Big Fish Read Free

you know what he says to me?”
    â€œWhat, Dad?”
    â€œâ€˜You owe me three-fifty,’ he says.”
    â€œThat’s funny,” I say.
    â€œWell, laughter is the best medicine,” he says, though neither of us is laughing. Neither of us even smiles. He just looks at me with a deepening sadness, the way it happens sometimes with him, going from one emotion to another the way some people channel surf.
    â€œI guess it’s kind of appropriate,” he says. “Me using the guest room.”
    â€œHow’s that?” I say, though I know the answer. This is not the first time he’s made mention of it, even though it was his decision to move out of the bedroom he shared with Mother. “I don’t want her to go to bed every night after I’m gone looking over at my side and shivering, if you know what I mean.” He somehow feels his sequestration here to be emblematic.
    â€œAppropriate inasmuch as I’m a kind of guest,” he says, looking around the oddly formal room. My mother always felt that guests had to have things just so, so she made the room look as much like a hotel as possible. You’ve got your little chair, bedside table, harmless oil reproduction by some Old Master hanging above the chest of drawers. “I haven’t really been around here so much, you know. At home. Not as much as we all would have liked. Look at you, you’re a grown man and I—I completely missed it.” He swallows, which for him is a real workout. “I wasn’t there for you, was I, son?”
    â€œNo,” I say, perhaps too quickly but with as much kind ­ness as the word can possibly hold.
    â€œHey,” he says, after which he coughs for a bit. “Don’t hold back or anything, just ’cause I’m, you know.”
    â€œDon’t worry.”
    â€œThe truth and nothing but the truth.”
    â€œSo help me—”
    â€œGod. Fred. Whoever.”
    He takes another sip of water. It seems not to be a matter of thirst so much as it is a desire for this element, to feel it on his tongue, his lips: he loves the water. Once upon a time he swam.
    â€œBut you know, my father was gone a lot, too,” he says, his voice crackling soft. “So I know what it’s like. My dad was a farmer. I told you that, didn’t I? I remember once he had to go off somewhere to get a special kind of seed to plant in the fields. Hopped a freight. Said he’d be back that night. One thing and another happened and he couldn’t get off. Rode it all the way out to California. Gone most of the spring. Planting time came and went. But when he came back he had the most marvelous seeds.”
    â€œLet me guess,” I say. “He planted them and a huge vine grew up into the clouds, and at the top of the clouds was a castle, where a giant lived.”
    â€œHow did you know?”
    â€œAnd a two-headed woman who served him tea, no doubt.”
    At this my father tweaks his eyebrows and smiles, for a moment deep in pleasure.
    â€œYou remember,” he says.
    â€œSure.”
    â€œRemembering a man’s stories makes him immortal, did you know that?”
    I shake my head.
    â€œIt does. You never really believed that one though, did you?”
    â€œDoes it matter?”
    He looks at me.
    â€œNo,” he says. Then, “Yes. I don’t know. At least you remembered. The point is, I think—the point is I tried to get home more. I did. Things happened, though. Natural disasters. The earth split once I think, the sky opened several times. Sometimes I barely made it out alive.”
    His old scaly hand crawls over to touch my knee. His fingers are white, the nails cracking and dull, like old silver.
    â€œI’d say I’d missed you,” I say, “if I knew what I was missing.”
    â€œI’ll tell you what the problem was,” he says, lifting his hand from my knee and motioning for me to come closer. And