I found my phone and looked at my “sent” mail. Confirmed what I’d remembered from last night. That I’d gotten up at two a.m. and sent a note to the chief, telling him I needed to take leave for a couple days.

Of course, his response at eight a.m. read. Get lost for three days. Then check in with me.

I moved into the shower and let it run until the water went cold.

Getting out, I threw on some old jeans and a black Bulldogs T-shirt. I grabbed my cell and rang up my father-in-law, Marvin. Which is to say, my dead wife’s father.

His voice was hoarse as he picked up. “What’s going on?”

Marvin had been my roommate for two months this summer after an accident, living in Jonas’s old room. But he’d recovered now and moved back into his own house.

“I’m taking the day off,” I said. “Was thinking of driving up to Schaeffer Lake. Fish for a couple hours. You up for it?”

“Does the pope shit in the woods on a camping trip, like the rest of us?”

I cocked my head. I was pretty sure that wasn’t a saying, but I was suddenly unable to not see the pontiff in bright white, squatting among a patch of kudzu.

“Pick you up in a half hour,” I said.

I got my rod and reel from the garage, along with my fishing vest and a pair of waders. I probably didn’t need those if we were going to rent a speedboat. Marvin certainly wouldn’t have any. His waders were called blue jeans, but mine were high-quality Frogg Toggs with stocking feet that Lena had bought for me three Christmases ago.

I pulled off 906 at 20th Avenue and coasted into my father-in-law’s neighborhood.

Marvin was waiting at the curb in a double flannel and old Lee jeans, a belt pulled tight around his scrawny twenty-nine-inch waist. He laid his rod in the back of the truck and opened the passenger door. He had on clodhoppers, but they didn’t have a spit of mud on them.

“Morning, Pop,” I said, motioning at a coffee I’d picked up for him along the way.

“Morning, Paul,” he said, taking a sip.

His hair, which was normally trimmed short, looked like it hadn’t been cut since I brought him back to his house over a month ago.

“What are we working on?” I said, pointing at his curls. “This is like a Questlove look? André 3000 in the Outkast days?”

Marvin blinked. “I’m not sure what those words mean.”

“Let me pick something from your time period,” I said. “Sly Stone? Pam Grier?”

Marvin chuckled, leaning in to the rearview mirror to stare at his dark skin and thick curls. “I guess I could use a trim.”

I pressed down on the accelerator and pointed my truck northeast.

As a kid, I’d learned to fish on a trip with my dad to Lake Rabun when I was eight. We had such a good time that we went for the next five years, until Dad left home. We’d fished across the whole northern part of the state, a few times along the Soque River in Habersham County, but most other times on the Chattahoochee, hunting wild trout.