Holding Lies by John Larison Read Free Book Online Page A

work and all he wanted to do was tip headfirst onto the couch and fall asleep to Cornell ’77 . He’d attended a few dozen Dead shows in his twenties, and still had a pretty serious collection, but that show, more than any other, cut to the heart of it all.
    Hank’s house could have been a fly shop, had the carpet been clean and the air not smelled of wet waders. One entire wall held strung fly rods: single-handers, two-handers, switchers, their pieces held together by hair ties, which he bought in bulk from the beauty supply store in Eugene. There was also the fly-tying desk he’d built of salvaged oak, its shelves climbing the wall above. Another wall held five hundred years of literature, everything worth reading, from The Compleat Angler all the way to The Habit of Rivers . Any book ever written about steelhead, any book that had even contained a chapter on steelhead, was there. He’d spent years tracking down the volumes, and only after the emergence of online book sales was he able to locate the rarest titles, like Enos Bradner’s Northwest Angling . There were more books and tackle in back, but these were things he kept in the front room, the things that kept him going on windblown days.
    He’d never owned a television, but there was a laptop, which he opened now to check his bookmarks: the weather sites, the river levels,the current fish counts, Speypages. Sometimes he’d pull the computer from its home on the bookshelf to the coffee table and watch a DVD he’d rented, and he was considering doing just this when he saw the posting in a forum: “An up and coming star, lost.” It was about Justin Morell. Fifteen people had posted their own remembrances, their tributes. Hank read each of them, the ones from clients, from friends, the one from Danny. Some people anyway really liked this kid. Or maybe they were just being kind.
    He closed the window and turned on some tunes and was about to pick up the phone to call his sport when his fingers guided the cursor to the file named “Annie Now.” He’d seen these photos hundreds of times, and he knew each well enough to recall even the peripheral details, yet he fished out his reading glasses and spent two or three minutes studying the images, imagining what she would look like in this very room. Then he changed the file’s name, in case she used this computer, to “A.N.”
    It wouldn’t happen; she’d call him tomorrow or the next day and offer some airtight excuse. She couldn’t come. Work required she stay. A friend was going through a messy divorce and needed her. He should expect it. He shouldn’t get his hopes up.
    He checked the answering machine, two messages, but neither from her.
    It was a simple house, a cabin really, and she would feel uncomfortable here. He’d never spent much money updating the place—in fact, the total retail value of the rods on the wall probably equaled the house’s worth. But he had spent considerable time and expense perfecting the cooking arrangements, and maybe she’d appreciate that. He would explain that he’d paid for an external tank and piped in the gas specifically for the stove, which he’d found used in town. The vent hood and its lighting had come new from Eugene and they cost more than the refrigerator but were worth every cent. Dinner, like fishing, was too important not to do right.
    But tonight he didn’t have the energy to cook, so he found some water crackers and sliced some cold elk roast and unwrapped the wheelof aged cheddar he had asked the co-op to order special and poured a splash of cab. But he only managed two bites before stepping onto the porch for some big, slow breaths.
    Annie would hate the house. There was little he could do to help that—she would be used to so much more—but he could distract her with the cooking. He’d already spent a trip’s profit in wine and ingredients. Each meal