"But the river's patient."
He looks back at the water.
I stand there in my too-big waders with my terrible casting arm in the morning light. What am I supposed to do with that info? There is no outcome to control out here. The river moves through the fury like it isn't there, indifferent and constant and completely unimpressed.
I cast again. The line goes wide, but it lands on water.
"Better," he says.
Two syllables. I'll take it.
two
Silas
Ididn'texpectherto come back, but she did.
I didn't expect that. Most clients who have a bad first day, and she had a genuinely bad first day, send a polite cancellation. I was waiting for the cancellation. Instead, she's at the bank at six sharp in the wrong shoes again, trail runners that are going to be soaked in fifteen minutes. Her hair is pulled back, and her phone is in her hand.
She puts it away when she sees me.
Then she sees Koda.
Koda is nine years old, mostly shepherd with something restless in her blood that never fully settled, and she has already covered the bank twice and investigated a log and come back to sit beside my left boot by the time Peyton reaches us. She's calm now the way she gets when the initial business is handled — ears up, watching, tail making a slow arc through the grass.
Peyton stops a few feet away and looks at her.
"You brought a dog," she says.
"She comes sometimes."
Peyton crouches down without asking permission, which is the right move. Koda leans forward and sniffs her hand with professional seriousness, then decides she's acceptable and pushes her head into Peyton's palm. Peyton makes a sound I wasn't prepared for — low and soft, surprised out of her — and scratches behind Koda's ears with both hands.
"Hi," she says to the dog. "Hi, you."
Koda's tail picks up speed.
I hand Peyton the rod when she stands. She takes it without the wariness of yesterday.
Something about her is different from yesterday. The anger is still there, but underneath it now is something worn. She is more relaxed, more beautiful, if that's even possible. That was why I could barely talk to her yesterday. I'm not used to finding my clients beautiful. Not looking at her was the hardest thing I'd done in my forty-some-odd years of life.
"Here." I keep my sentences short.
I've guided on this river for twenty years, and I can read a person about as well as I can read water. The ones who come out here running from something have a specific quality — they move too fast, they fill silence like it's a problem to fix, they're looking at the trees and the mountains, but they're not seeing any of it yet.
Peyton Archer is all of that. She talks constantly, which doesn't bother me, but she talks the way some people drink. To fill a hole that something painful has left behind.
Koda works the bank ahead of us as we move upstream, nose down, circling back every few minutes to check our position. She has done this her whole life and she is good at it. When Peyton casts too hard and puts the fly into the brush on the far side, Koda looks at the tangle, then looks at me, with the expression she reserves for situations she finds unnecessary.
"She's judging me," Peyton says.
"She's not."
"She absolutely is."
Koda has already moved on, which is probably its own kind of answer.
By mid-morning, I move in behind her left shoulder to fix her grip. Her hand has been sitting too high on the cork, pulling the line sideways on the release. I come up close and reach around and move her fingers to the right position on the cork, and she holds her breath when my hand covers hers.
