Fish

 

AFTER SACRAMENTO, they cut across to the coast to  escape the heat.

“This is way better than living in a house,” Dad said. “If we don’t like the weather, we can just go somewhere else!”

Odette didn’t point out that at home the weather was never this miserably hot in the first place.

She had taped up the picture of her and Mom on the wall in her “room.” Mom’s head looked pretty funny in the big floppy hat she’d chosen, but they looked good together. Like a team. Odette wished she felt that way in real life.

It was markedly cooler on the coast. The road was tight and serpentine, and Dad drove the Coach extra slow, pulling to the side whenever someone wanted to pass. “No hurry, not a hurry in the world,” he said, more to himself than anyone else. Odette sat buckled into the bench seat and watched the view—the soaring birds, the sharp-rocked cliffs, the low gray-tinged clouds drifting across the sky.

Rex sat across from her, riding backwards, which would have made Odette carsick. He stared out the window too, quiet for an unusually long time, as if hypnotized by the road unfurling behind them. Then, suddenly, his arm shot up. “What the heck is that!” he yelled. “Dad! Pull over! There’s a fish in the road!”

They weren’t going very fast anyway, and Dad drifted to a stop at the next turn-out.

“It must have been a dead squirrel,” Mom said. “They get hit all the time.”

“It was a fish,” Rex said. “A big one. I’ll show you.”

“Okay,” Dad said. “Let’s go check it out.” And Odette wasn’t even surprised. That’s how it went in their family.

When Rex wanted to park the Coach on the narrow shoulder of the skinny, windy road and go exploring, did her parents tell him he was insane? Of course not. They parked the Coach and everyone scrambled to follow him.

Odette left Georgie behind, and she made sure that the Coach’s door latched tightly. As annoying as the little dog was, Odette wouldn’t want her to end up as roadkill.

“Hold hands!” Mom insisted.

They formed a chain, Dad in the front, then Rex, then Odette, with Mom bringing up the rear, and they laced their way back toward where Rex had seen the “fish,” which Odette was certain was a squirrel. They were hundreds of feet above the ocean, which swirled and crashed down on the rocks below.

“There!” said Rex, yanking his hand away from Odette’s and pointing.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Dad said. “Look at that.”

It was a fish. About a foot long, silver scaled, fantailed. In the middle of the highway.

“A bird must have dropped it,” Mom said.

“I told you,” Rex said. “I told you it was a fish.” Now that he’d been proved right, he happily followed Mom’s lead back to the Coach. But Odette kept looking back. The dead fish in the road seemed magical. Like an omen, or a curse.