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Mandy makes him coffee before he leaves. The sun is only just coming up, but she’s awake, smiling, fixing two cups of coffee. She sits down at the table with him, too, and they drink it together. He doesn’t speak. He hasn’t felt like talking much in the past couple of days.
“Y’know, I think this’ll be good for you,” she says after a long while. She places a hand on top of his.
“Yeah,” Dennis says. He’s not looking at her. He’s not really looking at anything.
“You don’t even have to do anything.” She rubs her thumb over the back of his hand, and the touch grounds him a little. “Just sit there, alright? See what happens.”
“I’ll try.”
“That’s all I’m askin’ for, hon.”
He finishes his coffee, and when he stands to put his mug in the sink, Mandy smiles up at him. It feels trite, but it strikes him in the heart all the same. It’s something.
Dennis isn’t going very far, but he’s going. It’s more than he’s been able to do lately. He opens the map on his phone and punches in the name of some park — it’s just out of the city, and Mandy said she used to go there when she was a kid. His phone says the trip will take fifteen minutes, but from the driveway, it feels like a million miles away.
In an attempt to fill the silence, Dennis switches on the car stereo. It’s been tuned to some NPR-affiliate station since he got here. There hasn’t been a good enough reason for him to change it. It doesn’t fill the silence right, though, so he tries to change it to one of the stations he liked in Philadelphia. He’s only been in North Dakota for two months. He hasn’t been out here long enough to form new habits or overwrite the ones from before. It comes up static, crackling over the car speakers.
He twists the dial slightly to the right until the signal comes through clearly. It’s not the same as the classic-rock station he liked in Philly, and he’s not sure why he thought it would be, but he leaves it, lets it stand in as background noise. The hosts are talking in soft voices, and the volume’s down low enough that Dennis doesn’t really register what they’re talking about, so it’s fine for what he needs it to do. About five minutes later, though, someone mentions Psalm 77.
He doesn’t care. That’s what he tells himself, desperate for it to be true, and he doesn’t change the station just to prove it. That’s why he doesn’t change it. Not because there’s something abstractly comforting in it. It’s just something to listen to, just noise.
When Dennis gets to the park, the sun’s a little higher above the horizon, and the air is just faintly warmer, and they’re still talking about the Blessed Mother on the radio. He gets out of the car and looks around for the first time. He’s not the only person there — a couple other cars sit in the parking lot — but he can’t see anyone else. He might as well be alone out there. It’s so quiet, always so quiet.
It’s almost like he’s on autopilot. He wanders out along the asphalt pathway, out of the parking lot and through a small group of dark-green trees, and when he finally sees the river, something very quietly shifts in his chest.
He stands on the riverbank with his hands in his pockets and he doesn’t move. He’s barely breathing. The only thing he can hear is the water, constant and wild and restless.
Dennis has been in North Dakota for two months and he’s hardly left the neighborhood. He works at the bar down the street in the evenings. It’s just about as quiet there as it always had been at Paddy’s, but he doesn’t drink or talk shit or plan elaborate schemes with his coworkers. He keeps to himself, mostly. He goes to the store and he buys cheap whiskey and organic yogurt. He sits on the carpet in the living room with Brian Jr. and sets up train tracks, but he’s not really present, not the way he wants to be. He doesn’t know how to be. He does know that this is killing him. He doesn’t have it in him to change that. He stands out on the porch sometimes, staring out into the night sky, looking east. The stars are so bright, and the darkness feels darker out here.
Even the quiet out here is different. It’s not like it had been in the suburbs — no dead smoke alarms, no pool filters. It’s the closest thing to true silence he’s ever experienced. Some part of him misses the noise, the dull roar of the city. Another part of him is loosely aware that he can actually breathe, actually think out here, now that he’s not trying to filter out all of that sound.
He does a lot of thinking up here. Not as much talking. Not unless he has to. Not as much drinking, either; nowhere near like he used to. It doesn’t hit the same when he’s by himself, and he’s almost always by himself these days.
