fishing in the clouds

Fishing in the Clouds

written by CJ Nadeau &

illustrated by Ray Nolan

fishing in the clouds

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For the Kennedy Day School and everyone that makes it so wonderful.

fishing in the clouds nadeau 3

1.

Olive is fishing in the clouds again. It’s the third time this week and the twenty-second time

this month and the two-hundred eighty-eighth day this year. She’s been fishing every day since she

knew how and she has never caught a thing. Her mother asks her, “Why don’t you do something

useful and water the hydrangeas? Or massage my bunions?” Olive tells her she will after she fishes.

Her father tells her to walk the dog, but in the morning he hasn’t had enough coffee to hear her

answer and he gets home too late to talk to anyone.

Mostly, the reason Olive must go fishing is because of her grandfather, Robert Johannsen

Blezard XIX, and the eighteen Robert Johannsen Blezards that came before him. Well, except the

eleventh Robert Johannsen Blezard. He was a painter and spent all day painting fisherman

swimming in the clouds with tadpoles as shoelaces and fishing poles stuffed into his pants pockets.

No one really talks about the eleventh Robert Johannsen Blezard though and we won’t either. But it

all started when the first Robert was sitting in the grass on the smallest hill in all of the land. Really,

it was just a lump in the grass. But, he saw a great big cloud in the sky and it began to swim and he

ran and grabbed a kite and cast it into the sky. It wouldn’t catch in the wind and it didn’t take flight

the way it planned. Not to be discouraged, Robert Blezard the first went out and sat on the smallest

hill in his backyard and unlaced his sneakers, his belt, and even took the stitching out of his

mother’s hand knit sweaters to get the kite to soar higher in the clouds. Each day that Robert went

out he would cast his kite into the sky and try and catch this thing he saw. Was it a fish? Was it a

shark? Was it an astronaut? Nobody knew, but if anyone could be sure it was Robert and he was

sure that he saw something and he was determined to try and catch whatever it was.

When he had a few whippersnappers of his own, both Roberts the second and third, they

were raised on that small bump in the backyard. The twins sat on both knees while the first Robert


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would sit and they would help spool out the line. And from that age they were hooked. The Robert

Blezards are famous for catching nothing except themselves. Each one all down the line is raised on

the makeshift line and fishing in the clouds. It’s just the Blezard way. And that’s not to say they

haven’t done anything. No, they make plenty of time inventing just about everything we use today.

The hair scrunchy, Christmas tree stands, and even portable pencil sharpeners. And they tie their

rods to the stump in the backyard and master music too. Why, all the way down the block you can

hear them all jamming away from sun up to sun down and even then it won’t stop. No, at least one

of those pesky Blezards will be jamming away on just about anything he can find. Yessiree, Bob.

That’s the chorus they sing over and over again all day and night long they’re fishing. Yessiree,

Bob.


At their greatest, there could be eight or nine Bobs in the backyard fishing, grilling, or

playing. They were quite a site and always smoking cigars and eating cereal. Grilled cereal! That’s

their worst invention, but they swear to their family recipe and you can still find it in some drive

through windows or on the bottom of super market shelves.

All that great tradition ended though with Robert Johannsen XX. He changed his name as

soon as he could to Thomas Smith and he became an accountant and only wears white button down

shirts with black neck ties. Even when he comes home he puts on black sweatpants and a white t-

shirt. The only color is the yellow under the arms from years of wear. Because if Tom Smith

believes in anything it’s that change is strange and if there are no holes, he tells his wife, why throw

it out? Her name is Jane Smith and together Tom and Jane had Olive and it wasn’t until Robert

Johannsen Blezard the nineteenth became ill and moved in with the Smiths that Olive began

fishing. That was six years ago now when the doctors told him he had only a month left. So Tom

said, “well, it’s only a month. It’ll go by before we know it.”

“Surely,” Jane said.

And Olive, back then, had not yet learned to speak. It wasn’t until Robert the nineteenth

moved in that anyone spoke to Olive. She was three years old and only knew how to say yes, no, and

thank you. But Robert changed all that. He set Olive down and when he learned she couldn’t speak,

well he said “one month or not, I’ll live one-hundred more years and make sure this girl is a

dictionary!” And sure enough that’s where they began. First they read the dictionary, then Robert

got his granddaughter the book on tape, he even put a pillow case over the biggest dictionary he

could find and had her sleep on it day and night. Well, just nights. But if she napped she had better

get his pillow.

Once she had learned how to speak then Robert made sure she knew how to listen. He filled

her with all of his old stories. First, he started with how he met Olive’s grandmother and that’s a


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story he’ll tell almost once a day and for good reason. Olive never met her grandmother and no

granddaughter of Robert’s will be without her memory. So Robert tells her that one almost twice a

day. But mostly, he’ll talk about his family and the time they spent ratcheting up the greatest fishing

rod in all of Massachusetts. First, it started off as an ordinary rod, a Spielmann’s 2000 with no

frills. Then to make it longer Robert had to add more and more to it and while he was inventing

money was never great. He was rich until he was in debt and then he would be cash rich and debt

poor. In other words, all the money he earned went straight to paying the bills that had piled up.

Robert never had any money and couldn’t just buy more fishing line so he made his own with what

he had in the backyard. In their Spielmann’s 2000 there are probably two thousand things making

up the rod now. From waist belts to seat belts, rubber bands to violin strings, and even shoe laces to

extension cords. If you can think of it the Blezards have used it and Robert the nineteenth brought

the rod with him from Ohio to New England. He pestered his son to take up fishing, but Robert

the nineteenth’s son gave up fishing with his name. So Robert gave up on his son and the new name

Tom Smith and Robert’s only hope was his granddaughter.

Olive eagerly accepted the challenge and each morning she treks out with the rod and the

fishing line, which she has to keep tied up in a trash bag. She heaves it up and over her shoulder

and carries it out to the best place for fishing. Robert told her, “take this to a place that’s quiet.

That doesn’t mean it has to be silent. Just a place where you feel quiet. Where you can calm your

nerves and feel happy. Where you can let go of everything, but the fishing rod. Where you can take

a deep breath and think only of what you have to do. And when you get to that place and you find a

certain kind of quiet, then you can fish. And once you start fishing you’ll cast the rod and your bait

will take off. You’ll be fishing until your skin is burned and your mouth is dry. That’s what the

cooler is for. If you ever need a motto then use this one, ‘fish slowly and drink lots of water’. It’s

okay if you don’t know what that means now, you’ll figure it out when you need to. And when


you’ve been fishing for long enough and you understand what it means to be quiet then everything

will get loud. You’ll forget what you are and how you got there. It isn’t all peaches and barbeques.

No, you’re going to question yourself and you might turn yellow and be an accountant and that’s

okay too. But just remember what it is that you love to do and remember what makes you quiet.

Numbers don’t make anyone quiet though, remember that too. And remember to remember. If

you don’t remember then you’ll forget. It sounds simple now, but just remember that. And if you

forget make sure you remind yourself when you need to. Now, darling have you gotten all this?”

Olive scribbled furiously the first day she got her notebook and taking notes was very

difficult because she hadn’t learned how to write yet. But every morning, before she fishes she looks

back at her notes and remembers something different, but she remembers.

“So,” Robert the nineteenth asks, “where’s your quiet place?”

“The bus stop,” Olive says. She describes the one on the corner of Tremont and Tremont

across from the Laundromat and in front of the deli. It’s her favorite place because the man with

the Caribbean accent gives her sandwiches and makes her smile when she’s feeling sad. His shop is

painted bright orange and has a purple roof and a big blue door with a green knocker. He only

opens when he feels like it and closes just before he stops feeling that way. But at that intersection

there’s a four way stop light and a big bus stop and when Olive feels sad or overwhelmed and Mom

and Dad are fighting she goes and sits and watches the buses go by. And next to the Laundromat

there’s a library and a comic book across the street from that and then Olive isn’t sure what else is

around. “But it’s my favorite place in all of the world,” she says.

“Then that’s where you should go to fish,” Robert the nineteenth told her and so she

gathered together the fishing rod and all of its fishing line. And Robert the nineteenth took her

hand and said, “I almost forgot.” He takes out a maroon and plum colored briefcase with gold

latching. There is a combination lock on either side and he whispers her the code and then pulls


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her next to him. Robert the nineteenth undoes the right clasp and Olive undoes the left. They

open it up and inside is the bait, the great kite that has been passed down by Robert the first.

The Nineteenth Robert pulls out the blue fish that has been worn almost gray. In spots

around the fin and the mouth there are pieces of silver tape and patches of flannel. The fish has a

large bulbous eye and a fluttering tail.

“She looks old,” Robert the nineteenth says, “but she’s a good one.” He shows her how to

fasten it to the line and then puts it back into the briefcase. “If you forget the code, it’s the day I

met your grandmother. Eight, one, one, nine, five, two. August first, nineteen fifty-two.”

“Okay, grandpa,” Olive says and kisses his cheek. She ran outside eager to fish.

That was years ago now and since then her dad, Tom, keeps telling Robert the nineteenth

that it’s the longest month of his life. But for Olive, the days go by too quickly. She loves to fish

and wants nothing more than to sit at the bus stop and pass the time watching the clouds go by. She

tried to fish in the rain, but had almost no success getting the bait into the air. So she only can fish

when the sky is clear of any rain. She isn’t sure what she’s fishing for and only Robert the first really

knows the answer to that. But Olive wants so badly to catch whatever it may be so she can bring it

home for her grandfather. She’s never thought about what she’ll do when she catches the fish, but

she knows she’ll be happy. At the bus stop, she thinks mostly of her grandfather sleeping in his

armchair in the same clothes and the way he smells of cedar and smoke and a hint of something that

burns her nostril. She loves his big, watery green eyes and the way his hair is thin and wispy on his

scalp. When she’s done fishing she knows she can curl up next to him and sleep until morning.

But for today and, presumably, days to come she watches her bait go beyond the clouds.

2.


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That morning, Olive gets dressed her best fishing attire. Yellow rain boots, green coveralls,

her favorite purple long sleeve shirt with the red dinosaur, and a blue bucket hat that has the word

QUIET etched in big letters across the front. It’s too big and slides down her forehead so she tilts it

so the hat sits on the back of her head. Once she’s dressed she goes downstairs and kisses her

grandfather on the cheek and whispers “today’s the day, grandpa.” And then she takes a glazed

donut from the cupboard and fills her water bottle with orange juice. She’s sure to bring her cooler

filled with water and gummy snacks and even a bag of pretzels and then she goes off as the sun is

rising. It’s summer and there’s no school to interrupt Olive’s fishing today. The only people that

interrupt, or used to, were the people that told her she dressed strange or gawked at the girl and all

her luggage. But Olive was happy.


