Labrador

by Kathryn Davis

  Mama ran her hand through her hair and looked at me, exasperated. “It’ll never fit in the refrigerator,” she said. “Maybe you could put it on the porch.”

  “What’re you talking about, Constance?” Daddy asked. “We’re going to eat it, right, Kitty?”

  I stood looking at you. You were no longer interested in the subject of the fish: the expression on your face was strained and thoughtful, and you walked gracelessly to the sink, where you leaned forward to peer through the window, as if you were expecting someone.

  “I can’t imagine what’s keeping Patrick,” Mrs. McGuire said. “I told him four o’clock, did I not, Kathleen, and here it is five-thirty and still no sign of the boy. His sainted father, dead these twenty years, was no better—a month late, he was, for his own birth, so that his poor mama had swelled up to the size of a sea cow, and there was not a shoe this side of Sligo she could get her feet into.”

  I could see your back stiffen, the knobs of your knuckles whitening as you clamped down on the black rim of the sink. “Do you think,” you said, “you could spare us the tales of childbirth?”

  Mrs. McGuire ducked the pointy blade of her chin down into the place where the folds and pleats of her neck disappeared into the collar of her coat—it was an unconvincing display of servility. “Forgive me,” she said. “If my tongue offend thee, pluck it out.”

  “Willie hasn’t been herself lately,” Mama said. “You’ll have to excuse her.”

  “Ah,” said Mrs. McGuire, “of course. It is hardly a week since the poor old man passed away, God rest his soul.”

  Little by little the fish was beginning to thaw out on the table, its contours softening in a pool of clear juices. I went over to the sink to get the sponge, and as I came up beside you, you put your arm around me and pulled me close. “Hey,” you whispered, “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “I’m glad I’m here, too,” I said.

  “If I can just make it through tomorrow,” you said, nestling your small head down onto my big shoulder, pressing it in. “If I can just make it through tomorrow, everything’ll be okay.”

  “What’s happening tomorrow?” I asked. But I didn’t have to hear your answer to know: tomorrow the little feather would be plucked out of your body; tomorrow you would be Willie-without-a-feather, and I would be Kathleen-without-an-angel; tomorrow a whole glittering thread would be yanked loose from the fabric of our lives, and the residual pattern would either unravel into a kinked and colorful heap or assert itself, finally: two sisters seated together on a porch, smiling.

  “So,” Daddy said, “how about it? I can’t remember the last time we ate fish for supper.”

  “Do fish sticks count?” you asked, nudging me.

  Mama sighed. “What about the roast?” she asked.

  “We can have that, too,” Daddy said, pouring himself a tumbler full of Scotch. “We can eat our brains out.”

  “But I don’t know how to cook it,” Mama said.

  Rustlings and squealings both external and internal accompanied Mrs. McGuire’s decision to rise from her chair. Purposefully she drew pin after pin out of her hat, setting them down on the table in a pearl-headed cluster, like roe. “It has been many years, Mrs. Mowbrey, since I have seen a fish of such size and weight,” she said, removing her hat and coat. “My dear husband, Angus McGuire, was a fisherman—for years he used to carry the head bone of a flounder in his vest pocket, and I have always thought that the consumption took ahold of him the day he lost that bone to Connor O’Toole in a card game. It was a fearsome thing to see, a big giant of a man like Angus with the flesh just melting off of him! Why, in the end he was no bigger than Willie here, and his hair the same shade of red.”

  As we watched, Mrs. McGuire lifted the fish and carried it over to the sink, where she ran it briefly under the tap. “I hope, Kathleen, that you did not step over the line?” Bending delicately at the waist, like a young girl, Mrs. McGuire located the biggest of the cast-iron frying pans in its drawer under the stove, and ran her finger along its surface. “It’s been some time since you have used this pan, has it not, Mrs. Mowbrey? We shall just have to hope that the fish doesn’t stick. It is the worst kind of luck,” she told me, “to step over a fishing line.”

  “In that case,” you said, “maybe we should have the thing stuffed and hang it on the wall.”

  Mrs. McGuire ignored you. It was as if, while you sat heavily in your chair, watching, she had assumed those properties by which we all recognized you as a dancer. Each of her movements was calculated and economical: at the flick of her many-boned and brittle wrist, the flame leaped up under the pan; her elbows stuck straight out from her sides as she dredged the fish in flour, and then her whole torso twitched from side to side as she energetically twisted the pepper mill; when the butter bubbled up she raised the fish and smiled. I realized I had never seen her smile before.

  Dumbly—hypnotized, really—we all sat motionless as the fish hit the pan, sizzling, sending forth a cloud of fishy-smelling smoke. It was six o’clock: I could hear the Westminster chimes in the living room. We all sat motionless around the kitchen table as onto each of our sky-blue plates Mrs. McGuire slid a portion of lake trout: dark on the outside, white within. It smelled delicious.

  From where I sat I could see your nostrils expanding and contracting; I could see you prodding at the fish with your fork, and then lifting the fork to your mouth.

  A story is a story, I said to myself.

  You chewed and swallowed. Then you looked at me and your face was lit up with inexplicable happiness. “It’s so sweet,” you said. “I never expected it would be this sweet.”

  In this world, Willie. That is how a miracle happens in this world. And then the door blew open, all by itself, on its hinges, and in poured the miraculous air that we’ve been breathing ever since.

  KATHRYN DAVIS is the author of eight novels, the most recent of which is The Silk Road. She has received the Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman, both the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award and the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and lives in Vermont.

  Book design by Cynthia Krupat.

  Manufactured by Friesens on acid-free,

  100 percent postconsumer wastepaper.