It occurs to him, fleetingly, that he really hasn’t spent this much time alone in a long, long time. It was always Dennis and Dee when they were kids, and then it was Dennis and Mac and Charlie, all through high school. It was all four of them, then, and eventually Frank, once they bought the bar. They’ve always been the same, more or less. They’ll probably be the same without him. Maybe better, he thinks, and that’s where he decides to walk back to the car. He’s not good at this stuff yet. Not good on his own, like he thought he would be.
One weekend, in the middle of the summer, Mandy takes Brian Jr. to go visit her parents. She had invited Dennis, but he didn’t want to deal with all the questions they’d ask him about fatherhood or marriage or where he grew up, so he decided to stay home. Mandy didn’t seem too offended by it. He doesn’t have to work either of the two nights they’ll be gone. He doesn’t have anyone to talk to. It’s just him and his thoughts until they get back.
He drives out to the river that evening. He doesn't know why. It just feels right, like it’s what he’s supposed to do. It’s better than sitting alone at the dining room table and drinking himself into a stupor. It’s better than walking through downtown Fargo and finding a bar to sit alone at. Down at the edge of the river, watching the sun dip down below the trees, he’s just as alone as he would be anywhere else. It’s different, though.
It’s different because here, it’s just Dennis. He’s not trying to make friends or keep himself busy or anything. He’s just standing on the rocks, listening to the water, the sound steady and constant. He doesn’t think about much of anything out there, at least not this time. He crouches down to feel the water. It’s a lot warmer than he had been expecting. He stays down there on the riverbank for a while, his fingertips just beneath the surface, and watches the way the stream moves around him.
When his back starts to hurt from the position he’s in, he stands up and stretches and makes his way back toward the car. The sky is a deeper shade of blue. His breath comes a little easier.
The next weekend, while Dennis is halfway through the business section of the newspaper, Mandy wanders into the kitchen with Brian balanced on her hip.
“Hey, I gotta run some errands real quick. You mind hanging out with your little guy?”
“I can, yeah.”
“I’m only gonna be out an hour or so,” Mandy says. “Maybe you could take him to the park, let him run around?”
Dennis nods. He thinks about saying something, but it sticks in his throat. Mandy hands Brian over, and Dennis holds him close, like he’s afraid he’s going to drop his kid on the floor and break him into a million little pieces.
It doesn’t take much for him to decide he’s going to take Brian to the river. It’s supposed to be warm out that afternoon, so he can splash around in the water without getting too cold. There’s some part of him that doesn’t understand his fixation on spending time by the water, but he always ends up feeling better afterwards, so he doesn’t feel the need to question it too much.
Mandy leaves and it’s just Dennis and his kid. He’s not entirely sure what he did to warrant being trusted like this. He digs a beach towel out of the closet. He fills up a water bottle for Brian. He gets Brian’s shoes on before worrying about his own, and buckles Brian into his car seat, and some part of him feels like a real dad for the first time.
When they get to the park, Brian seems excited to play in the water. Dennis doesn’t feel entirely out of his depth. He sits down on the rocks and watches Brian splash around for a while, and just like earlier, something about it makes him feel like a real dad. Brian’s been his kid the entire time. Dennis hasn’t really taken the initiative to act like his dad.
He doesn’t know what to do in these situations, really. In his experience, Frank kind of outsourced parenthood to Barbara and the staff at the Reynolds estate, so he never had the chance to learn by example. He’s had to learn it all from scratch in the past couple of months. He’s not sure if he’s doing it right yet.
Brian turns and smiles at him, though, knee-deep in the river, and he thinks he might be doing something right, at least.
One afternoon, at the very end of the summer, Dennis wanders into the kitchen to find a huge cardboard box on the table. Mandy’s beaming at him from just behind it. It feels faintly like that time the gang tried to stage an intervention for Frank, but this time, he’s on the wrong side of it.
“What’s, uh, what’s all this stuff?”