But today was different. Maybe there wasn’t enough glaze on her pastry, or too much pulp

in her juice, or maybe she’s growing and her hat doesn’t tilt the way she likes. She tries rolling up

her pant legs and tucking them into her socks and that doesn’t help either. Something in Olive

feels positively wrong. She thinks back and tries to figure out what she did. But she brushed her

teeth twenty-seven times on both sides and thirty-one times in the front just like always. She

washed both of her hands starting with the left and then the right. And she didn’t make her bed

and she kissed Grandpa’s right cheek, the correct cheek and that’s the left one, and she locked the

front door. But something was wrong even though everything went right and Olive couldn’t put her

finger on it.

She did her best to forget about it and unpacked her line and put in the code to the

briefcase just like she always does. And she works the line together and gets it in the sky. Around

noon she opens the bag of pretzels and sits on the cooler. Even though the morning went by just

the way it should she still didn’t feel quite right at all.

That’s when a man got off the bus and stood to the side of Olive’s cooler and just off to the

side. He has a long gray beard and he keeps it tucked into his polo shirt. Seeing that Olive is

barefoot, he takes off his work boots and stands facing the street. After a short while Olive stands

up next to him because she doesn’t like that he won’t sit down, but doesn’t want to interrupt his

quiet time. There’s enough space between them for someone else to stand and then he asks Olive if

she’d like to dance.

“But there’s no music,” Olive says.

“That’s okay, it’s like this.”

He picks up a foot and stomps it down and then the next and he shakes his arm about up

and down and then he puts them at his side and stares at the sun. Humming a low tune, the man


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starts to spin about and continues to clop his bare heels against the sidewalk. He makes a popping

noise as he does this and Olive does her best to imitate, careful not to tangle her line.

“You got any spirit?” the man asks her.

“What’s that?”


He explains that it is something normally bottled and kept in a brown paper bag. Olive has

never seen anyone but her father and grandfather with the spirit. “I could ask them,” she says.

“No, they probably wouldn’t like that any one bit. The spirit is a strange thing it tastes like

rotten apple cider and you shouldn’t ever drink it. Once you do nothing else tastes the same.

What’s your favorite thing to eat?”

“Donuts. The glazed ones! Glazed donuts.”

“Well, you would never be able to enjoy another one. Just stay away from any drink that

belongs in a bag.”

“Okay,” Olive says and she keeps dancing, but the man pulls her cooler over and sits down

on it.

“Would you knock it off?” the man says. “It’s not time for dancing any more. I’ve danced

long enough as it is. Danced my way down here from Montana. That’s a long time. Do you know

how far Montana is from Massachusetts?”

“About an hour, two with traffic.”

“Precisely,” the man says. “Except when you get stuck behind a great blue whale and it stops

traffic for almost an hour. I bet you wouldn’t believe me if I told you that story though.”

“Is it true?” Olive asks.

“The story? Of course it’s true.”

“Then I’d believe you.”

“Okay,” the man says. “My name is Felix. That’s the first true thing I’ve told you all day.

Start with a small one and then start telling bigger truths. That’s the way it goes. Anyway, about this

whale.”

Felix tells Olive all about how he set out to dancing across the West. He was part of an old

circus act and they used to travel by tractor, but then Felix met a young woman and he fell in love


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and built a log cabin in Montana. But then a great whale came and laid down across the big highway

that allowed Felix to get out of Montana and into the city. He and the young woman needed to get

to the city to make any sort of money because they were traveling salmon salesmen. So every day

they went out and fed the great whale two or three or twenty salmon and in a week he had eaten all

their fish. They went out and bought more.

“But we had to buy it from Wolf’s Fish Market, he’s our biggest competitor,” Felix says.

“Why’d you keep feeding the whale?”

“A whale is almost the size of two city busses and it looks even bigger when it’s laid out

across the road and stopping you from making any real money.”

He explains that Wolf’s Fish Market was just down the road and that his business brought

fish to the city, “but it was a real predicament because I wanted to run him out of town. I did so

well in the city I wanted to do well in town.”

Olive asks again why he kept feeding the whale.

“Are you kidding me? Because it’s a living breathing thing, that’s why. It’s hungry and

needed to eat. Just because it’s stubborn doesn’t mean it should be hungry.”

The rest of the story isn’t as simple. Because Felix and his wife spent their entire savings

account on fish for the whale. And they tried everything. They made a trail for the whale to lure it

off the road and tied a stick to the top of its head and hung a fish from the end.

“But nothing worked,” Felix says. “And the joke was on us.”

After two and a half weeks the whale ended up giving birth to one hundred little whale pups

and it died giving birth.

“And Wolf’s bought them all up and took the whale meat and sold them all for a fortune.

On a technicality it was all on his property. You believe that?”

“If you say it’s true.”


“It is true. Every word of it. And now here I am.”

“What happened to the woman?”

“Where are your parents?”

“At home with Grandpa,” Olive says.

“You ever hear the one about the cow that jumped over the moon?”

Olive knows that one.

“Well, the woman did nothing like that. She loved me so much she couldn’t bare to be with

me anymore and took all our things.”

“I love my grandfather. But we just eat donuts and talk and listen.”

“Yes indeed,” Felix says. “She loved me so much and moved to Canada and went under the

gun.”

“Is that a bridge?”

“More of an overpass, but now I’m out here searching for her. Or the next best thing.”

Olive tells the man that his story is very nice. She hopes the man catches his gal and she says

the word “indeed” as much as she can just like Felix.

“Have you looked on the sofa in the living room? That’s where my daddy goes when he loves

Mummy too much.”

The old man smiles and he shakes a leg out again. He tells her that’s a very good idea and

he’ll check as soon as he’s home. Then he laughs and says he is home. And Olive very much likes

this man because she thinks they are pretty good at being peculiar together. Her grandfather said

that being peculiar meant she was being inexplicably Olive.

“You’re inexplicably Olive, mister,” Olive says.

The man jumps and repeats Olive’s words.


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“I used to fish around here, you know. Never had much luck, not until this cat came up and

gave me a magic ring.”

Olive peers at the man, she knows that you should never take magic from strangers.

“Ever catch anything?” the man asks.

“All the time.”

“Like what?”

“Like you. You got caught here dancing with me.”

The old man smiles and says “You’re a funny gal.” Then he asks “You ever catch anything

else?”

“Once I caught a fish and it must have been pretty big because then a big hawk swallowed it

up and it flew away with my pole. Then it went down and got run over by a bus. It was all over the

newspaper. There was a big picture of me holding the hawk. Have you seen the paper?”

The old man says he has not. So Olive holds up one finger and slings off her knapsack. In

the newspaper you can see it’s surely her and she’s grinning and hugging this hawk and some of the

insides of the hawk are spilled onto her coveralls.

“See? I’ve caught plenty of things already, without any magic. Just smiles. My grandfather

says that’s magic though. A big smile.”

“He’s probably right, young lady. But with this you’ll catch what you’re after. What are you

after?”

Olive goes on in depth and tells him that she has no idea quite what she’s after, but that she

knows it’ll be good whenever she gets it. “It’s all Grandpa talks about.”

The old man takes a step back, stands up real tall, and salutes her.


“You don’t mean to tell me you’re after the biggest thing in all of the sky, do you?” Then,

from Olive’s face he knows she is so he says, “Young lady, I don’t know if that’s safe. I heard that it

is the size of fourteen skyscrapers put together, do you know how big that is?”

“Probably bigger than a bus.”

“A bus? Definitely bigger than a bus.”

Then the old man pulls out his beard from his shirt and he runs a hand through it two and

a half times. After he’s done rummaging through his beard he pulls out a plastic ring that Olive

recognizes to be from a cup cake. In the center of the ring there is a popcorn kernel. Around it

there is a big clump of glue. He tells Olive to look at it and she takes it. Then the man pulls off a

necklace from under his shirt and the black thread is laced around a plastic bag holding a collection

of hair balls.

“This is the only thing that will keep you safe. The kernel is to attract the shark and this bag

here. This bag is so heavy it will stop the shark from lifting you up into the sky. I won’t leave until

you take it.”

“Wait a minute, mister.”


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“Felix.”

“Felix, right. Wait a minute, Felix. This is awful nice, shouldn’t you give this to the gal who

loves you so much she left so she wouldn’t be over a gum and under a bridge?”

“She went over the gum two weeks after she left, young lady.”

And the old man looks at his shoes and stands there for a few minutes. Then he walks off

without saying anything and Olive calls goodbye over his shoulder.

Olive keeps fishing until the sun goes down and she gets a few nibbles, but only when clouds

are covering her bait so she can’t see if it’s anything or just the wind. Finally she packs up and

decides to go home. In her room she sits on her bed and puts her fish in its air tank that she built

all on her own. It’s a cardboard box she found in the trash and she poked some holes in it and

there’s a big hole in the side so she can see her fish swimming around. He gets tired from fishing

all day though, so he just slinks down to the bottom.

In Olive’s room she has her terrarium of snake skin she collected from the science teacher

at her school. She’s named each one and Georgina is the one that looks most like a snake, Oscar,

Josephine, Bettina, Rosaline, and Horace all are misshapen or cut in half. There is a sneaking

suspicion in Olive that Bettina and Horace are really the same skin cut in half, but she can’t be sure

so they both have names. And the terrarium is kept atop her dresser and beside that she has a chalk

board wall and in the center of it she has written no one is at the door. Because she has this terrible

nightmare each night that someone is knocking on her door and she knows it isn’t good. But she

never gets up to answer it and once, Olive promises she’s truth telling, the door shook in its hinges

when she woke up, but her father tells her that her imagination is acting up again. That’s when they

took her back to the doctor. And that’s coincidentally the same time she started taking medicine

because she has too much imagination. She was imagining too many people and too many things,

but when Olive took that medicine she was so very lonely and forgot how to fish. So now, next to


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door which is next to the chalk board which is next to the dresser and the terrarium is Olive’s desk.

Which is empty except for Mr. Patton, an old stuffed animal of the American general. He sits and

keeps watch over Olive’s room when she isn’t there and in the bottom drawer of that desk there is a

drawer in which Olive keeps all of the imagination medicine her doctor gives her. The pills she was

supposed to take, but learned how to pocket them away and stash them in her drawer. And next to

the desk, which is next to the door, which is next to the dresser is Olive’s bed and her kite’s air

tank.

Olive is watching that tank and her fish when her father gets home and she runs down the

stairs because it’s about to be time for dinner. She sits and waits quietly. Actually, she doesn’t even

make a sound. Because Olive learned that when her daddy gets home it’s best to be quiet because

sometimes he gets so mad that he “blows his lid” and sometimes his lid falls off and hits Olive on

the head. But it’s an accident, because after daddy’s had some of his favorite juice he apologizes and

tells her how sorry he is. Mommy says they’re trying to figure a way to fix it, but his lid just keeps

falling off. It’s really funny when you think about it. So Olive eats her mac and cheese and hot dogs

at the counter and her father goes to watch television.

When her mother gets home she’s still sitting on the wooden stool and her chin is resting

on the granite counter.

“Pick your head up and eat, Olive,” her mother says.

So Olive keeps eating and soon enough she’s full and there’s only a little left so her mother

lets her throw it out.

“Did you have a nice day, Mom?” Olive asks.

