Kenny was six the first time he learned how far away something could feel while still being visible. The window in the dormitory looked out across a shallow valley, and on clear mornings—when the fog hadn’t yet burned off—you could see Lake Livingston resting there, calm and indifferent. It wasn’t close enough to hear, but it was close enough to imagine. Boats moved slowly across the surface like they had nowhere else to be.
The Walker County Children’s Home had rules about noise and schedules and quiet hours, but it had no rules about looking. Kenny learned early that looking was allowed. Looking didn’t cost anything. Looking didn’t get taken away. He would stand there longer than the others, forehead close to the glass, watching men fish from clean boats with wide decks and easy movements, laughing with each other like the day had been waiting for them.
He didn’t know anyone who fished. He didn’t know how you got a boat or how you learned which way to cast or what made a fish choose one lure over another. None of that mattered yet. What mattered was that fishing looked like a world where nothing was being counted against you. No files. No intake forms. No whispered conversations behind doors.
Some mornings the lake disappeared entirely. Fog would roll through the valley and erase everything beyond the fence line. On those days, Kenny would still stand at the window, staring into the blankness, knowing the lake was there even if he couldn’t see it. He learned something important without realizing it: wanting didn’t depend on proof.
Other kids came and went. Some got adopted. Some didn’t. Kenny stayed. He learned how to keep his hands busy and his thoughts quiet. He learned how not to ask questions that didn’t have answers. But every morning, before the day told him what to do, he looked out at the water and imagined what it would feel like to belong to something that didn’t explain itself.
Fishing became a shape in his mind before it became an activity. It wasn’t about fish yet. It was about stillness. About choice. About being somewhere because you wanted to be there. The lake didn’t know his name, and it didn’t care—but it was there, and that felt like enough.
From that window, Kenny didn’t dream of trophies or records or respect. He dreamed of standing in a boat with nothing expected of him. Of casting into water that didn’t judge where he came from. The lake waited. Kenny grew. And the distance between them became the first thing he learned how to carry.