“I was out in the garage, putting Brian’s pool toys away,” Mandy says, “and I found a bunch of my dad’s old fly-fishing gear.”
“Oh.” He doesn’t know what to do with his hands all of a sudden. He settles for resting them on the back of one of the chairs. “Are you… getting into fishing?”
“Nope, I don’t have the patience for it.”
“So what’re you doing with it, then?”
“I’m not doin’ anything with it. You’re gonna take it to the river with you next time.”
“I mean— I don’t know how to—”
“I’ll show you. It’s super easy.”
It’s not a suggestion, Dennis realizes, and so he resolves to watch over Mandy’s shoulder and absorb as much information as he can.
She picks up a long, cylindrical case and pulls out a few thin fiberglass pieces, which she connects into a nine-foot rod. Once it’s all together, she digs through the box for a moment, makes a face like she’s thinking about something, and unearths a small reel wrapped in a neon-green line. She attaches it to the rod and unspools some of the line, and then hands the whole thing to Dennis.
“You’re gonna thread this,” she says, putting one end of the line in his hand, “up through the guides, all the way to the end of the rod.”
He draws the line up through each of the metal rings, and when he gets to the end, he looks at Mandy for further direction.
“Now, pull a couple more feet of line out, and then hold onto the end so it doesn’t tangle.”
There’s some part of him that feels like this should be demoralizing. Like he should feel small, childish. He can’t find any condescension in Mandy’s voice. He pulls a few more feet of the line out and holds the end between his fingertips, just like she told him.
“Alright. Don’t worry about the rest of that stuff right now. Just bring that outside,” Mandy says, and Dennis follows her out the front door.
He watches the end of the rod flex with every step he takes. It’s so lightweight and responsive and something about it scares him a little. Mandy stands in the grass, just a couple steps off the deck, and Dennis hands her the rod.
“I haven’t done this in a long time,” Mandy says, pulling a few feet of line from the reel. “Might be kinda rusty.”
Dennis watches intently, studying her every move. She draws the rod back behind her, then snaps her elbow to bring it forward again, and the neon-green line floats way out into the grass. It looks easy when she does it. It’s almost like the line is suspended in the air, effortless, weightless.
“Alrighty, now come here.”
He moves a little bit closer, hand outstretched. He doesn’t speak, and he moves slowly, like he’s afraid of breaking something. She places the rod in his right hand.
“Just hold it like that. Keep everything real loose and easy.”
Dennis scowls down at his hands — one wrapped around the rod’s cork grip, and the other hovering limply next to the reel — and tries to commit that to memory.
“Now, you’re gonna unwind some of the line from the reel,” Mandy says, and Dennis pulls out a few feet of slack, letting it drop onto the ground.
“Like that?” His voice comes out microscopically, uncharacteristically small.
“You got it.” She tucks one end of the line under his right index finger. “That’s just to hold tension. So then you’re not freakin’ out, reeling like crazy, if you catch somethin’.”
He nods and adjusts his grip, trying with everything he has to keep his hand relaxed.
“So when you start to cast, you’re gonna keep your rod flat, like this,” Mandy says.
She gently moves his wrist so the rod is parallel to the ground, then stands back a few feet to give him space.
“Then you bend at the elbow and bring it back to just behind your head, and then you snap forward almost all the way, so then you’re like this.” She holds her own arm out in front of her, slightly bent.
Dennis’ first cast only gets the line out a few feet. He does it again, though, running through each step in his head, and his next few attempts get a little bit stronger each time. He can’t think of anything that feels similar. The motions are completely foreign to him, but every time he draws his arm back to cast again, it starts to feel more and more fluid.
He stands out there in the yard, working on his cast, until the sun dips down beneath the trees.
Mandy shows Dennis how to tie knots over the next couple of days. He stands out in the yard and practices his cast in the evenings. Mandy watches from the deck, silent and proud. She opens a box of hand-tied flies and tells him which ones are good for which seasons and which ones will work if nothing else does.
