animals have a place and that place is not in her house.

“I brought her chow and her bed,” says Odd while he drags those things out of the backseat and brings them to the porch.

“Hey Polly, since we are getting such a late start, I thought we'd go ahead and spend a night or two out, you know? So we won't miss the best times to fish. . . . I saw your dad down at the Loaf'n'Jug—goin' to give some baybeeze to some laydeeze,” Odd says with a wink meant for the whole TV audience, “And he said that sounded like a plan. Did he call you?”

No, my dad did not call me—or my mom. I can see she doesn't think this is a plan at all—not at all. But it is kind of out of her hands, and she knows it. Odd has managed to offend her three ways in less than five minutes.

 

1) He showed up.

2) He made a vulgar joke about my dad, the large-animal vet who will spend most of the day artificially inseminating somebody's cows.

3) He went over her head to my dad—like my dad made the decisions.

 

So, under her perfectly still exterior, Mom is seething. Come to think of it, Odd has offended her four ways.

 

4) That damn dog.

 

Odd trails after me as I go downstairs to get my sleeping bag and tent from the rec room closet.

“Shwuuuu, whwuuu, Snow White, I am your father.”

Odd is staring at the cardboard cutout of Darth Vader standing by the ping-pong table. Behind the villain is a mural my mom painted for me when I was little: Snow White and her forest animal friends. Come to think of it, it is a little weird for those two to be together. But I don't think about that, not really. Things like that become invisible when a person sees them all the time.

“Shwuuu, shwuuu, shwuuu . . . You don't know the power of the dark side.” Then Odd asks, “Why Snow White? Why not Princess Leia? You seem more like a Leia—or Princess Peach.”

“I'm just bringing my one-man tent.” I say. I'm not going to talk about princesses. The mirror I took out of my bathroom is in the way, and it topples over onto the floor when I push it with my foot. Seven years of bad luck—or is it thirteen? It's neither; the mirror didn't break. The worst luck happens when the mirror doesn't break. When I pick it up and move to the other side of the closet I see my face. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the prettiest of them all? Not me, thanks for asking.

“You don't have a one-princess tent?”

I have a moment when I agree with what Mom never said: better to just stay home. But then Darth Vader catches my eye, and I remember what my dad said last night: I need to do
something
. I might as well start with fishing.

“Should I bring a camp stove? Fuel? Cooking gear?”

“Naw. Gotcha covered. We're burning daylight.”

Seriously, he can say
that
, to me, after I've been waiting for him for seven freaking hours?

 

My mom is still standing on the front lawn. Odd's little dog is still running back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. It doesn't pay any attention to Odd. It seems fixated on my mom. My mom is basically refusing to look at it. She's just staring at Odd's boat of a car.

It is a very unsuitable fishing car. It has a third of an inch of clearance. It is freshly washed and scratch-free. It looks like it gets about 12 mpg highway. It is exactly the sort of car that dealers declare has only been driven by old ladies to church. Well, if it gets banged up or gets its guts ripped out, it isn't my problem. I check in my vest pocket for my waterproof box with my phone, I.D., fishing license, and debit card inside. I'm covered in case of disaster—at least as far as taking this dumb car off the blacktop goes. We toss my crap in the backseat. I wave. Mom smiles a pulled-flat smile. Odd's little dog runs back and forth, but it doesn't chase the car down the driveway as we pull out.

I turn my head a little so I can see my mom in the rearview mirror. She's just standing there like a lawn ornament. Beside her, on the porch, I see I forgot to grab the little blue cooler full of peanut butter and iced tea. I'm on my own. I realize this is the first time I've been more than a hundred yards away from Mom since I left the hospital.

Bye, Mom.

 

The driver calls the tune on the radio. No argument there. Just like there is no argument about who has to open the gate.

There are rules. There is an etiquette. The driver does not open the gate. The other person does—even if the other person is an eighty-six-pound pregnant granny and the gate is one of those half-assed contraptions made out of three strands of barbwire and a couple of unpeeled twisty lodgepoles. It's kind of hilarious: the same guy who makes a double-quick step to open the door of the Loaf'n'Jug for a stranger will sit and wait for his girlfriend to drag a gate open and closed on the way to a fishing spot. At least that's my experience when I was Bridger Morgan's girlfriend. It's just the way of it.

The gate question isn't really in play at the moment because we are enjoying a little wide-open blacktop. It could all be good but, sadly, the driver calls the tune even on the interstate. Odd reaches over and there is about fifteen seconds of serious godly talk . . . static . . . some South-will-rise-again twang . . . static, and he settles on—I wish I brought my MP3 player, what was I thinking?—local sports talk.

“My brother—he's on two hours a day,” says Odd.

“. . . lost just two games last year, both of them against state champion . . .” says the radio.

“Your brother?”

“This is his show.”

“. . . . returns a wealth of talent on both sides of the ball . . .” says the radio.

“I thought your brother sold equipment at your dad's . . .”

“Tsst. I wanna hear this,” says Odd and cranks up the volume. Well that's my cue. It isn't essential that I know about Odd's brother, who I thought sold combines and lawn tractors. I don't really care. I was just pretending to care because pretending to care is what a nice girl does in a conversation. If that's not required, hey! I'm warm. I'm in a car with cushy deluxe seats. I can feel the velvety upholstery on my pretty cheek. I shut my eyes. My eye. The velvet carries a whiff of old happiness, of nickels and vanilla perfume and cigarette crumbs like the inside of an old woman's purse. I go to sleep.

 

The crunch of gravel under the tires wakes me up.

“Where are we?” I'm confused. It doesn't look like a fishing access.

“Prairie dog town,” says Odd.

“You miss the turnoff for the fishing access?”

“Haven't come to it yet.”

OK. I'll bite. “Where are we going?”

“Hole below the Natural Bridge on the Boulder.”

“Umm . . . why?” It's a long way to drive to go fishing. There are easier places. We must have driven past a bunch of them already.

“Why not? You got a better idea?”

I got nothing.

“Come on Polly, let's see us some doggies,” says Odd, and he pivots around and pushes himself out of the driver's seat. There is a technique to getting out, I see. Odd has been developing coping skills and new strategies for his new condition. I step out too, into the bright light and dust of the prairie dog town. The wind is blowing the grit around. I stand beside the big interpretive sign like they always have at the state parks, which explains prairie dogs are an endangered species. I'm not really interested in what it says, but it cuts the wind.