“Fish” begins with news that a man, sixty-four years old, has just found out that he is dying. The cause—whether cancer or something else—is never given. Family and friends gather to comfort the man, including a woman who nursed him back from pneumonia when he was two years old. She saved him then but cannot save him now. His younger daughter narrates this story, and she recalls her father's childhood despair that he might die as did his stillborn brother. He has two older brothers and two older sisters, but his “partner” died. This sense of loss initiated a depression that haunted him for much of his life.

The narrator's eleven-year-old nephew sits with his dying grandfather and tells him all the stories the grandfather made up for him when he was very young. All of his grandchildren are there, and their affection...