Chapter 1

People say that those of us who live in Minnesota must be crazy, what with how cold it gets in the winter and all the ice and snow that has to be dealt with. I get that. Most of those people think of it in the context of their own lives. Like, say you work at an office somewhere in the city but you live in the suburbs, so your commute is an hour or so. If you live that way in Minnesota, getting to the office by eight would mean you have to get up at four, get dressed for shoveling the new accumulation of snow off the driveway, getting the car started and, if you don’t have a garage, getting it cleaned off, too.

Then there’s that hour of commute which, with all the new-fallen snow, means it’s now at least two hours, assuming some idiot doesn’t cause a major pileup that closes the road, which means you have to find an alternative route that might not have been plowed yet.

So I get it.

But those people don’t get to go ice fishing. At least not unless they plan a major road trip that might take a day or more, just to get there.

I, on the other hand, can toss the camping gear into my truck and, three hours later, be set up and fishing.

“So,” you say, “what if I don’t like ice fishing?”

Well, then, this story isn’t going to be interesting to you, because it’s about ice fishing.

Actually, it’s about a whole lot more than ice fishing, but it was ice fishing that made it all happen so, there you go.

As has already been established, I love ice fishing. Other people want to lie on hot sand under the burning rays of the sun at the ocean, or frolic in a nice clean swimming pool, or play softball or golf or any of a million other pursuits people use their free time for.

Me? I’d rather lie on an air mattress in a snug tent, reading a good book, with a fishing line in the circle in the ice I just cut out, waiting for a fish to take the bait.

I don’t care what kind of fish, be it Walleye, Pike, Sauger, Perch, Bass, Muskie, or Crappie. They all taste great cooked in a cast iron skillet with a portion of fried potatoes and maybe some baked beans and cornbread. And don’t believe that crap that Pike are too boney to clean and prepare.

My grandpa taught me the secret of dealing with that.

“What,” you say, “if you get bored and fall asleep and a fish takes your bait?”

Obviously, you’re not an ice fisherman. If you were, you’d know how that works. Suffice it to say that we wake up. And, if there’s no bite during a nap, then it’s just a nap.

Catching fish is the main idea, of course. Otherwise you could just pitch a tent in your back yard and take a nap out there, but that would be ridiculous and even someone who can’t spell “ice fisherman” would know that.

But the solitude, out on the ice, can be healing. You have time to think and it’s practically as comfortable as being home. The air is crisp and clean, your neighbors, if you have any, are usually polite and quiet. And if they turn out to be rowdy college kids, you can unpin the tent from the ice and move away from them to a new spot. And all this happens on a huge expanse of water ... that you can walk around on.

In my case there’s another reason I go as often as I can. I met my wife on the ice. She was seventeen and I was a year older. We went to the same school but didn’t know each other. Her family set up not far from us and when they needed something - I can’t remember what - they sent her over to ask us if we had it. She was bundled up, of course. All I could see was her face. But one look in those eyes and I was hooked like ... well, a fish.

I asked her out and the rest is history. We were crazy for each other. My first year at college, while she was still a senior in high school, about killed me, but then we could be together again. We finished college together and I started my own business while she taught third grade. Two years later we decided to have a baby and a month into trying that she got sick.

It was a glioblastoma in a part of the brain they couldn’t operate on. It didn’t matter that she was ten years younger than the “usual” victim of that kind of cancer. It didn’t matter that she had none of the genetic issues that sometimes cause a tumor like that. Nothing mattered. It was aggressive and three months later I buried her next to her mother in a plot somebody in their family had bought seventy-odd years before. When you’re in your late twenties, you don’t think about things like having a burial plot ready to go, should you need one.

She went ice fishing with me all the time. It was her passion, too. To be honest, sharing a sleeping bag on the ice was our passion. The fishing was just frosting on the cake. We spent literally hours and hours, naked, inside two zipped-together bags, paying attention to each other instead of the lines in the water.

My last ice fishing trip with her was five years ago. Being on the ice without her isn’t as painful now as it used to be. Sometimes I think about her and sometimes I don’t. Either way, it’s good.