She’s following her mother upstairs and her mom asks if they have to talk about it right now

and Olive says no so she goes and plays in her room until it’s almost time for bed. Then she runs


down stairs and slides across the linoleum floor and stops at the cookie jar. She peers in and then

she’s about to reach for a cookie when her dad stops her.

“You know you aren’t supposed to eat cookies after you brush your teeth,” Dad says

“But it’s an oatmeal raisin.”

Her dad shook his head and shifted his weight. His dress shirt was unbuttoned and his hand

rests on his belly.

“What does that have to do with it?”

“Oatmeal raisins never get eaten, I was going to give one to the ants. Ants like anything.”

“Go to bed, Olive,” her dad says.

Olive turned and started to leave.

“Olive,” her dad says, “the cookie.”

Olive puts it back.

That morning, Olive stays in bed until her parents leave and she’s supposed to wait until

Grandpa gets up. But she never does that and instead she packs her cooler, gets a donut, fills her

water bottle with juice, kisses grandfather on the cheek and takes off.

She stands on the cement sidewalk dock and casts her fish into the air. It’s only an hour or

so that goes by before Felix comes meandering on over. He sits down on the sidewalk because he’s

having trouble standing. And he mumbles something about a woman named Delilah and he lies

down on the cement to rest.

Poor Felix, Olive thinks. He looks like he hasn’t rested all night. He’s still probably looking

for his catch. Olive gives him back his lucky necklace so he doesn’t blow away and while she’s fishing

a cat licks her ankles.

“Hello,” Olive says.

Then the cat says, “I’m going to be Frank with you, I want to taste your kite.”


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“Frank,” Olive says. “That’s rude. My kite can hear you and even if he didn’t have ears I

wouldn’t let you.”

But Olive packed a tuna fish salad and she gives half of it to Frank and they eat it together.

Frank is sitting on top of Felix’s chest and he gets crumbs all over Felix’s beard, but Olive is pretty

sure it will cheer Felix up.

“That was good,” Frank says. “Really good.”

Olive smiles at Frank and keeps watching her kite tread wind.

“So can I taste your kite?” Frank asks.

“No way,” Olive says. “You’re crazy, he’s my favorite kite. I raised him from a kit I got. I

put him together by myself. He’s like my brother.” Then, she says “Stop talking under his fins.”

“It’s better than behind his back, at least he can hear me. I’m not trying to hide it. I’m not

ashamed. I’m a cat and have nothing to be ashamed of.”

Olive agrees completely.

Then Frank stands and tells Olive that he called the cops on the bum.

“He’s not a bum,” Olive says.

Frank says he doesn’t care and the cops are going to be there in a moment. He can hear

them coming, he says.

“Let me give you something,” Frank says.

He pulls out a headband and it’s made of cat hair he licked off his own body and puts it

down next to Olive.

“Maybe tomorrow I can try your fish,” Frank says.

“Probably not,” Olive says. “But thank you.”

Olive, still wearing her coveralls and purple shirt and today wearing her yellow rain boots

and kernel necklace ring puts the head band on. And that’s how the police find her.


“Is this man the vagrant?” the cop asks.

He looks very serious in his black uniform and fancy hat. The man is wearing a really shiny

silver badge and Olive tells him she really likes it. The man asks his question again.

“Oh Felix? No, I believe he’s a human. He’s a good friend of mine.”

So the cop says he’s going to give Felix a ride home and puts some bracelets on his wrist and

then in the back of his black and white car. He turns the lights on and then before he leaves he says

“I almost forgot. Thanks for calling us.”

Then he hands Olive a plastic badge that she pins to her chest. She stands there rocking on

her toes and heels thinking what a nice man the policeman was, especially since she does not have a

phone. It’s probably for the best Felix goes home and gets some rest. He did smell like he needed a

shower. Or even a bath. But it was nice of the man to give him a ride home.

Olive went on fishing and missed the company of Felix. He had disrupted the normal quiet

of her routine and now she had trouble finding comfort in the lack of noise. Sure there was the bus

grumbling up and down the street and stopping to exhale passengers into the streets. And there was

the man running the deli and his Caribbean accent telling everyone not to worry. No matter how

long ago they ordered their sandwich it was always only fifteen minutes away. Children outside the

library shouted and whirled their hips in hula hoops. Olive closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

She paid close attention to the way the fishing rod felt between her fingers and how, keeping it

propped against her belly, it wasn’t heavy in her hands. And because it was the summer she could

only smell trash baking in the sun and it smelled nothing like the oatmeal raisin cookies at home. It

smelt more like grandpa after a long weekend. She wondered if Grandpa would smell the same if he

was left in the sun all day long and Olive was quite sure that he would.

But she focused so long on how the city smelled, looked, and sounded that she didn’t see

the sun set. She missed the clouds retreating to another part of the world and the clear blue


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turning orange before fading to black and now the stars were beginning to awake and two men

hopped off the city bus. One was long and tall and he had bushy eyebrows and a long top hat. The

other was short, round and had circular spectacles and he said, “good day, darling. What are you

doing?”

“Fishing, of course.”

“Fishing,” the round man said. He elbowed his taller friend and repeated the word.

“There’s not a dime in that.”

“No, sir,” Olive said. “At least I don’t think so. There’s electrical tape, extension cords,

elastics, and even a shoe lace. But I have not seen a dime sir.”

“Precisely,” the taller one said. “I would advise you to be a doctor like myself. There’s a

dime there that’s for sure.”

Really, he was a lawyer, but he went to school long enough to be a doctor and thought that

the longer his name was the more important he became. His name was Doctor Harold Winston

Chamberlain Esquire, attorney at law. The rounder man he traveled with was Hal Tannerhan and

he was a banker at the lending tree.

“You need a dollar, young lady and you come see me. I have the highest interest rates in

town. The longer a loan lasts, the better it is,” the man says. “Remember that, it’s good advice.”

“Here’s some advice,” the taller one says. “You should dress nicer. Even a fisherman should

look nice. You won’t accomplish anything unless you look nice. I promise you that.”

“He’s right,” Hal Tannerhan says. “And you know what else you should do? I’ll tell you.

This will interest you. I’ll tell you.”

“Do tell her, Hal,” Doctor Harold Winston Chamberlain Esquire says.

“I plan to, Doctor.”

“Get it over with then.”


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“I’m trying.”

“Not very hard.”

“You keep interrupting.”

“Me?” The doctor puts up his hands.

“Yes, you.”

The doctor doffs his cap, “well, pardon me sir. Please continue in your infinite wisdom.”

“Right,” Hal Tannerhan says and turns to say something to Olive.

“Even though,” Doctor Harold Winston Chamberlain Esquire says, “all she needs is to

dress a little better. You’ll just loan her something aren’t you?”

“Excuse me,” Hal Tannerhan says.

The rounder man and the taller man stand chest to chest and shout very quickly and grow

increasingly louder. They bicker back and forth and shout words Olive has never heard before, like

“imbecile”, “ignoramus”, “nincompoop”, and “buffoon”. All of these words sound so fun and

Olive tries them out on her own tongue and they get stuck and she spits them out. When the drop

of spit hits the sidewalk it makes a kerplunking sound and both men stop at once.

“Young lady,” Hal Tannerhan says. “I dear say that is rather rude. This is a public sidewalk.

Here, let me loan you my kerchief. Use this and get some nice clothes like the good Doctor Harold

Winston Chamberlain Esquire has instructed you. I’ll be back on the morrow to collect it. Please

have it laundered, will you?”

They say their goodbyes and Olive wipes up her spittle, embarrassed. Then she drags in her

line and bottles it up in her trash bag and puts the fish in its brief case. When she’s all packed she

meanders her way home, shuffling along sidewalks pockmarked with holes and divots.

3.


At home, Grandpa is listening to classical music and sipping an amber drink with ice cubes

clanking in commotion against the glass. Olive tries to sneak by him and Grandpa calls her over.

He pats the chair beside him and Olive climbs next to her Grandfather.

“What’s wrong, little one?” Grandpa asks her.

Olive won’t look at him and part of it is because she’s embarrassed and the other is because

she’s staring at Grandpa’s teeth. They’re soaking in a fizzy water and sunk at the bottom of a glass.

A bubble squeaks out between teeth and pops at the surface.

“Have I ever told you how I lost my teeth?” Grandpa asks Olive. She has heard it and

Grandpa asks her “would you like to hear it again.”

“Okay.”

When Robert the nineteenth was a younger man he worked briefly as an electrician. He had

never really learned how or been taught formally. But he lived through the entire country being

depressed and Robert kept his sunny disposition the whole time. So he had the belief that he could

do just about anything if he was happier than a whole country and its government. When he was

offered a job fixing up and rewiring an old factory somewhere in Vermont, Robert left his fishing

rod to the seventeenth Robert and hopped on the first greyhound he could.

“You rode a dog from Massachusetts to Vermont?” Olive asks.

Robert explains that it was a bus company and when he made it all the way Vermont. He got

off the bus and got to work immediately, he worked all through the night and it turns out he knew

how to do it all along. Sure, he blew every fuse three or four or five hundred times. But in the

morning he had it all sorted out. And it only took him three days to get everything rewired.

“Whether it was sheer luck or instinct, I don’t know,” Robert says. “But I was almost done.”

But on the fourth day, just as Robert was rewiring one of the ceiling lights he made a

mistake and electrocuted himself.


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“Did it hurt?” Olive asks.

Robert scuffles his socks on the rug and then touches Olive’s arm. Nothing happens.

“Well, if that worked I could have explained it. It felt like a light bulb took a deep breath

and blew all of its lungs right into my hands and through to my toes. It didn’t hurt until later.”

“When you were at the doctors?”

For a week Robert was in the hospital covered toe to nose in bandages. All of his teeth had

fallen out and even his fingernails changed colors.

“Is that how you lost your hair too?” Olive asks.

Robert has a way of smiling with his eyes rather than his mouth. Now, they turn to small

crescents and his hair is sticking up from sleeping most of the day.

“I like to blame it on that,” Robert says.

In that week at the hospital Robert spent his time getting to know all of the nurses. He

never felt sad over what happened and really he had never been happier. On the fourth floor of the

hospital Robert became something like the mayor. Nurses found excuses to check in on him just so

they could listen to his stories. But there was one nurse in particular that Robert loved to talk to

more than anyone. She was a young nurse with brown curls that wound loosely around her face,

which was slender and beautiful. Her smile was enigmatic and was the first thing in all of Robert’s

life that made him blush.

“If you could have asked your grandmother,” Robert says. “She’ll tell you I was a real rascal.

She worked overnights in those days, so I would sleep all day just so I would be able to stay up all

night and talk with her. It really flustered her.” Grandpa’s eyes sweat like the glass in his hands. He

takes a sip and uses his thumb to wipe away the droplets on his glass. “She used to say I was a real

nuisance, nothing but trouble she always told me. I kept her from getting her rounds done on


time. I wouldn’t let the nurse on second shift change my linens or my bandages so Millie would

have to.”