She tells him about how eager her dad had been to introduce her to fishing when she was younger. He doesn’t know what to do with that information. Frank’s only attempt to introduce Dennis to anything he cared about involved the family business and a great deal of hush money. He wonders if he has anything worth sharing with Brian.
Dennis puts a canvas bag in the backseat of the car before he heads out to the river one weekend. It’s just starting to get colder out, and the leaves are changing colors, and it’s somehow even quieter than it had been in the summer. Everything he’s been doing in the last few weeks has led him to this. Mandy had shown him how to put everything together the night before. He can figure this out.
When he gets there, he walks down to the edge of the river and stands there for a moment. It’s just him, which is exactly what he had been hoping for. He wants this to be a secret, or at least relatively private. Something he can distance himself from if he needs to. Something he doesn’t have to answer for.
Dennis kneels on the rocky ground and starts going through the steps he’d been taught. He pulls the fly rod, broken down into six pieces, from its case and slots it together. He sets it down gently in front of him and works on attaching the reel. The cold air makes his hands shake, so tying knots in the monofilament is harder than usual, but he gets a fly attached to the end of the leader. As far as he knows, he’s ready. When he goes to stand back up, his nerves jolt with anticipation.
His first few casts don’t get the distance he wants. He sticks with it, though, and after a few tries, his arm remembers, his hand remembers how this works. The line sails out, reel spinning — like it’s singing. The fly lands and drifts downstream for a few moments, and Dennis tracks it as it floats. He lets it get past him, then casts again, way upstream.
It only takes a second, that time. Something surges up right where the fly sits on the water. The line twitches on the surface. Fish on.
He pulls up hard, just like Mandy had said, and sets the hook. The fish struggles and the rod flexes and Dennis reels the line in as steadily as his hands will let him. He can feel his pulse in his fingertips and hear it in his skull as he draws the fish in closer.
Dennis drops to his knees and puts his free hand in the water. His heart races. The rocks shift under his feet. The fish fights like hell, straining against the line, against Dennis’ hand. It’s like time has stopped dead around him. He thinks he might be holding his breath.
He’s alive. He’s living and breathing and bleeding and he’s so goddamn aware of it in that instant that he almost loses his grip.
As gently as possible, he eases the hook out of the fish’s mouth, and when he lets it go, it darts off like nothing happened. Dennis tries to watch it swim downstream. It disappears into the current almost instantly.
He’s remarkably, stunningly alive. Even without the fish in his hand. Even right here, hundreds of miles away from everything he’s ever known. He’s been holding his breath for his entire life, he thinks, and it’s only just in this instant, soaked with freezing-cold river water, that he finally lets it go.
When he gets back to the house, Mandy’s on the front porch, arms crossed, smiling.
“How’d you do?”
“Not bad,” Dennis says. “Caught a couple fish, but I didn’t know what they were. Just big brown things.”
“I’ll tell you how to identify ‘em later. Did you have a good time, though?”
“Yeah. I did.”
He leaves it there. Mandy doesn’t press him for more. That night, he falls asleep before she does, though, and that’s all the clarification she could have wanted.
The winter feels twice as harsh as anything Dennis ever remembers seeing in Philly. There’s black ice in the roads and icicles hanging from the gutter and snow on every single surface. The cold in the air cuts straight through to the bone. It gets dark early in the evening and it stays dark late into the morning. He loses track of time. He works three or four nights a week, but there’s no consistency in his schedule, so he can’t set his watch by that.
He’s just going through the motions. He’s barely alive, like he froze right through one day and never quite thawed back out. He goes to the store and buys cheap scotch and organic produce, shipped in from warmer climates. He shows Brian how to make snowballs in the front yard. The quiet around him is deeper still, somehow, like he’s out in space. He doesn’t talk much. Mandy lets him get away with it for a few weeks.
The day before Thanksgiving, though, she corners him in the kitchen. He’s staring through the counter. Looking at nothing, hardly moving.
“You okay, hon?” She places her hand on top of his, which is braced against the edge of the counter, and he doesn’t flinch.
