“I thought I’d find you here. How are you holding up?”
“Can we please not talk about Dad for just 30 seconds, or how I’m doing?”
“Sure.” Alan crouched down and sat next to his brother on the pier. “Caught anything?”
“Not a nibble. You know how it is here. How’s the play coming, by the way? You open soon, don’t you?”
“Well, it’s a piece of shit. But I guess there’s no surprise there.”
“I’ll never know why you got into the business. It’s no way to live.”
“For the money and the glamour, mostly.”
David laughed. “It’s a shame Dad couldn’t see it,” he said softly, after a moment.
“I doubt he would’ve showed up one way or another.” Alan picked up a small pebble and skipped it across the water. “It’s weird. I hated him for so long, you know. Yesterday I was cleaning out his closet. I found a bag of weed in there and a Peter Frampton album.”
“You found a bag of weed?”
“And I never knew he liked Peter Frampton. I like Peter Frampton. It’s like, I hated him for so long, but I hardly even knew the guy.”
“You found a bag of weed?”
“Oh relax, David. I’m sure even some of your country club friends toke up every now and then if you can believe that.”
“I don’t think you know shit about my friends. But that’s really not the issue anyway. This is Dad we’re talking about. Dad, who I don’t think I ever saw with so much as a cup of coffee, let alone a beer or a drug.”
“Well, we’re all a fucking enigma on some level, aren’t we?”
David didn’t respond. He just kicked at the water with his bare toes. “It’s nice out, though,” he said after a while.
“Yeah.”
“It’s weird to have this happen on such a nice weekend. It’s stupid, but I always imagined these things happened in the rain, like in a movie. You know, everyone in black, a great parade of umbrellas walking towards these somber looking black cars.”
“I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about it before.”
“It just feels odd,” David said, and reeled his line back in. “You know, I always hated fishing as a kid,” he said after a moment. “I resented it every time Dad brought us out here. Anytime he tried to bring us anywhere, really. But I love it now. It’s so peaceful, so simple. I wonder how much of that actually goes back to Dad, how much of it is nostalgia. Would I still like to fish if I hadn’t had those terrible experiences as kid?”
“All I know is that I still fucking hate fishing.”
“I guess the strangest part is that such a big influence on our lives is gone now.”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s been gone for longer than you think. I’ve been thinking about Maya, you know, and how she must think of me. When you become a father… when you suddenly have to become this person worthy of emulation, part of you gets lost to the kids. Maybe, it’s for the better.”
“I know Jenny just worships me right now. It’s kind of scary sometimes. You think we scared the shit out of Dad like that?”
“I guess we’ll never know,” Alan said. He flicked at the end of David’s pole absentmindedly. “Sometimes I think that the moments we say goodbye are life at its most intense. I’ll probably always remember this day, you know? All the particulars about it. All the sounds and smells. How quiet it is everywhere. Everything.” He placed his hand on the warm wood of the pier, and watched as a ladybug walked up into his palm. “How long did you take off work, anyway?”
“Just the weekend.”
“Just the weekend?” Alan said. He paused for a moment. “Are you sure you don’t need more time off?”
“At my salary? Alan, if they realized they could survive without me for so much as a week, I’d be out of there. Anyway Jenny is still sick.” David recast his line into the still surface of the water. “Christ, we’re all just ticking time bombs, aren’t we?”
“Don’t say that.”
“Well, it’s true. Dad ate well, exercised, didn’t drink. It didn’t matter, of course. I don’t know why we trick ourselves into thinking it matters. Every fucking thing in this world is cancer, if you give it long enough.” David began to cry a little. Alan made no gesture of sympathy. He simply waited for his brother to stop. Crying had become so commonplace in so short a period of time that David may as well have sneezed.
“Why do we have to die?” David said. There was exhaustion and defiance in his voice, as though the act of asking the question was itself a powerful gesture against the powers that demanded it in the first place.
Alan was silent for several moments. “Because it makes life matter,” he said. “Because it forces us to take stock of the gift of existence that we are, and make the most of it. Like Dad did. Like we will.”
The two brothers sat side by side, then, looking out on the still water reflecting the summer sky. Somewhere a crow cried.
"No,” David said, suddenly. “Fuck that. Fuck all that… petty cleverness. That’s all that is, you know. Petty cleverness. I'm so sick of it. I go to these parties and that's all it is. Petty cleverness, from everyone. It's just how clever or neat or witty or pessimistic or skeptical or whatever you can be, and its false and its worthless. And it’s exhausting, and I'm tired of it. Look. Just stop for a moment and look. The water is clear and still, the grass is tall. Somewhere in those trees the corpse of a fox is rotting, and somewhere under the water there are trout swimming. That's all the answer there is. That's enough.”