Robert asked Millie out a few times, but she always said she had to work. Back then, nurses

worked while they were still in school and it was Millie’s last year and she was very focused. But the

day Robert was released from the hospital he asked Millie’s supervisor to give Millie the night off so

Robert could take her out.

She arrived in her white skirt and the matching button up shirt that was her uniform.

Robert asked her out and she said no, “I’m working, Bob,” she told him. “You know better.”

“Actually,” Robert told her. “Suzanne gave you the night off.”

The supervisor, Suzanne, was sitting at the sign in desk and told Millie she was indeed off

for the night. And because Millie was a terrible liar she never tried and had no excuse other than

her outfit. She pointed to her feet and her ankle socks and white nursing shoes. “I’m not dressed to

dance.”


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“Neither am I,” Robert told her and he was still wearing his working clothes. An old and

faded work shirt stained yellow from sweat and his grease stained black pants. But they went out

dancing that night and every weekend Robert took the bus to Vermont and he and Millie danced all

night before Robert took the bus home. After Millie finished school she moved to Massachusetts

with Robert and they never left.

“I wish you knew her,” Robert tells Olive. “You have her smile.” He takes off her bucket cap

and ruffles her hair. “And if you didn’t hide beneath this hat I’m sure your hair would look the

same. But you’re just as wonderful and I hope you know that.”

“Thank you, Grandpa.”

“Of course.”

“May I go upstairs? I want to go to bed early.”

“That didn’t cheer you up?”

“It did, I just,” Olive stops there because she inherited her grandmother’s inability to lie.

“Have you eaten?”

Olive had not, so Robert has her make a sandwich and he eats half and she eats the other

with him. After that he lets her go off to bed before her parents get home from their day.

In the morning, Olive gets ready as she always does. But today, she puts on a yellow dress

with stripes running horizontally along its print. She keeps the kernel necklace and the hairball

ring and lugs the fishing rod to her typical spot.

The morning goes by slowly and because its overcast no one comes outside more than they

have to for fear of the rain. Olive forgets that its Saturday too so there are no commuters and most

of the morning goes by without her seeing anyone.

Until a large white bear comes bumbling down the street. First, Olive sees it from a long

way off and doesn’t believe her eyes. Or at least she’s very confused because it looks, on the


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horizon, like a lollipop with a large loping head that is too round and too big to be a human. It

lollygags over to her, shuffling and dragging its feet. The eyes are large and beady with sloping

eyebrows. Its paws are big and Olive leans to the side to judge if they are near the same size as her

face. She concludes that they are. What is most peculiar, or most Olive, to Olive is that its body is

slender and its white fur is tinted brown and dirty like city snow.

“I’ve been to a lot of zoos, but I’ve never seen a bear like you, bear,” Olive says.

The bear grunts and keeps going, Olive yells at it to stop. It does and it turns around and

stands toe to toe with Olive, looking directly down at her.

“What kind of bear are you?”

“First,” the bear says, “it’s Mr. Bear to you. And second, I’m a bi-polar bear.”

“So you’re from the north pole?”

“I’m from both poles at once, you’ve probably never heard of me.”

The bear takes out a cigarette and sits down on the curb. With its left paw it scrolls through

on its phone.

“What are you doing?”

Turning to take a photograph of Olive, the bear says “I’m uploading you to the internet.”

An electronic shutter makes a mechanical clucking sound. “Okay, what filter should I use?”

Olive tells him a friendly one. “One that would make Grandpa smile.”

“Sepia tone should be okay,” the bear says.

Then Olive tries to ask him a question, but first the bear tells her he gives her a status and

then tweets at her and then Olive has to wait so long she nearly doesn’t want to talk to the bear

anymore. But just as that happens he puts the phone away and asks her why she stopped him.

Olive starts to explain, but Mr. Bear interrupts her and says, “it’s just not every day you see

a girl in a dress fishing on the sidewalk. I used to see a girl out hear that looked weird. Really weird.


Six different colors in her clothes and a dumb hat. That girl was nuts. I would stand far away and

take photographs of her and then upload her to the internet so my friends and I could make fun of

her. I miss that girl. I just gave you the caption of, ‘this is how it’s done. This girl is legit.’ You

know? You ever see that girl?”

Utterly sad and on the verge of tears, Olive shakes her head. It starts in her chest and it feels

like her lungs are tightening up. She wants nothing to do with this bear or to hear his stupid

stories. Her thoughts are racing so quickly and she can’t keep a hold of them. All she wants is to

slow herself down, but she doesn’t know what’s going on. But before she knows it she blurts out

“well two men came and said if I wanted to make something out of anything I should dress up. I

can’t get nothing done if I don’t look nice. Didn’t you know?” She throws down her fishing rod

and starts running.

As fast as she can she tries to put the bus stop far behind her. Past the loud music club on

Pearl Street, past the grocery store on Columbus, past the big college with the fancy statues, and

past the Museum of Arts. Olive does not stop running until she runs past the trains and their

clanking tracks and she runs down the loping sidewalk all the way down to the reservoir. She plops

down on a bench and looks out across the water.

She can’t believe that anyone could be so mean and she wonders if she’s been wasting all her

time. The words of her parents come flooding back to her and all their lectures telling her that

she’s foolish for spending her time fishing for clouds. Countless times her father has told her to

“put her nose to the grind stone”. Her mother said “you should be studying for the SATs and the

MCASTs.” Mr. Smith thinks Olive should already be applying to colleges and universities, “it’s

called early action for a reason. They’ll admire your desire to be educated. You’ll get in without

any trouble I promise you that.”


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That’s when Olive begins sobbing. She has no idea how to get home so she sits in the grass

and begins to pull a waxy blade from the earth until she has a small stack beside her. With a lump of

grass in her hands Olive begins to smear it in her palm until it is sticky. The sun is high enough in

the sky that it won’t set for another couple hours Olive guesses. But she also hasn’t learned how to

tell time so all she can do is guess.

Around her is a long and narrow dirt path that circles the reservoir. Reflecting on the water

are benches every so often and long wispy, willow trees that are thinning the same way as Olive’s

grandfather, she thinks. Above the benches are bubbly, white clouds that are swollen and threaten

rain. All at once, Olive is made aware of the mugginess in the air and it feels hot and thick. She

moves her arm around and pretends she’s physically pushing air out of the way, but since she

doesn’t see air she doesn’t really believe in it. Today, she wants nothing more than to be a little girl

who’s only interest is playing with dolls or dressing up or playing basketball or baking or wrestling

lawn gnomes or lassoing tree branches or licking cats and petting brownies or swinging or climbing


jungle gyms and jumping from tree branches. But no, Olive was born to a fishing family and was

cursed by the lure and tackled to her fate. Resolute, Olive unwound the grass in her palm and ate it

piece by piece. Only when her stomach began to hurt did she stop and by then she guessed that an

entire twenty-four hours had passed. But who’s to say?

A young woman, with long red hair tied back behind her head and thick, big rimmed glasses

and a bucktooth smile stopped behind Olive. “Excuse me,” the woman says. She waved her gangly

arm at the back of Olive’s head and the dog leashed at the woman’s side hunkered down on its

haunches. The woman repeated herself.

“Are you talking to me?” Olive asks.

“Yes, ma’am. Why are you eating grass?”

“Because there’s nothing else to do.”

The woman sat down and ate a blade of grass, the dog chewed on its front paw.

“Doesn’t taste very good,” the woman says. “What are you doing here? Where’s your Mom

or your Dad?”

“They’re busy right now, do you need them?”

“No, it’s just weird. A little girl eating grass all alone. You got to wonder, you know. Where

is this girl’s parents? Like, hello! Sheesh, I guess when I was your age I was doing some sort of

business too, I mean, hey we all have, you know what I mean?”

“No, ma’am,” Olive says.

“Ah, that’s okay. Hey would you watch my dog for a second? I need to run an errand.”

The woman pushes her glasses to the bridge of her noses, springs up, and takes off. Olive

doesn’t take the leash and just watches the dog. It looks at her and Olive is sure that the pup has

smiled at her. Then she begins to confess everything to the dog. That she’s worried about her

parents, but she doesn’t know why and she doesn’t know if her grandfather is okay or not because


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he’s always sleeping. And then there’s the fishing of course and she left the fishing rod and the line

and the kite at the bus stop. “It’s all gone,” she says. “And it’s all my fault.” She begins to cry and

then the dog barks and stands up.

“I don’t just sit around and think about tennis balls all day, dag nabbit,” the dog says. “You

want to hear some stuff? I got some stuff for you. First of all, there’s a dog living in the door of my

owner’s house. All he does is mimic me. I go left he goes right and gets in my way. I bark, he barks.

That dog, oh I tell ya he’s going to get his. And don’t get me started on eating. All day long I do

cheap parlor tricks for something that tastes like bacon. Like bacon, not even the real thing. I’m

doing real tricks, but I don’t get real bacon? And this is a first world country. Ha! If this is the first

then what’s that mean for the second and third worlds, hopefully they were able to fix it. They

haven’t though. My cousin Vinny, he’s down in some third world gig and he’s in the army. He had

to join to get any food. They make him do some terrible things you wouldn’t believe. Every few

weeks I get these long letters and they’d give you something to wimper about.”

Olive, not surprised that this dog is speaking after meeting Frank the cat and that awful bi-

polar bear, starts to speak.

“Excuse me,” the dog says. “I’m still speaking. Here, how do you like it? Sit, roll over, good

girl. I don’t think so. Who’s a good boy? You don’t know me. You don’t know what I do. Get out

of town and fetch your own frisby if you’re dumb enough to throw it down there anyway. Besides, I

know you aren’t a good girl and neither is Helen, that girl you met, that’s Helen. Oh, the stuff she

tells me. I’ve had enough. I’m going to take my act on the road. I’m out of here. No thank you.

Thanks for nothing, huh?”

And the dog stands up on all fours and makes way for the road. Olive watches it trot up the

steps and run along the street, all the while its leash bounces up and down and bobs on the

sidewalk.


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4.

When the young woman comes back she sits down next to Olive and lights a cigarette. She

asks Olive where her dog is and Olive tells her exactly what happened.

“Thank you,” the woman says. “Seriously, that dog has been free loading off of me since it

was a puppy. Eight years just eating my food and never a thank you. Wouldn’t even play dead when I

had company over. Good grief. Hey, my name’s Lucile.”

Olive introduces herself. Then tells her everything that’s been wrong today. And every day.

“Oh, man,” Lucile says. “I forgot how tough kids have it these days. When I was a kid it was

all daisys and grass stains. Look at kids now. Well, hey. I wouldn’t listen to those two buffoons

anyway. I think you should dress how you’d like, but what do I know? I haven’t had a job in years. I

get paid to be unemployed. Anyway, I think I’ll go out for dinner. You hungry?”

Olive declines as politely as she can so as not to hurt Lucile’s feelings.

“Well, I’ll bring a sandwich by and if you’re still here then it’s yours.”

“Thank you.”

The lady gets to her feet, wobbles, and then walks off in the same direction her dog had

gone.