“Hey.” He shakes his head slightly. “Yeah. I’m good.”
“You workin’ today?”
“Not until next week.”
“Why don’t you go sit by the river? Might be nice.”
“Too cold,” he bites.
“No, I mean it. You need to get out of this house.”
Dennis doesn’t seem to have a choice. Mandy has a way of outrunning his resolve like that. He acquiesces, heads upstairs, puts on several layers of the warmest clothes he owns. He thinks about fishing. He figures it’d be nice just to sit there and think instead.
The car doesn’t want to start in the cold, but it eventually, slowly comes to life, engine humming. Dennis stays in the driveway for a moment and lets the air warm up.
Down on the water, Dennis watches his breath leave his body in thin clouds of vapor. He hasn’t been out in a while. He hasn’t been able to handle much lately. Something about this time of year makes him more sensitive than usual. He feels like his heart is on the outside, all exposed nerve endings, all raw from the cold.
Mandy’s parents come in to celebrate Christmas Eve. Her dad drops a stack of presents in front of the tree. Her mom brings in an assortment of covered dishes and trays that Mandy adds to her own spread. It’s a whole production. Dennis watches from the sidelines, observant. There’s a fire in the fireplace and three different desserts on the kitchen counter and he’s never known Christmas to be this vibrant or exciting or loud. It’s like a whole different event to him.
“Mom, Dad, this is Dennis,” Mandy says, gesturing for him to come closer.
“We’ve heard so much about you, hon.” Mandy’s mom steps forward to hug Dennis. He wills himself not to tense up in her arms, and it mostly works.
“All good things,” her dad says, and claps him on the shoulder.
They remind him a lot of Mandy, he realizes, as the evening progresses. He hopes to God that he won’t remind Brian of Frank, if he ever meets Frank, somewhere down the line. He makes a promise to himself to avoid it at all costs. Her mom has a loud, joyful laugh that fills the room. Her dad has a penchant for telling stories — about Mandy, about his childhood, about fishing — in his booming voice. It’s nothing like the formal, high-pressure holiday parties he had to sit through at the Reynolds estate.
He calls Dee that night, two hours ahead, and wishes her a merry Christmas. He tells her he loves her. He thinks it more than he says it, but he omits that part. She misses him, she says. She doesn’t mention anyone else. They both know what goes unsaid, and that it needs to go unsaid.
The next morning, while Mandy and her parents open gifts with Brian in the living room, Dennis stands up and wanders into the kitchen. He just needs a second. It’s all so foreign, and it’s not bad, but it’s a lot. He stares out the window over the sink — out over the yard, where the snowman he built with Brian keeps watch — just until he feels a little more present.
When he comes back, Mandy holds her hand out, palm up on the couch. It’s just out of everyone else’s view. Dennis hesitates. She keeps it right where it is. After a moment, he takes it, and she squeezes. Not hard. Just enough that he knows she’s there.
Her parents take off in the afternoon and Brian lies down for a nap and Mandy pulls Dennis aside.
“Got one more for you.”
“You don’t have to—“ he starts, but she’s already placing something long and narrow in his hands, wrapped in sparkly silver paper.
“It’s nothin’ you haven’t seen before.”
When he opens it, it’s the fishing gear he’d been using — the rod, the reel, and a brand-new box of flies.
“Don’t want you to feel like you’re just usin’ mine.”
It’s all he can do not to cry. He holds his hand out, this time, and she beams at him like he’s done something monumental. She takes it. He squeezes.
Dennis sets off a couple of fireworks in the yard on New Year’s Eve. When he turns back to look at Mandy and Brian on the deck, it’s all too much. He walks back and stands beside them and watches the sky through misty eyes.
For the rest of the winter, and all through the spring, Dennis goes to the river almost every weekend. Mandy watches for when he gets that hazy, distant look in his eyes and tells him to go out the next morning. Sometimes he doesn’t even fish. On the days he can hardly drag himself out of bed, he just goes and sits by the water and watches, but it works just the same.
