The Lighthouse Road(99)

Odd looked over at him and wondered again what his hardheartedness had done to the boy.



"Hey, bud," Odd said. "Hell of a morning for catching fish, ain't it?"



"It's unnatural, the way they're biting."





She was fifty-seven years old as she stood at the window. Except for that year in Duluth with Odd she'd spent almost forty-four of those years living here, the last ten of them alone. The apothecary had de volved first into a general mercantile, then a clothier, and finally a haberdashery before it became nothing more than a madwoman's madhouse. That was what people thought, anyway. What the high school– aged kids said as they roamed the Lighthouse Road on Friday nights. Sometimes they threw rocks through the big front window, once they painted a large owl on the clapboard siding. She thought nothing of their mischief, was only relieved to know that Harry was not among the vandals.

She looked up and down the shore at the snow in the pines. Some of the trees had grown in the years she'd been there, others had been felled, but the shape of the wilderness had stayed the same. The shape of the lake, too. She took comfort in this, felt some affinity with the years.



But it was a comfort short in lasting. As soon as she settled her gaze back on the ice fishermen, the vagaries of time that a moment ago had provided solace were now as cruel as the wind.



Out on the lake the ice fishermen were hauling them in, one after another, even as the fissures spread like veins through the ice, even as the wind stiffened from the northeast.



Odd said, "That wind is coming around now, ain't it?"



" Maybe we should call it a day."



"Look at that pile of fish. We've never had a day like this."



"Still. The wind."



"We'll be all right."



And because Harry believed every word his papa ever said, he dropped his line into the lake again.