The Constant Heart by Craig Nova

cranky. The study about random attacks had been published in the U.S. Journal of Wildlife and had been translated into German, which he was pretty proud of. This German magazine came with the pages uncut, and he sat at the kitchen table with a steak knife, slipping it in between the uncut sheets and slicing them with a slow, constant, and careful motion. He had a drink when he did this and took a particular delight in the roughness of the cut pages.

    He was an assistant district commissioner, and an opening came up for the commissioner’s job. One of the advantages of the commissioner’s job was that my father would get a car and a cell phone, and he would have a secretary, too. So, after he put in for the job we played a game in which he sat on the back steps of our house and pretended that he was driving the commissioner’s car, and I would be a state trooper who had stopped him for speeding. He told me who he was, and I’d say, “Well, excuse me, Mr. Commissioner. I will know better in the future and will remember the car. Have a good day.” This was about three years before Sara was arrested, and so I must have been fourteen, but even then I thought this was the kind of thing an eight-year-old would have done. But we were tense, and when you are tense you often don’t know what to do and so you act stupid.
    In the evening, my mother would say to him, “Any word?”
    â€œNo,” he said. “Not yet. I’ve heard, though, that they have stopped interviewing.”
    â€œThat’s a good sign,” said my mother.
    â€œYes. I think so,” he said. “It’s possible.”
    Then he told me a story about a fish that someone had caught, one that was ugly and deformed and probably caused by a pesticide that the potato farmers were using on Japanese beetles. Or by the nuclear power plant that was upstream on the river. He brought a fish like this home once, a creature that had a hump on its side and iridescent scales the color of a housefly. One eye was clouded over, just like it had been cooked. I took the thing out to the garage and looked at its skin with a magnifying glass, and in its mouth, too. Scales like a rainbow. Big ridges in its mouth.

    My father sat on the back steps when I came home from school. I used to come in quietly sometimes, and this time I wish I hadn’t. He was on the back steps, looking at the empty field, the place where those sheep had been when everything had seemed so filled with hope and possibility. When he saw me, he turned away. His expression was one I had seen before, as though someone had slipped that viper into his chest and it was moving around, although I saw now what it cost him to pretend it wasn’t there.
    â€œWho did they give it to?” I said.
    â€œFrank Ketchum,” he said.
    â€œThat asshole?” I said. “What does he know about brook trout?”
    â€œHe has a degree in business from Stanford,” said my father.
    He made a sound, not a sigh exactly, but more like the first breath of surprise perfectly imbued with a long-held suspicion.
    â€œFrank Ketchum is an asshole,” I said.
    â€œI don’t know, Jake,” he said. “You get to a certain point in life and you realize things are going to stop. You hit a wall. Nothing new will happen.”
    He was afraid to touch me for fear I would pull away. But I wasn’t old enough to do anything aside from going on about Frank Ketchum, which, of course, didn’t help. The worst thing, I suppose, was that I was a little ashamed, because things were supposed to advance in a certain way and the fact that he didn’t get the job just showed that we weren’t advancing as everybody else was, and that meant there was something wrong with us, didn’t it? Well, everyone knows how brutal things can be. Either you’re in or you’re out, and if you’re out, God save you.

    The odd thing is that Frank Ketchum died of a