He wishes it weren’t so goddamn effective. It’s almost a direct correlation. He spends time by the water and he comes back a little bit more relaxed, a little bit more in his body. He wishes Mandy would just let him sleep through it like he always has. He’s grateful that she doesn’t. Every single time, he resents her for the fifteen minutes it takes him to drive there, and every single time, it goes away the second he gets down to the river. Dissolved in the stream.
He spends one afternoon thinking about what he left behind in Philadelphia, and then about what he would leave behind here, and about how either way he loses something critical. At some point, he’s going to have to decide which part of himself is more essential to life. Which one he’s willing to deem vestigial. He stays out at the river until long after dark, that day, until the feeling passes.
The next weekend, he doesn’t think about anything at all. He just fishes. He catches a few, all about the size of his forearm, and lets them go as quickly as possible. One of the hooks sticks in the side of his hand; he winces as he pulls it out, and he’s even more gentle than usual when he unhooks the rest of his fish that day.
When it starts getting warmer outside, Mandy makes Dennis sit on the porch with her on the nights he doesn’t work. She puts Brian to bed and the two of them head outside to watch the sky get dark. Dennis doesn’t usually talk much. Mandy doesn’t press him, just lets him sit and think, lets him watch the lightning bugs dance at the edge of the yard.
It’s a Tuesday night in August, and they’re out on the porch as always, when Dennis is comfortable enough to break the silence first.
“I should go back,” he says.
“To Philly?” Mandy doesn’t look over at him; she keeps her eyes locked on the sunset.
“Yeah.”
“How come?”
“Just, I’ve been out here a while. Don’t know if it’s working.”
“I think you might be right,” she says. “You were awful torn up about leaving.”
He hums affirmatively, distantly.
“You just going back to the bar?”
“I mean, where else would I go?”
“Start over, maybe.”
“Why the hell would I do that?”
“Could be good for you.” Mandy shrugs, even though Dennis doesn’t see it. “Living out here was.”
“What, like—” Dennis’ voice gets small all of a sudden, like he’s not sure what’s going to come out of him. “You think this was good for me?”
“I do.”
He doesn’t say anything. He crosses his arms over his chest, and he looks down at the wooden boards that make up the deck, and something sticks in his throat.
“One thing though, hon,” Mandy says, “You gotta talk to somebody.”
“I don’t—”
“I’m not sayin’ you gotta go cry on some therapist’s couch every week.”
“I won’t do that.”
“I know.” She breaks right on through, not letting him interrupt her. “I’m just saying, get that stuff out. Not doin’ you any good bottling it up.”
“The fishing’s been good for me.”
“I think so, too. But you can’t just run away from everything forever.”
“I don’t run away from everything.”
“Why’d you come out here, then?”
He doesn’t say anything. He just stares out at the lightning bugs in the distance, blinking.
“Look, hon, I know it’s hard, but I wouldn’t be tellin’ you about it if I didn’t think it would help.”
“I’ll look into it.”
“All I’m asking.”
Mandy holds a hand out, palm up, in the space between their two chairs. When Dennis takes it, she squeezes. Just enough that he knows she’s there. She doesn’t have to say anything, but they both know what she means.
He leaves Fargo three weeks later. Mandy and Brian drop him off at the airport, and when Mandy hugs him goodbye, he tenses up slightly in her arms.
“You gonna be alright?”
“Think so.”
“Don’t be a stranger.”
“I won’t,” Dennis says, and against his better judgment, he means it completely.
That afternoon, when Dennis lands in Philadelphia, he rents a car. As far as he knows, the Range Rover is sitting on the street across from Paddy’s. Right where he left it. He wonders if he’d prefer it if everything had managed to stay right where he left it, or if the alternative would be easier to stomach.