Serendipity, chance, or fate, or whatever you want to call it, is a wild and crazy thing. It was what brought Cathy and me together before we fell in love and got married. It’s probably what got her a job in Thief River Falls, which was only an hour from her dad and my family. There were literally dozens of places to go fishing there. It was good for us. Really good. Until it wasn’t so good anymore and I had to bury her. What was in that casket in that grave plot wasn’t Cathy. So I stayed in Thief River Falls. Cathy wasn’t there, but memories of her were.

It turned out serendipity wasn’t finished with me yet. The house next to mine was owned by a man I’d never met. It was a rental, and there had been several tenants come and go. Fate was at work again when it became vacant and was needed by a gold star widow with twin girls who was trying to pick up the pieces of her life while I was trying to pick up the pieces of my own.

Gloria moved into the house next door barely four months after I lost Cathy. Her twins were ten. Her husband had been a crew chief on one of those helicopters that have two rotors, one in the front and one in the back. It got shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan and everybody on board was killed.

Serendipity is why I was home when she arrived in an SUV towing a U-haul and she and the girls started moving things in. I happened to look out the window as they tried to get a chest of drawers up the un-shoveled walk (it had snowed six inches the night before) and into the house. She was on one end and the twins were on the other. She slipped and I saw her foot go under the furniture as she went down. She screamed, the girls let go of their end, the chest of drawers fell over, and I went out to help.

That’s how I met the Robertsons, Gloria and her daughters Samantha and Karla.

The injury didn’t look bad enough to require professional medical help but we put her in a chair to keep her off the ankle for a while. I shoveled the walk and then helped the girls get everything else in. I didn’t have anything pressing to get done and I needed the exercise. I was still in good shape, but had gained a few pounds since winter started. I’d been sitting around, feeling sorry for myself.

When we got finished I looked at Gloria’s ankle again. It was her right foot and it was more swollen than before. There were purple streaks beginning to form. When she put even a little weight on it she winced and sat back down. I suggested a visit to the ER and she started crying. I was unaware she’d only been a widow for a month. The girls and I hadn’t chatted much while we worked and all Gloria had done was tell us what room to put things in as we brought them in.

I told her it wasn’t that bad. She didn’t say anything about her husband - not then - but pointed out (somewhat sarcastically, in my opinion) that she couldn’t use that foot on either the accelerator or brake, and then that she couldn’t just go off and leave the girls alone. She wasn’t trying to get me to help her, but no decent person would have walked away.

So I drove them all to the hospital and stayed in the ER waiting room with Samantha and Karla.

That’s when I found out about their dad, and having to move out of their house, which was on the post he was stationed at, and her deciding to move to Thief River Falls, where one of his uncles owned the house they were moving into. They were torn up, but at ten years of age, the inability to truly comprehend the depth of the shit they’d just been dropped into protected them a little bit. In following years, they’d understand more, but they toughened up more, too. All things considered (again, my opinion) things turned out okay for them. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Gloria finally returned in a wheel chair with a cast on her foot. It wasn’t a walking cast. They loaned her a pair of crutches, but recommended renting a wheelchair for a couple of weeks.

She was not happy.

I took them out to dinner, so at least they wouldn’t go to bed hungry. Gloria was twenty-nine. She’d had the twins when she was nineteen. I was then thirty-three. Our ages were close enough that we had some shared life experiences, but far enough apart that she thought of me as ‘older.’ As time progressed, I imagined she thought of me as the older brother she’d never had. Again, I’m getting ahead of things, but how we met and that first day set the stage for what was to follow.

I wasn’t looking for a woman and she for sure wasn’t looking for a man, but she needed help and I already had a soft spot in my heart for those girls. It broke my heart when I learned about their story in that ER waiting room.

So I helped them over the next week, putting together beds and installing the mirror on the back of the vanity, moving furniture here and there while Gloria tried to decide where she liked it. The twins couldn’t cook, so I made sure they all had a hot meal each day and taught them some cooking basics at the same time. That kind of stuff. Eventually I took over a six pack of beer and Gloria and I sat in the dark and traded stories.