Olive sits and watches as the clouds turn gray and then black with the night. Her hands are

cold and she doesn’t know how to get back home. But instead of worrying and instead of crying she

only waits. If Olive has learned anything about fishing outside at a bus stop it’s that people will

always help when she needs. The wind blows harder and makes Olive shudder and the leaves around

her rattle and Olive tries to hum along.

A cat stretches across her knee and burrows between her crossed legs.

“What a cute kitty,” Olive says and pets behind its ears.


“Hey,” the cat yells. “It’s Frank and I’m not cute, I’m devilishly handsome. I believe that is

painfully obvious.”

Olive apologizes and then one more time for not petting Frank. Once she’s gotten all of

Frank’s itches—the ones behind the ears, his neck, and his hind legs—Frank tells her he ran into the

dog.

“You remember, he’s a real malcontent. I tell him he should have been a cat, but he won’t

have the surgery. But he just doesn’t have any insurance. What can you do? Nothing, that’s what.

But hey, I’ll tell ya something else. This dog felt badly about his conversation with you. He wanted

me to come get you.”

Olive listens while the cat bobs up and down with its story, lengthening its body at the start

of a sentence and then slinking down.


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“So here I am and I took care of your stuff, don’t you worry. Were you worried?” Before

Olive can answer, Frank says “I knew you wouldn’t be. You’re a weird one. The weird ones don’t

worry.”

“That’s not true.”

“Don’t lie to be, it’s cold lets get going.”

Frank gets on his two hind legs and walks with Olive hand-in-hand.

“Really, it isn’t,” Olive says. “I worry all the time. I worry I’ll let my Grandfather down and

I won’t catch anything. I worry I’ll upset Daddy with my bad grades. I worry I’ll upset Mommy when

my room isn’t clean. And when Mommy and Daddy are arguing I worry that it’s because of me. My

mother says I have no friends and that makes me worried. Because I don’t have any friends I’ve

made up my own and that worries me. Sometimes, I worry that you aren’t real and that really

worries me. I’m worried about that man over there,” Olive points to a man walking slightly

hunched forward with a hand on his back. “I’m worried that his back is hurting and no one will be

at his home to make it better. I’m worried that no one is at his home. I’m worried when I see

someone eating ice cream that it will melt before them. What worries me most is what is going to

come next, I can never think about what I’m doing. Always! I need to know what is going to come

next and that has be all in a tiff. Mom says that when she’s really angry. I’m not angry, mostly just

worried. I worry all the time. I’m worrying right now.”

The cat puts its head down and they keep walking together. He slowly thinks over everything

that Olive has just told him and he licks his paw and Olive, watching him, does the same. She licks

her wrist and tries to get her elbow just like Frank.

“See, humans can’t lick their elbow,” Frank says. “And there are a lot of things that humans

cannot do, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t wonderful. I hope you don’t worry so much

because I’m worried about your worrying.”


Olive says she’ll stop, but she’s starting to cry—or at least the tears have begun to puddle in

her eyes and ready to drip out at any moment.

Frank says, “I’m sorry I told you not to worry, I forgot how much a little human has to

worry about. Life can be awfully hard sometimes, but when you’re young you shouldn’t have so

much to think about. You should be thinking about cotton candy and holding hands—it’s the only

time you can hold hands with anybody. You’re going to get to a point where people will look at you

funny, but that’s another story. Hold every hand you can and hug the bodies holding those hands.

And make sure you don’t think about worrying, it will only make you worry more. Take a picture of

every smile you see. Do it in your brain, blink both eyes really hard and you’ll store the picture in

your brain. When you start to worry you can find a smile in your brain and think about it. That will

stop you from worrying. Here try me first.”

They stand a foot away from one another and Frank smiles. But because he is a cat his smile

is lopsided and he really looks rather angry. The black of his fur make the midnight color of his

eyes lost and it makes his eyebrows slant down and he looks terribly worried. But Olive takes a

picture anyway, because his mouth is open and he’s touched his two fangs together so his head is

tilted back and he looks very silly.

“Thank you, Frank,” Olive says.

“Now wait, just a minute,” Frank says. “I need some smiles too.”

Olive stands still and smiles her biggest smile she can. Frank takes his picture and then

Olive tells him to take a silly one. She pulls her mouth wide open with her index fingers and sticks

her tongue out. Closing her eyes as tightly as she can, Olive tilts her head as far as she can so she’s

upside down.

“Did you get it?” Olive asks.

“It’s perfect,” Frank says.


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And they walk, hand-in-hand, back to Olive’s house. Frank tells her stories about his time

in New York when he was homeless. He lived in mailboxes and subways and then a young man

scooped him up and put him in a briefcase. Frank was so tired that he didn’t care if the guy was

going to throw him in the garbage. As long as Frank didn’t have to move he didn’t care about

anything at all. But the man didn’t carry Frank to the dump, he got on a bus and brought him to

Boston. The man gives him food every day and lives on the biggest hill in the city. He makes sure

there is always food and water for Frank and anyone Frank brings home.

“So anytime you need,” Frank says while he gives Olive his address, “please come by and see

me. I’ll make sure you get plenty to eat and plenty to drink. I’ll see you soon.”

They hug and then Olive walks up her front steps to her family’s apartment.

5.

Olive raps her knuckles against the frame of the door and jumps when it is opened. Al is

waiting on the other side and Olive begins to apologize saying “I thought I was knocking on

Mommy and Daddy’s door.” Al picks her up in a big hug and brings her inside. He carries her all

the way to the dining room table and it looks as though he was crying.

“Young lady,” Al says and his voice is thick with the Caribbean Sea. His voice is so full of

the water that it softens his vowels and his words go in and out with the tide of his tongue. “I’m so

very sorry. Your grandfather is very sick and your parents took him to the doctor.”

Olive nods her head and asks “when is he coming back?”

“Well, honey. I do not know. He might be there for a long time. So long that it may feel

like he is never going to come back. But if it starts to feel like that then you can remember that your

grandfather will be in your heart.”

“Like Mommy when I was in her belly? I’ll let her out.”


“No, he will be there in spirit. What will live in your heart will be your grandfather’s smile

and his laugh. The way he smiled first with his eyes and then with his mouth. What will be in there

is the way your grandfather always had a story to tell to cheer you up. And his stories will be there

too. And more importantly, what will be there is the way your grandfather lived. Because I see more

of him in you than in your father. I think you are a spitting little image of that old man. So every

day you will remember him and you can tell stories about him with me and your father and your

mother. You can remember him and smile like him. That is what you can do.”

Olive nods her head and asks what’s for dinner, but Al doesn’t seem to hear her question.

“I used to know your grandfather,” Al says. “We were good friends from a long time ago.

When I first moved here it was your grandfather that gave me a job. He owned a small fiber mill

and he gave me a job managing the spools. I had no idea what I was doing, but he gave me a job

doing it. When I wanted to open my own shop he was the one that gave me the money. He is a good

man, a wild one—always spent his time fishing. Fishing and his kids, that was all he talked about.”

“Grandpa only had one kid, my daddy, that’s it.”

“He had more. His wife had several miscarriages, but your grandfather had the biggest heart

of anyone I know. He named all of them and each one was harder than the last. That man has more

love in his heart than he had sense in his brain. He was a terrible businessman, but a good father,

and a better man. You are a very lucky girl. You look just like him, you know.”

Olive thinks she looks nothing like him. Her hair is long and thick, her skin is smooth, and

she is much shorter than her grandfather. But Al is talking into his hands, which he keeps on the

table facing toward him and Olive knows not to interrupt a man talking into his hands. Her

grandfather would do it when he spoke about his grandmother. Even after she passed he never took

off his wedding ring and he would kiss it goodnight every night and good morning every sun rise.


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Sometimes, if Olive was lucky, he would kiss her goodnight and then the ring would kiss her

goodnight too.

“Do you understand what I’m telling you?” Al asks.

“No, sir.”

“That’s okay. Someday, you will. For now, let us eat. I read once that eating is a small, good

thing at a time like this. Now go take a bath and I’ll have supper ready for you when you come

down.”

Olive goes up stairs and takes a long hot bath. She sits in the water and sinks down so water

begins to fill her ears and nostrils and she inhales. The water rushing into her nose makes her

cough and choke, she sits up and turns on the shower head so water pelts the back of her head. She

sits like this until the basin of the tub is nearly full. Then she pulls the drain and dries off.

In her room, all of her fishing equipment is piled in the center. Olive carefully unpacks

each foot of fishing line and winds it the way she was taught by her grandfather. Once the line, rod,

and bait are all stowed away correctly, then Olive goes back downstairs in her favorite pajamas.

Al is sitting at the kitchen table and he’s made jam-bob-laya in honor of her grandfather.

The only difference between jambalaya and jamboblaya is that jamboblaya uses nearly twice the

amount of stuff and always needs a great deal of cinnamon.

“If you ask your grandfather, he’ll tell you cinnamon is the answer for everything in the

kitchen.”

“But you don’t think so?” Olive asks.

“I don’t think much of anything,” Al says. “I cook so I don’t have to think and I put all of

my love into the food I’m making because that’s how I make people smile. Get right down to their

bellies, I believe that’s where all the smiles are hidden. If I can fill up their belly and push the smile

up to their face then that’s how I know I made a good meal.”


Olive tells Al about her taking pictures of smiles to remember later and Al tells her that’s a

great idea.

“Take mine,” Al says and he smiles with an impossibly big smile and his teeth are whiter

than Olive could have imagined. “Did you get it?” Al asks. Olive says she did, “Take another one. I

think I blinked.”

“I think it looks good,” Olive says.

“Okay, okay. Well, let’s eat.”

As they eat Al tells Olive a story about his honeymoon. Al and his wife took a trip to the

Grand Canyon and while Al was peering over the ledge to look down over the canyon he saw a small

ledge. He pretended to fall and jumped down to the ledge. “You shoulda heard my wife screamin’”

Al says. “Oh she wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the day she was so mad.” That story is one of

Al’s favorites to tell and he’s told it so much that now Olive’s grandfather tells the same story to

everyone. “Except, he tells it as if he were there. I say to him ‘Bob, there is no way you were there.

It was my honeymoon!’ But he insists, he is so sure that he was there that I have even begun to

believe it.” Al stops and thinks for a moment. “That’s what I will miss most about your grandfather,

I make food, but he makes ideas. That man can make me believe I can do anything. And I think

he’s right. That takes a good person.”

Al washes the dishes and Olive watches from the table as Al meticulously hand washes each

plate.

“Never trust a dishwasher,” Al says.

“May I have a cookie?”

“As long as you brush your teeth before bed, then yes. My only rule as a babysitter is that

you must brush your teeth before bed.”


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Olive eats her oatmeal raisin cookie and wonders when her family is coming back, but Al

tells her it is getting late and sends her to bed.

“I’ll wake you when your family comes back,”

“Goodnight, Al.”