He doesn’t drive back to the apartment. He almost turns down that street, lets himself linger at the four-way stop sign a moment too long, but it’s not really his apartment anymore. He gave that up the night he left. His name is probably still on the lease, and Frank’s credit card probably still gets charged every month for the rent, but it’s different now. He imagines Mac’s already cleaned out his room and sold all of his tapes on Craigslist as “amateur pornography” or something equally undignified. He doesn’t want to know.
He drives to the bar and casts out both of his replacements — Cindy and the sex doll — and it’s almost like everything’s stayed exactly the same. It’s mostly a comfort that his absence didn’t make that much of an impact. If he were any less exhausted, and if Dee hadn’t just handed him a cold beer, he might be more offended by how little things had changed without him.
Charlie hauls the sex doll down to the basement. Dee locks the front door, then heads out the back alley, waving at Dennis with an unreadable look on her face.
“You comin’, dude?” Mac raises an eyebrow at Dennis.
“Coming where?”
“Home? Back to the apartment?”
“Figured you would have sold all my shit by now. Found a roommate. Moved on.”
“What for?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe because I was gone for a year.”
“Yeah, but I knew you were gonna come back,” Mac says, beaming.
Because he knows me, man , Dennis thinks, and it’s like a blow to the chest.
“We gotta walk, though, ‘cause, uh, somethin’ happened to your car.”
“What kind of something?”
“Totaled,” Frank shouts from the back office. “Some fuckin’ kids came through an’ smashed it up. Sledgehammers. Wish I saw ‘em doin’ it.”
“Yeah, it was bad, dude,” Mac says, shaking his head slightly.
“It’s fine. I got a rental at the airport. Let’s just get out of here,” Dennis says, making a face at Mac that could pass for a smile. He’s too tired to argue. He grits his teeth, pushes the door open, and holds it for Mac without thinking about it.
He remembers the way back to the apartment perfectly. He could drive it blind. He could walk it. He could draw it on a map, still, even after having been away for so long. Some part of him wishes that he’d forgotten it at least partially, that the memory was even marginally hazier than it is. It’s like he didn’t even have to think, he just wound up in front of their building, just like he had a thousand times before.
When they get upstairs, and Mac unlocks the front door, it’s almost too much for Dennis to handle. Mac hadn’t lied to him. The apartment is almost exactly the same as how he left it, save for more cases of energy drinks stacked up in the kitchen. There’s no dust on anything in Dennis’ room, though, which means that Mac has either made it into a Dennis-themed guest room, or he’s gone out of his way to preserve it as a shrine to Dennis in his absence. The bed is made. He wonders how long it’s been like that. He can’t find it in himself to care what the answer is.
It’s too goddamn loud in this apartment. In this city. In his head. He barely sleeps that night. The next day, Mac leaves for the bar, and Dennis stays home. He can’t stand the noise of the bar and he can’t stand the silence of having the apartment to himself. He can’t stand being alone and he can’t stand being with the gang.
He doesn’t unpack everything, but he does look through one of his bags for his fishing gear. It’s the only thing he thinks he can handle at the moment. Dennis doesn’t expect it to save him from anything. He just wants some time to himself, some space to readjust.
He looks up fly-fishing in Philadelphia. One of the results is a small creek, up north and out of the city, so he heads that way. The drive is quiet. He needs it to be. The park is quiet when he gets there. He needs it to be.
Dennis puts the fly rod together and sets the reel in place and runs the line up through the guides. He ties a fly on the end of the leader, and when he tests the knot, it holds true. He stands on the riverbank and looks around. It’s nothing like it had been in Fargo. The water moves faster, and the sound of it rushing over the rocks is louder than everything else, and it takes him a moment to get accustomed to it.
He casts upstream. When the fly lands on the surface, and something surges up to take it, he pulls up hard on the line. Fish on. These are different fish than he’s used to catching. It fights differently, but he brings it in just the same. He lets it go just the same. It disappears into the whitewater, never to be seen again. Ephemeral, fleeting, in a way he’ll never fully understand.
None of this is exactly the same as it had been. Neither is he, though. He isn’t holding his breath out here anymore.