Chapter 2
two
Silas
I didn't expect her to 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.
I fix the grip. I step back. I keep my face arranged into nothing. I can't let her know how she affects me.
Koda comes back and sits between us on the bank, which she has never done with a client before. I don't look at Peyton. I watch the line.
By noon she's losing fewer flies. She still puts too much force into the cast but she's reading the water better now. I showed her where the current breaks along the far bank and she's been placing the line there for an hour, consistently, making the adjustment without being reminded.
People who can take one piece of information and actually use it are the ones who eventually get it.
We eat lunch on the bank. I brought sandwiches and she looks at hers for a moment like she might ask about it, then takes a bite without asking.
"These are good," she says.
I nod.
Koda positions herself exactly between us, and puts her chin on Peyton's knee. It isn't a request. It's just a fact. Peyton looks down at her for a moment and then sets her hand on Koda's back without making anything of it.
She sits eating and looking at the river. The first quiet I've seen from her that isn't the quiet of someone actively not saying something. Just quiet.
Koda doesn't move from her knee as she falls asleep.
The river does this. Not to everyone, of course, and not fast. But sometimes you can watch it happen.