I.
IN MY memory, we are awake in the pre-dawn dark, walking to where the earth dives down to kiss the pond. Loons and secretive deer watch us make our way to water that shimmers with the scrabbling of hundreds of thousands of mayflies, reminding us that what makes the world go on are often the smallest things most easily overlooked. The air is thick with the exhalations of water and moss, and to protect himself from the bone-deep damp my father wears a gas-station poncho. I wear a trash bag with holes cut for my arms and head and, in spite of my layered long johns, shiver with the cold. My father, if he notices, pretends not to.
At the edge of the pond my father flips over a canoe and snakes the colors of tabby cats twist away from the light. I'd like to catch one but I dare not stop. For the past three weeks, my father has worked the night shift. For three weeks, my father has been a set of shoes near the door, a snore from a darkened bedroom, his patience measured by the puffiness beneath his eyes. My father wants me to be a certain kind of child and I will never be this child, although at my early age, I do not yet know it and so I hurry along, leaving the snakes alone.
The canoe is loaded with our fishing poles, a tackle box, a Cool Whip container filled with night crawlers and dirt. A small cooler with bologna sandwiches, Bud Light, water. We step in and push off, each dip of the paddle rocking the canoe. If we were closer to home there would be things to pluck from the water—styrofoam, a Butterfinger wrapper, a half-crushed Moxie can. But out here, the only signs of human life are the gentle drips of the paddle, the swooshing of our patched fiberglass canoe. Out here, we are lost between layers of pondfog and looncall.
Fish bite better in the rain, says my father. If you're ever hungry, and it's raining, go to the water.
I am hungry, but my father's advice is meant for some other time, a future in which there is no food in a cooler in a canoe, just waiting to be eaten. A future in which he, too, is absent. I have not known the kind of hunger implied by my father's advice, yet I understand it anyway, always feeling the presence of its possibility. We have food and we will eat. Our hunger is checked by free school meals, by leftovers eaten at my grandmother's house before dinner, by samples handed to us at discount shopping centers. But we live in a state of readiness, feeling acutely our need