And Olive goes upstairs and decides to let her kite out of its tank. She strokes its scales and

whispers an apology before stringing it to the overhead fan. As she drifts off to sleep, she watches

her kite swim through the current of her bedroom.

6.

In the middle of the night, Olive’s father comes into her room. Hearing, her door open

makes Olive jump. She lays still and listens to the wheezing floorboards as her father tip toes over.

Her father brushes back the hair off his forehead and whispers something.

“What, Dad?” Olive asks.

“Nothing, honey, nothing. Just sleep, okay?”

Her father scoops her up and keeps her swathed in blankets. He carries her in his arms to

the living room and sits down in a rocking chair. Wrapping the blanket and tucking her into him,

Olive’s father takes great care in cocooning his daughter to him. Slowly, he begins to rock back and

forth and Olive wants to stay awake because she is excited because her father never spends time with

her, especially at night. She wants to stay awake and be sure she remembers every moment of this,

but she’s only eight and her eyes are heavy. The ticking of the clock gets louder and more

thunderous, echoing in her head. Tick, tock, tick tock. Her eyes close, tock, she opens, they close.

Tock. Tick. Tock. And then her breathing is more rhythmic, a deep breath. She snorts awake, but

quickly falls back in rhythm. Her father is combing her hair with his fingers and then she begins to

feel a wetness on her forehead. And her father’s lips are whispering quietly.

In a voice that does not sound like her own, Olive whispers, “what’s wrong, Papa?”


“Trying to make right,” he says, “for all that I’ve done wrong.” Olive asks what again, but

her father doesn’t hear her. She begins to think she’s dreaming and starts opening her eyes,

mouth, and ears as best as she can to wake herself up. But nothing seems to be working and her

father asks “what have I been doing all these years?”

Olive starts to get very, very tired and she just keeps saying “I love you, Papa. It’s okay, it’s

okay.”

In the morning, Olive wakes up in her bed and she thinks about the night and thinks she’s

had a very strange dream. Then she smells bacon, the distinct maple and honey that means it’s the

weekend and her father is eating. She tosses off her covers and jolts out of bed. Olive dresses with

as much haste as an eight-year-old can muster.

Downstairs, her mother scowls because Olive is wearing her ballerina’s tut too over her

coveralls, a button down shirt buttoned over her denim bottoms, and a long necklace made of

cotton balls.

“Is it bacon?”

Her father nods, pats down a few pieces with a paper towel to sop up any grease, and puts

down a plate of pancakes and bacon. Sitting beside Olive, her father says nothing as he flips the

pages of the newspaper. Olive slurps her orange juice, crunches her bacon, and chews with her

mouth open. Once in a while, her mother will look up and scowl. But no one will say anything and

Olive can’t seem to muster a word out of either of her parents. Olive clears her throat, but gets

nothing again. Her grandfather wasn’t in his typical chair and Olive wonders if he’s in his

bedroom. She thinks very hard to try and remember whether or not his door was closed when she

left this morning, but she can’t possibly remember. Thinking back, every door was closed. No they

were open. Either way, she remembers the bacon and the taste lingers on her tongue and it’s mixed

with pancakes and syrup and orange juice. It feels as though a film has covered her mouth in a thin


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coat of breakfast and Olive clacks her tongue to the roof of her mouth so it mimics the tocking of a

clock. Then, Olive has her best idea yet. She leans down over her plate and licks the syrup clean off

the plate. Her hair drags over the plate and her parents only sigh, Olive continues to lick the plate

over and again. When she picks her head up her parents are both looking at her. And they both

look dreadfully tired. Her father has a mug of steaming coffee pressed to his temples and both

elbows on the table. Hair spurts from the top of his undershirt and his mouth hangs open. Olive’s

mother has her hands stacked atop one another and her fingers spread out. Olive knows that she

only does this when she’s very upset. The lines around her mother’s mouth are deep and taught.

Olive stares at them, feeling the sticky syrup drip from the bottom of her hair and down her neck.

“Olive, honey,” her mother says.

“Give it a rest, will ya?” her father asks.

“Go outside,” her mother says.

“Go anywhere,” her father says. “We love you.”

They both say “we do, we really do.”

Then Mother, “but we need a break this morning. Neither of us got any sleep, darling.

Please go out and play, okay?”

Olive begins to worry. She wonders why her parents are calling her such strange words like

darling and honey and if Olive should start calling her parents silly words like molasses, blaring, or

buffoon. Olive tries to remember all the words she heard those silly businessmen saying before, but

she gets nervous and runs to her room before any escape her lips.

Carrying all of her things—the fishing rod, line, and a cooler of snacks—Olive runs with her

jumble of things. She does her best not to let any snag across the ground, but it’s nearly impossible.

The trash bag carrying the fishing line catches a snag in the grass and splits open, spilling out most

of the line. But Olive doesn’t care. It feels like ages since she’s fished last and she really can’t


remember how long ago it was (even though it was only afternoon the day before when she gave up

fishing forever). Time is tricky for everyone, Olive thinks. Her mother always yells at her watch

when she’s waiting for the bus. She wonders how old a person needs to be to understand time. This

is something that makes her stop in her tracks and shut her eyes as tightly as she can. Olive thinks

the question three times so that she’ll remember to ask her grandfather.

Standing in the sun, the syrup begins to crystalize down Olive’s neck. When she moves her

neck from side to side the sugar cracks and breaks from her neck, tugging her hair. For a weekend,

it seems to be especially busy at the bus stop. A mess of people have swarmed her favorite spot so she

has to stand by the mailbox a few feet father down from her typical place.

“Just have to see how the fishing is here,” Olive says to herself.

She gets the kite up and running and the sky is wide open and immaculately blue. The only

clouds Olive can see are far away and when Olive measures them against her hand they don’t even

cover her fingernail.

Today is absolutely the day, Olive thinks. She knows that today is the day that she will catch

her fish or whale or whatever it is she’s fishing for. Her grandfather told her that he will never tell

her what it is exactly that she’s on the prowl for, but Olive knows that she’ll catch something and

that’s what matters. She has trouble containing her body. Her muscles squeeze and tighten

together, clutching her arms to her chest, and she squeals with excitement. And it’s at that moment

she hears someone yelling at her.

Down the road, an older, round gentlemen is bustling about. She watches him and turns

her head to the side as if to get a better view of the man. On this hot summer day, the heat rises

from the pavement of the streets and blurs him. He’s hooting and hollering as he skips and jogs

down.


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“Thank goodness I’ve reached you,” the man says when he’s reached Olive. It’s the man

from before—the one that lent Olive his handkerchief. He promptly asks Olive where it is.

Olive shrugs and says she doesn’t remember.

“Now, now, young lady,” the man says. “No one gets a loan from Hal Tannerhan and gets

reneges payment. I expect interest. I expect prompt payments. I expect order. A loan is a loan, it’s

simple. Plain black and white like the ink and paper it’s printed in. Now, I’ll ask again, young lady.

I’ll ask you once, I’ll ask you twice, and dare I need ask thrice—why! I don’t know what I’ll do.

Never, have I ever asked someone thrice before they paid me twice and double the interest and I’ve

tripled my profits—do you follow me? Splendid. Positively stupendous, now young lady, what will

we do about this?”

“Sir, could you slow down?”

“Slow down? Positively preposterous! Slow down when there’s money to be made? I hope

you haven’t a mind to get into business because you would fail miserably, what’s your age? How

many years have you got in that skull of yours?” The man asks Olive who informs him she is eight

years of age. “Eight?! Are you kidding me? I had already cornered the market on lemonade stands

by the time I was eight years old. I started one at six when I was living in a dead end street. Spent day

and night all summer, autumn, winter, and spring long working at it. Walked downhill both ways to

the five and dime for lemonade mix and I had that dead end bustling with life and had six cars at a

time getting lemonade. The paper called me the Dead End Dealer, I bought my second stand and

hired the girl that spilled popsicles down her chin every summer. Put her stand on the main road

and tripled my profit, do you know what that means? That means three dollars to one. By the time

I was eight I owned and operated sixteen lemonade stands across my town. When life hands you

lemonade, you know I made it. Those were the days. I sold my business to someone and they


turned it into old something or other. That was me that started it. Eight years old, young lady.

Shape up!”

By the time the man has finished he is sweating from everywhere.

“You look hot, mister. Want some water?”

“How much?”

“It’s free.”

“I don’t trust a thing that’s free. I need my handkerchief because I’m perspiring like the

dickens. I’ll tell you a tale of two kitties one of these days, but right now I need something to dab

off my brow. Your necklace, give it to me and we’ll be square.”

The man all but rips the necklace from Olive’s neck and he dabs his forehead and neck.

“Okay, we’re even,” Hal Tannerhan says.

“I thought we were square.”

“Don’t get smart with me.”

“I thought we were even.”

“Enough of this,” the man says. “Taxi!” And like that he gets into a blue and white taxi cab

and speeds off.

Olive wonders if the man understands time and decides that he must since he talks about

numbers and anyone that knows numbers probably knows a thing or two about time. Or maybe

they think they do and maybe that’s not the same thing. Either way, Olive never wants to be in such

a rush as that man. She touches her forehead and it is not sweating and she feels nothing like a

shape. There are bugs about her neck and they land and get stuck to the syrup and it begins to bake

into her neck from the sun. When it’s burning, Olive goes to Al’s sandwich shop.

“Hello, young lady,” Al says. He’s holding a spatula and he dings it three times on the grill

and asks her what he can make for her.


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“Can I use your bathroom?”

“I can’t make that,” Al says.

Olive skips and says thank you and takes the key off of Al’s counter. She scurries in and

washes her whole head under the sink. Her head, under the hand dryer, is hot and makes her brain

swirl. She’s dizzy afterward and water drips down her neck. But it feels better than dried, baked

bugs.

Sitting at Al’s counter, Olive asks for a grilled cheese.

“Al’s way or your way?”

“My way is Al’s way.”

“Right you are, lady. Right you are. That’s why I like you. You know me. I know you. It’s all

about us, ay?”

Al chops two spatulas on the grille, cutting up tomatoes and spinach and onions. He

pinches his fingers in jars of spices and they sizzle when they hit the grill. Then Al grills two pieces

of bread and melts cheese over the fillings. He puts two pieces of lettuce on the grilled bread and

cuts it into a triangle.

“Here you are,” Al says and he asks if she’s thirsty and gives her a cup of water.

Taking a bite, Olive thinks of the ocean. Al always smells salty and once, when Olive told

him he smelled like the sea, Al told her it is in his pores. He was born on the beach and washed in

ocean water every day. When he was a boy he was a fisherman and when he was old enough he swam

all the way to the United States. He told Olive he was only kidding, but he also told her he was very

serious about some of it. And it was Olive’s job to find out what was true and what wasn’t and she

knew she would figure it out eventually. Or if she didn’t then it wouldn’t be important.

“Can I ask you something? Why are you always fishing?”


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A long moment passes and Al waits with a hand on his hip and leaning against the wall. In

his shop is Freddy, a young man with greasy black hair who is sweeping by the grill and the

refrigerator. On Olive’s side there is a young man hiding his head in a baseball cap and watching

television while he eats.