We had a lot in common. Had things been different, we would have been attracted to each other. There was chemistry there. Both of us sensed that, but that chemistry was channeled - by both of us - towards friendship, rather than romance. I liken it to two people, both married, who are attracted to each other. They know it’s wrong (feel it’s wrong, in our case) to be attracted like that, so they try to ignore it and mold it into a different kind of relationship.

She grew to think of me as that older brother I mentioned. The girls sort of adopted me as a surrogate uncle, but they usually only called me “Uncle Bob” when they wanted something and were trying to butter me up. Most of the time I was just “Bob”. There was never any formality, no “Mister Giordano” or any of that, even on that first day. Maybe it was just the frenetic circumstances of how we met, or what we all did for the first twenty-four hours after we met. I don’t know. All I know is that the twins treated me more like a peer than a grown man.

That eventually developed into a relationship that enjoyed a lot of teasing. Kids tease each other. Sometimes they’re mean about it. I don’t think they understand how that can affect the target of the teasing, and I don’t honestly think they understand why they’re doing it. There’s a desire to be top dog in humans. It’s just instinct. And when you don’t know how to earn that position, sometimes it’s instinct to try to put others down to raise yourself up.

Not that they were vicious about it. It was just stuff like calling me old, or fat, or stupid. And I have to admit it usually made sense in the context of the moment. When you wear a T shirt that’s ten years old, and you’ve gained twenty pounds since you went to that concert and got that T shirt ... well ... you look a little pudgy.

In one sense that kind of teasing was a product of a basic honesty that we were able to establish early on. I wasn’t trying to impress anybody when we met. They just needed help. And none of them were looking to impress me. They were just trying to take another step forward. So there were none of the social games we sometimes play when we meet someone new and try to make a good impression.

That honesty lasted and I think it became a bulwark in all our lives. We became friends, but because of our shared loss and pain, that friendship was deeper than usual. I understood what they were going through on a deep, intimate level. And they understood my pain and loss as well.

At the same time, the details of the friendships were vastly different. Gloria and I could talk about anything. We sought each other’s advice on a multitude of issues. Among them was the subject of dating. That didn’t come up until two years later. Both of us talked it back and forth and decided we weren’t ready. Cathy had told me firmly that I was to move on after she left, and find someone else to love and all that. I had to promise her I would, but my mental fingers were crossed. There was no way I could just happily go bar hopping or whatever, looking for another woman to fill my bed. Gloria’s heart was still broken. It was patched together, but not strong enough to hazard in that way. And, of course, her husband never told her to be happy without him. I’m sure he would have, if he’d known what was going to happen to him. But he didn’t and so ... she didn’t.

The girls were fraternal twins, and they did a lot of the “twin things” you hear about. They were inseparable. They would have taken a bullet for each other.

That said, Samantha was a classic tomboy, while Karla was the very picture of a girly girl.

Sam likes rough and tumble sports and doing dangerous things. She holds her own with boys even a couple of years older than she is on the hockey rink. If we lived in Oklahoma she’d be the girl trying to break the barrier and get on the football team. She said she was either going to be a high school gym teacher, an astronaut or a lawyer. Try to figure that one out. She was fearless.

Karla, on the other hand, avoided getting dirty in any way. She didn’t even want to sweat. While her sister was on the ice knocking boys down, Karla sat on the sidelines and knitted or just talked to one of the boys that she drew like bees to honey. She wore dresses, rather than jeans and T shirts, and made some of her own clothes, even designing some of them herself instead of buying a pre-made pattern. She liked making jewelry and wrote in her diary every day. She went to dance classes while her sister took lessons in taekwondo. Karla was in choir. Samantha had just as good a voice, but wasn’t interested. Karla said she was going to study “design” in college, whatever that meant.

Physically, they looked like sisters, but there were distinct differences in their physiology. Sam’s baby fat turned into muscles. Karla developed curves that were more pronounced. Sam wore her hair in a pony tail almost all the time. Karla wore hers either up in some complicated arrangement, or down and loose. Sam had higher cheekbones and a longer neck. Karla’s fingers were longer and more deft.

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Ice Fishing With the Twins

Lubrican

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