Page 44 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"You're better at this than my teacher."

"I doubt that."

"You explained it in one try. She's explained it like four times and I still didn't get it until now." He says it simply, no flattery in it, just an observation delivered with the blunt honesty only kids seem to manage. "Are you good at all math, or just fractions?"

"Depends on the math. I was decent at the kind that keeps a brewery running. I mostly relearned fractions explaining them to you just now."

"That's a good trick. Pretending you already knew it."

"It's not really a trick if it works."

By the time Jenna gets off the phone, he's finished the whole worksheet without help, checking his own answers twice with the same grim focus his mother brings to payroll, and the look she gives me over his head, something warm and slightly stunned, sits with me longer than it probably should.

"You're good at that," she says later, once the twins are absorbed in something on the other side of the taproom.

"I'm good at explaining things slowly to people who don't want to hear them. Spent a career doing exactly that."

"It's different when it works."

"It really is."

The fishing trip happens the following weekend, Eli's idea entirely, delivered with the gravity of a formal proposal over breakfast. I take him out to the bend in the creek past the property line, the same spot my grandfather used to take me, and for the first hour it goes about how I expect, tangled lines, a lure lost to a submerged branch, Eli narrating his own frustration in real time like a man doing color commentary on his own failure.

"This is impossible."

"It's not impossible. It's just slow."

"Same thing."

"It's really not, but I understand why it feels that way." I help him untangle the line for the third time, patient in a way I didn't know I had in me for anything that wasn't equipment maintenance. "Fishing rewards people who can sit still and be bored on purpose. Most people can't. It's a skill."

"Being bored is a skill?"

"Being bored without giving up is. Different thing entirely."

He goes quiet after that, more from stubbornness than actual patience, and somewhere around the second hour, long after I've stopped expecting anything to happen, his line goes taut and he nearly falls backward off the bank in surprise. What follows isn't graceful. It involves a lot of shouting, some genuinely impressive cursing for an eight-year-old that I decide not to correct in the moment, and eventually a trout about the length of my forearm flopping on the bank while Eli stares at it like he personally invented fishing.

"I caught it. I actually caught it."

"You did."

"Can we keep it? Can Mom cook it? Can I tell Josie I caught it bigger than it actually is?"

"Yes, probably, and I won't stop you."

He talks about that fish for the entire drive home, the whole story growing by roughly six inches with each retelling, and I let it grow because some things are more true in the telling than they were in the actual moment, and this is one of them.

"Did you use to fish with your dad?" he asks, somewhere around the last stretch of gravel road, out of nowhere the way kids ask the questions that actually matter.

"My grandfather, mostly. Same spot, actually. Same bend in the creek."

"Was he good at it?"

"Better than me. He could read water like most people read a room." I glance over at him, windburned and grinning and holding a cooler with one very proud trout in it like it's a trophy. "He'd have liked you. You've got the patience for it, even if it took you an hour to find it."

"I found it eventually."

"You did. That's the part that counts."