Then Olive says, “it’s kind of like loving your family. My Dad says that he loves my Mom

even when he’s angry. Family is family, he told me. And no matter what you love them. Even when

you’re really mad at them you still love them and you won’t know why. But you’ll know that they’re

always there for you when you need. And for me, fishing is like family. I don’t know why I started

or when. I wake up and it’s there and I do it. I miss it when it’s gone and I don’t think about it

when it’s there and I think that means I love it.”

“You are a brave, girl, lady.”

“Thank you.”

“Of course, of course. Can I get you anything else?”

Passing Al her plate, Olive says she couldn’t eat anything else. She is just getting up when

the bi-polar bear comes into the shop.

“I been looking everywhere for you,” it says.

The bi-polar bear is dressed in gray dress pants and a button-downed blue shirt. Its tie is

red and striped with blue and the knot hangs loose around its neck and the top button is undone.

“I took your advice,” the bear says. “Got a job as a banker. Wear a suit every day it’s

amazing. Really incredible. I can’t believe how wonderful it is. Really, I think I’ll do it forever. I

really mean it this time, really. I can’t thank you enough. You’ve saved my life.”

The bear shakes her hand up and down furiously and clamps a hand to her shoulder.

“What do you think? How do I look?”

“Like you’re hungry,” Al says.


“ Great,” Olive says. And she says goodbye to Al and goes outside to her favorite spot.

It’s almost lunch time and the street has emptied out. Across the street there are no kids

playing or running to the library and no one is waiting for washing machines at the Laundromat.

For the most part, cars only seem to be streaming from one direction. Olive continues fishing

while she watches cars approach from her right and then speed off to her left. All the while, the bi-

polar bear sits on the curb beside her. Between bites of his sandwich he begins to tell her stories

about a girl that he’s dated, dating, and going to date. And before that story finishes he launches

into a story about some injustice at the grocery market. That’s when Mr. Bear becomes recklessly

optimistic about the dropping price in summer fruits.


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“I am part polar bear, you know. So fruits are typically part of my diet. Every year they get

better though. I think pears are the absolute best fruit there is. Made me forget about watermelon

completely. I never eat that stuff anymore. Pears, pears, pears. That’s all I need. Pears for me,

yessiree. Do you like pears?”

Olive opens her mouth to answer.

“Because I love them. A nice, perfect ripe pear—nothing better. The flesh comes off so

nicely and the juice that comes from a pear is the sweetest, most natural thing you could eat. A

delicate flavor really. Oh, I could eat a whole basket of pears breakfast, lunch, and dinner and be a

happy bear. You know what I mean?”

Shifting her weight, Olive takes a deep breath.

The bear continues, “better than pears though? Mangoes. But that’s another story, I love

pears so much I should be a pear bear. Hey that’s a nickname!”

“You always do that,” Olive says. “You always say ‘you know what I mean’ and then you

don’t listen to know whether or not I actually know what I mean. It’s making me very angry.”

The bear loosens an already loose tie. Then he pulls the knot completely from it and lets

each length hang down his sides. It puts both hands on its forehead and lets out an exaggerated

sigh.

“You’re right,” the bear says. “I get so excited about some things that I talk about them as

fast as I can so no one can stop me from being excited. And now, I feel anything but excited.”

“Are you unhappy?”

“No.”

“Are you sad?”

The bear shakes its head.

“Are you upset?”


The bear drops its palms to the curb and slumps its shoulders as it turns to look at her.

“Then what are you?” Olive asks.

“I’m depressed.”

Olive says it slow “De-pressed?”

“It means I feel very, very sad.”

“So sad you can’t get out of bed?” Olive asks.

“No, no. Now it’s your time to listen okay?” Then the bear waits and Olive says she will

listen. “Being depressed is terrible. It’s like being caught in a big whirlpool in the center of the sea.

And the whirlpool drags you down and down and down and you feel worse and worse. Then,

miraculously you stop. Maybe you float up a bit higher and you feel a little better. And I think I’m

out of it and I’m okay. And then I think I’m swimming to the surface, but I’m so disoriented that

I’m really swimming further down. It continues like that for days, weeks, months, and right now

it’s been a little over a year. Once, a few months ago I thought I was out. And I nearly was. But the

worst part about the whirlpool is that even when you get out, you still have to swim to shore. That’s

the worst of it. So is it like being so sad I can’t get out of bed? No, not really. Getting out of bed is

the easy part. It’s staying out of bed that’s the hardest.”

Olive sits beside the bear and takes one of its giant paws into her hand. The paw envelops

her fingers and dwarfs her wrist.

“That’s why I got this job. When I saw you, I thought you pointed me in the right direction.

I felt really good. Went and got a job, dressed well, and felt happy. But this doesn’t feel so great. I

just wanted it to be great. I really don’t want to feel like this. I just don’t have the energy to feel any

other way. You know what I mean?”


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“No, I don’t. I’m only eight years old. Mostly, I’m very happy since I began fishing. When I

feel sad, I have a trick. I take pictures of smiles and then when I’m sad I think of them and that

makes me happy.”

“With a camera?” the bear asks.

“No, with my brain. I only just learned this trick, but it’s a good one and I think you’ll

really like it. I hope so anyway. Will you try it with me?”

The bear agrees and Olive smiles as big as she can and like most little children do. Her

mouth forms a rectangle around her teeth so that she doesn’t look happy or sad. She opens her eyes

as wide as they’ll open and some people might think the bear is scaring her, but Olive is happy. The

bear blinks and says he’s taken the picture. Olive shakes her head and closes her eyes tightly and

makes a noise an antique camera would and makes the bear do it again. Once that’s finished she

asks how the bear feels.

“Better,” Bear says.

“That’s how it starts. My grandfather once told me that happiness is something you have to

want. It’s easy to be sad and angry, but it takes a lot of hard work to be happy. But once you work

hard enough, it comes much easier. He said you have to wake up and think happy things as soon as

you wake up and make sure you walk slowly. If you walk slowly then you’ll be able to enjoy ant hills

and puddles. And he told me to make sure that I take at least fifteen minutes everyday to sit and do

nothing. I don’t know what fifteen minutes is so I sit as long as I can and Grandpa says that’s good

enough.”

Just then, they stop talking because they hear horns being elongated and exhausting their

breath down the road. A big green object is puttering down the road, it has two large rear tires and

the smaller ones are much normal size. It sounds like a great truck, but looks nothing like Olive has

ever seen before. The front end is narrow and elevated so its snout is level with the tops of cars.


And atop it there is a long bearded man sitting beside a woman. Olive wonders out loud what the

object is and the bear tells her it is a tractor.

Behind it there is a long stream of traffic, the wheels of the tractor are so big it takes up

more than one lane. And since there are cars parked along both sides of the road, the tractor is

driving down the middle. Cars begin to honk and there are shouts accompanying them. It’s in this

moment that the bearded man lifts up a leg and swings it around the woman beside him. All at

once, he uses his leg to push her into the driver’s seat and pull himself up and into the passenger

seat. It all happens with such fluidity that Olive believes they must practice the move day in and day

out. She begins clapping and shouting with everyone. The bearded man stands to face the honking

mass of automobiles behind him and he starts waving his hands about. It looks like he’s clamoring

at them all to drive closer to the rear of the tractor. He’s conducting! The man is conducting the

traffic behind him, he waves his right hand to try and keep the tempo of the horns and waves his

left to increase the volume of the voices and it works. While the shrill shrieking section is a bit off

beat, the baritone of the two cab drivers almost over power. They shout such a terrific baseline and

it choruses into a cascade of beautiful music.

Olive takes the paw of Mr. Bear and pulls him up. Together, they dance and they make

quite a silly sight. Mr. Bear, being a bear, is almost twice Olive’s and she holds both his paws and

they start dancing. Well, Olive dances around the bear. She shakes her hands like she’s waving

frantically and she skips about. She stops and jumps up and down and flaps her arms. The bear

doesn’t move and Olive shouts at him to dance.

“But I have two left paws,” Mr. Bear says.

“Because you’re supposed to walk on all fours,” Olive says. So she stands on hands and feet

and dances the way a bear would—so she shakes her rump and sways her head and jumps all at once.

“But, me and you dancing,” the bear says, “what will people think?”


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“That you’re a bear.”

Olive keeps dancing and she takes the bear’s paws and they swing around and around and

finally the bear starts to move on his own. It’s awkward at first and he only moves his wrists and

keeps them low by his waist. Then he raises his arms and dances off beat. Olive points to her ears

and tells him to listen to the horns and then she shows him how to move to them. Soon, they’re

bouncing to the horns, swiveling with the shrieking, twirling to the shouts, and they turn it into

their own sort of sidewalk waltz.

They keep dancing until the tractor is almost next to them. The man driving is Felix.

“Hey,” Felix says. “It’s my favorite fisher. How is she?”

“Great!” Olive says.

She continues to move, but Felix has turned his back on the line of honking musicians and

it begins to sound like noise. Olive tries to keep moving to the music, but her movements are just

as disjointed and disembodied as the honks, yelps, and shouts of the orchestra. So she jumps and

sits and flops and rolls when she should have twirled, skipped, and discoed. Felix shouts her name

to get her attention. Olive turns on a heel and folds her hands behind her.

“What are you doing?” Felix asks.

Olive tells him she was dancing. The woman beside Felix looks very familiar, Olive asks

Felix “is that the lady you were looking for?”

“Her?” Felix asks, gesturing to the woman encased in eye glasses. Her spectacles are so large

they take up almost all of her face—from her forehead to her cheeks, Olive believes the woman to be

some sort of insect. “This is my daughter.”

“Don’t I know you?” the woman asks. Then she snaps and points at Olive, “You’re the girl

that lost my dog. I knew you were familiar.”


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“Your dog ran off, I didn’t lose him. I told you where he went. He’s a dog. I was lost, not

the dog.”

“All’s well, anyway,” the woman says. “But, hey we just got this tractor. Someone left it on

the side of the road and it said it was free. One of those ‘if you can fix it, it’s yours’ kind of

situations.”

“What was wrong with it?” Olive asks.

“Nothing,” Felix says. “Just needed elbow grease. So I drained both my elbows and mixed

what I had with water and half with jam—strawberry of course. And it started right up.”

Felix slides back into the driver’s seat and doesn’t stop driving while he’s talking to Olive so

she trots alongside the tractor.

“What’s the deal with your friend, here?” Lucile asks.

“He’s depressed,” Olive says. “Or he was, he is impressed now.”

With a tug of his beard and a slap to his knee, Felix stands up and takes his hands off the

wheel. “By golly, that’s all we need.”

Lucile takes the wheel.

“What’s the suit for, bear?”

Bear insists on being called Mr. Bear and after that he says “I was a bank teller, but I’m

miserable there. It’s terrible.”

