Part Three: Water

He got up at four-thirty on Saturday. He hadn’t set an alarm; he just woke up. The house was dark and quiet. He stood in the tying room and looked at the boxes…

He didn’t go to Vero Beach. He tied flies. He tied Muddler Minnows and Woolly Buggers and Seaducers and a series of his own patterns that he had been working on for years and that had no names and that caught fish in the Mosquito Lagoon when nothing else would. He tied them with the care of a man who believed, in some part of his mind that he could not access directly, that the act of making something beautiful and functional would eventually produce a corresponding change in the man who made it. It did not. But the flies were very good.

In late August, something happened that forced Webb to walk to the mailbox. The county had sent a notice, certified mail, that his unpaid-leave status was being converted to a separation unless he contacted human resources within ten business days. The notice was in a large envelope that would not fit in the mailbox, and the postal carrier had left a slip. Webb stood at the mailbox in the late-morning heat, barefoot, and felt the concrete of the driveway under his feet like a foreign surface. The street was quiet. Pudge’s truck was gone. A mockingbird was working through its repertoire on the power line. Webb looked left and right, a man checking for traffic on a street that saw four cars an hour, and walked back inside.