OCR Text |
Show 204 "We're good. We're fine," Hunt said. "She's doing all sorts of things. She's alive and moving." "That was really hard on mother and myself." Hunt's father looked at Hunt squarely. "It was hard on us," Hunt said. "Well, I know, certainly, that it was hard on Leah." And Hunt felt like a witness again. A visitor. A stranger even to his own history, as it turns his head, passing, on a street. "This should work," Hunt said, and he handed his father the readied fishing rod. "All the knots are tight." They picked their way down the trail, through the woods to the beach, Hunt leading, in silence. When they arrived, they could see Sean, nearly at the top of the point casting with a sweet and enviable intensity. "Wonderful boy," Hunt's father said. "Yes," Hunt said. Hunt's father asked that Hunt let him fish by himself. "Just as soon set my own pace," he said. Hunt agreed and strolled to the edge of the water with his pole and tackle box, settling between the others. Sean spotted him. He bent and held a stringer up with a trout already dangling from it. Hunt smiled then felt jolted, stopped at his son's intensity. It touched and penetrated him. To want. To want something -- a fish, an image, the grace to properly care, to feel abandon -- to want anything with an untouched passion, always bore, didn't it?, that aching print of absence. Always, there was the empty canvas. Just becuase you needed to paint . . .! Legacies. So there would be ghostly hollows in Sean's life: Blood to blood |