Matters of Faith by Kristy Kiernan

Author:Kristy Kiernan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2010-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

MARSHALL

By the time they were paddling up Fisheating Creek, the sun had warmed central Florida’s wilderness to a steamy mid-nineties and the only one who looked perfectly comfortable was Grandmother Tobias. She wore an old baseball hat with a Lykes logo on it and her gray hair foamed out the sides in frizz.

Ada had emerged from her shower looking like someone else. She hadn’t reapplied any makeup and had drawn her hair back into two low, spiky pigtails. She’d removed her eyebrow ring, and she looked about twelve years old, as innocent and clean as Meghan. She’d only rebandaged one knee, the worst one, and the other one glowed with bruises, but was no longer swollen.

Grandmother Tobias’s eyes had roamed over her and she seemed to approve of something. Marshall took a shower while she and Ada loaded up the old truck with rods and a cooler, and by the time they were jouncing down dirt roads to the edge of the creek, he could tell they had spoken enough that they were comfortable in each other’s presence. He was the one who felt like an outsider.

But now that they were in the canoe, he took over the ways he knew how, steering upriver over the tea-colored water according to Grandmother Tobias’s directions while she showed Ada how to work a fishing rod. He was surprised to see that Ada did not flinch at threading a worm onto the hook. Apparently her vegetarian reluctance to hurt any living thing didn’t extend to invertebrates, and he was torn between an uncertainty about who she really was and pride.

“Arms holdin’ up okay?” Grandmother called to him, glancing up the waterway. She pointed to a small inlet overhung by lacy cypress limbs, with an alligator sunning itself on a short bank. “See there? That’s where we’re headed. We’ll get some bluegills maybe. I’ve gotten bass there too. Your daddy caught a twelve-pounder there when he was just eleven.”

“No way,” he said, peering over the edge as they glided into the inlet.

“Don’t ever underestimate your daddy’s fishing skills, boy,” she said, adjusting Ada’s fingers on the reel and pulling her arm back, showing her how to cast lightly into the water. “He was like magic on the water.”

“Still is,” he said. “I do okay too, you know.”

“Lotta talk on the Creek,” she said. “Got to prove yourself. Now, Ada, you feel a nibble, don’t go jerkin’ it out of the water like you got a marlin on, you just let him take it before you set, and just reel, don’t jerk. I don’t feel like gettin’ hooked when it comes flyin’ out of the water. This is easy fishin’, not deep-sea fishin’.”

While his grandmother was teaching Ada, Marshall chose a rod and got busy tying a weight and sorting through the small tacklebox, settling on a four-pound spinner rather than hooking a real worm. His grandmother watched him out the corner of her eye as she got Ada used to the motion of casting, and she smiled at his choice.

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