The man sat across from his father

The man sat across from his father at the small table in the kitchen and the kitchen was bare and the light came in thin through one window and fell on the table between them. He told his father he had thought about the river. He had thought about the river many times. He said he had imagined them walking along the river in the morning when the stones were wet and the light was grey and the trees along the bank hung low with their branches in the water and he had imagined his father would show him how to tie the line and how to cast the line and how to read the water where it moved and where it did not move and where the fish held in the cold dark places beneath the rocks. He said he had imagined them building a fire in the yard in autumn when the leaves were down and the smoke would go straight up in the still air and they would stand by the fire and not talk and that would have been enough. He said he had imagined riding in the truck on the long road to the coast and his father driving and the windows down and the dust coming up behind them and the fields flat and brown on both sides of the road and arriving at the sea and standing together at the edge of the sea and the sea very large and themselves very small against it. He said he had imagined all of these things many times over many years and that he had held them carefully the way a man holds something small and breakable in his hands and he had turned them over and looked at them in different lights and they had sustained him through certain periods that were not good. He said he was not angry. His father looked at the table and the light from the window was on his hands and his hands were old. They did not go to the river.