Felix stares long and hard at Mr. Bear and they all travel past the post office and even make

it down to Miss’ Mismatched Bakery before he says anything. Then Felix asks “do your ears hang

low? Can you tie a knot and a bow? Would you could you with a fox? I hope not, I certainly do not

want anything to do with a fox. Can you fashion a good breakfast? Change the oil? Can you

remember my mother’s birthday? Do you clean behind your ears or just pass a towel and call it a

day? Have you ever wrestled three raccoons in a jungle by a waterfall while a new wave English rock


band imploded on the scene? Do you know the square root of a hip square? Do you think it’s hip

to be square? Do you have a bad hip? Would you come off the bench if it meant your team won the

championship? Do you cut the crusts off your sandwiches? Does that mean you don’t eat pizza

crusts either? Do you have something against crusts? Because we’re walking on Earth’s crust and if

you have a problem with that then I got a problem with you. So listen up, pal, because this isn’t

going to be a magic carpet ride and where we’re going there is a place like home and I need to know

if you’ve got the beans for it. So what do you say?”

“Yes,” Mr. Bear says.

“Good,” Felix says.

“Better,” Olive says.


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“Okay,” Lucile says. “But even I didn’t know what that meant.”

Felix squeezes her shoulder and tells her he’ll explain, then he looks at Mr. Bear and says,

“You’re just a side plot, but hey someone needs to be the sideshow that no one cares about. But

you put us together, and hey I think we’re on to something. We won’t be the greatest show on

earth, but we’ll be the best show in town.”

And it’s just like that, that Mr. Bear climbs up onto the tractor and Olive waves goodbye to

a few old friends who never promised to come back and visit, only to write when they got where they

were going.

7.

When Olive gets home all the lights are off at her house. She calls for her mother then her

father and there is no answer. She smells a faint smell of cinnamon and wonders what they ate for

dinner. Her parents must be working, Olive thinks. She sits in her grandfather’s chair and

wonders where he disappeared to. One of her favorite songs is about a taxi driver on the Amazon

River and she sings a few lines from that before she remembers that she forgot all the lyrics.

Upstairs, the light to her grandfather’s bedroom is on. Robert the nineteenth is fast asleep

in his bed. The covers are pulled to his chin and he’s snoring lightly. Olive clambers up onto the

bed and snuggles close to her grandfather so that she can be on her side and wait for him to wake

up.

Quickly, Olive becomes bored. She starts tossing and turning and making small noises to

try and stir her grandfather. Then she begins to nudge him between his ribs, which feel bonier

than usual. He opens an eye and then the other. Groans. Says good morning.

“It’s nighttime,” Olive says.

“I’ve slept all day.”

“Yep. You must be tired.”


“Exhausted.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“Sleep.”

“But you’ve slept all day.”

“Then I’ll sit and talk with you.”

Olive breathes a sigh of relief. She sits up and crosses her legs. Pulling at the hem of her

grandfather’s pajamas, she thinks of her question.

“Do you understand time?” Olive asks.

“Time?”

“Time.”

“I know nothing about time,” her grandfather says, “but I knew a Tim once.”

“Did he know about time?”

“He was time.” Robert the nineteenth takes a very long time inhaling through his nose and

then exhales very, very slowly. “I’ll tell you a story I have never told anyone, but your grandmother.

It’s when I first went fishing for the very first time in my life.”

It was specifically a Wednesday afternoon, Robert the nineteenth recalled. He had just

fallen off his bicycle and broken his ankle the afternoon before and he was fresh in a cast. His

mother, Olive’s great grandmother, was a nasty old woman and Robert the nineteenth believed that

she gave him medicine he didn’t need. She used a small dropper and would put it into his drinks

or mix it into his potatoes.

“Whatever she put it in always would taste bitter and make me sour my face. I asked her why

she did it and she told me it would make me very strong.”

On the contrary, Robert the nineteenth was a sickly child. Almost weekly he went to the

doctors and they tried everything. Even on the day he was fishing they hooked him to an


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intravenous drip to hydrate him. One of his doctors also recommended tobacco for his asthma and

that compounded all his problems.

“It was arsenic, I’m sure of it. Just a small enough amount to keep me ill,” Robert the

nineteenth said. “My mother didn’t want me and she told me that. So I stopped eating.”

The only meals Robert the nineteenth ate were at friend’s houses or at school. He starved

himself, but he was became healthier and the darkness his family’s history returned to his skin and

made it a rich, olive color hue.

On that Wednesday, Robert had been feeling particularly sad. He lassoed a kite to his

fishing pole and cast it into the air. With meticulous care and a watchful eye, a young Robert the

nineteenth let out the line so that it at its max capacity. A summer storm was coming and the clouds

were thick and overwrought and gray. The wind blew strong and tugged at the line so it felt as

though Robert the nineteenth may be brought up in the sky forever.


“I remember thinking,” Olive’s grandfather says, “of all the possibilities of being brought

into the clouds. I wanted so badly for it to happen. To be taken away from everything. Always, as a

child I was rushing from thing to thing and never stopped to enjoy what I was doing. Every task was

something to be checked off and it was impossible for me to have fun when I was always looking

forward instead of at what I was doing. But, a broken ankle I had no choice but to find happiness in

stillness. That’s why I liked fishing in the clouds. I lost myself that afternoon. Watching the kite

dart off and away beyond the clouds and then disappearing. It was like I cast my chaos to the sky and

become a buoy of rest.”

“How long did you stay out there for?”

“Almost all day.” Robert the nineteenth ignored his mother’s call for dinner and she told

him that he could stay out and starve. But that was okay with him because he was happy in one spot.

And the night drew on and the hoots of owls began to sound and then crickets sang with them.

Spiders began to crawl over the bare knee of Robert the nineteenth and the young boy steadied his

breathing so as not to startle them and encourage a bite.

“It was right as I became completely still,” Robert the nineteenth says. “That I caught

something.”

It felt like Robert the nineteenth caught the entire sky and he began to pull as hard as he

could and reel in his catch. The sky opened up and rained down on him and it was already so dark

he couldn’t see and he closed his eyes. Thick drops of rain pelted his eyelids and kept them shut

tight as possible. Robert the nineteenth felt himself being pulled up and into the sky. He rolled

down to the ground and breathed in as much air as he could to try and make himself heavier.

Thanked the rain for making him weighted even more, Robert the nineteenth reeled and reeled.

Bent almost in a right angle, the fishing rod was near collapsing. Then the wind relaxed and his


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catch gave way to gravity briefly and sank down. Reeled in as much as he could, Robert the

nineteenth braced himself against another gust. It continued for almost an hour.

“My hands were cut to bleeding from my finger nails.” Olive’s grandfather lifts his palms so

Olive can see the small scars and how time has made them raise and darken. “The sun was only

beginning to crest over the horizon when I finally reeled in my catch. I was so exhausted I didn’t

look for it. When it was nearly twenty feet above me, at least that’s what it looked like, the wind

stopped and my catch dropped to the earth. It was just beginning to lighten, the sun was behind the

clouds and what light shined through was dim and brought no warmth. I lay on my back among

twigs stripped from their trees and I pressed my bleeding hands into the cool mud. Every muscle in

my body ached, especially my broken ankle. The water that had pooled in my ankle was cold and

made me shiver. My teeth clattered off one another and I closed my eyes and wished that sleep

would take me. I didn’t care what I had caught or if it would run off or if it would eat me. I only

cared that it had been caught. Willingly, I would have swallowed all of the drink in my mother’s

glass dropper—I was that tired and spent. That’s when I was slapped in the face.”

Olive’s grandfather smiles and presses his dry hand to her cheek.

“Standing above me was something of a giant. It was a thing. On its shoulders rested a

round pocket watch whose circumference was slightly impressed beyond its frame. It was dressed in

a long gray suit, salmon tie, slacks pinstriped in blue, and pointed blue suede shoes. The thing

picked me up and carried me inside to my bed.”

Robert the nineteenth said he slept for almost an entire day and when he woke up he was so

sore he could hardly move. As soon as his eyes opened, the clock leaned in close to his face and

thanked him. It had been stuck in the sky for as long as it could remember and when it saw the kite

it latched on for as long as it could. The thing had jumped into the sky to chase a dahlia that had


been uprooted by the wind and escaped his garden. It had no idea where it was or where it was

going to go.

“But it gave me the dahlia and said ‘if this jumps up and goes back to the sky, let it go.’

Nothing happens on accident twice.’ Then it said goodbye and went away to try and find its home.”

Olive’s grandfather has closed his eyes and enough time passes that Olive begins to wonder

if he has fallen asleep.

“I only kept fishing,” her grandfather’s voice is nearly a whisper, “hoping that the clock

would have drifted up into the sky and needed someone to bring it back down to Earth.”

In the grandfather clock, finished in a heavy brown and lacquered until it shined, Olive’s

grandfather instructs her to open the door. The pendulum counts the seconds as they pass. To the

left there is a rifle. Her grandfather’s old hunting rifle and it is encased in dust and a small bishop

plugs the open end of the barrel. Opposite the rifle on the right side, is a flower.

Lacking a stem, the flower is a dahlia. Its bulb is rotund and bulbous, forming a perfect

circle. As the years pass, Olive will think the pedals look like arteries and because she thinks this the

color deepens in its redness. But at this moment, Olive turns the dahlia over in her hands. From

the bottom, the pedals are wide and open in loping ovals. As they cascade in on themselves the

pedals close in size and begin to form circles, tightening near the top. Closer to the center, the

pedals form cones and the colors are most vibrant until the cones envelop in and are tiny buds.

This makes the epicenter look almost like a honeycomb of pedals and the redness deepens and

looks bruised.

Taking the flower carefully in her hands, Olive clambers onto the bed on one knee and

then the other. She pulls her knees together and kneels parallel to her grandfather’s ribs.

“I want you to have this,” Olive’s grandfather says, “you must care for it every day.”


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Opening her mouth to ask how, Olive grandfather shushes her with a heavy breath. Then

takes one of her hands in his and closes his fingers around hers.

“At least once a day in Spring and Summer, twice in autumn, and three times in the Winter

you must water it. Take the flower and press it to your lips, but be sure to be delicate so as your lips

form words they are careful not to damage any of the pedals. Whisper a dream into the pedal very

slowly and in as much detail as you can. Store the flower in a dark place when it is alone and when

you are with it take it out often and always smile in greeting. Try it now, it hasn’t been dreamed in

nearly two days.”


Olive lets go of her grandfather’s hand and pulls the flower to her lips.

“Be sure to keep this forever. I never saw that clock again, if it comes looking he may want

his flower. Share it with him. It will give you much even if you only have it for a time. Remember

me in it and remember the clock. Fish at least once a day and twice if you can. Your life will be busy

and fishing will let you slow yourself. I’ve found it best to dream the flower in the morning in

Spring and Summer, right when I wake up. It is always good to dream when you wake up.” Then,

Robert the nineteenth apologizes and tells his granddaughter to continue dreaming the dahlia.

She cups the flower to her lips and closes the lids of her eyes so they meet at her iris.

Whispering into the pedals, her lips brush the smoothness of the plant and her words trickle out

and make no sound.

fishing in the clouds

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