“We better get back to it,” Sam says, giving her a kiss on the cheek.
I watch Charlie climb the ladder up to the tree house, muscles flexing in his back. “I’ll be over this afternoon to do a few things at the cottage,” he calls down to me.
As I turn around, I hear Percy say to Sam, “Do you really think they’re just friends?”
“You know how he is,” he replies. A moment passes, and he adds, “But I guess there’s a first time for everything.”
21
Wednesday, July 9
54 Days Left at the Lake
Nan and I make curtains for the bathroom and covers for the throw pillows in the living room. We pillage Stedmans for more fabric. But unless Charlie’s around, Nan is often melancholy or biting. She gripes through her physio exercises, even though they’re clearly helping. She’s moving more confidently with the cane, and we take careful strolls together along Bare Rock Lane. Each day we go a little farther. I try talking to her about why she and John aren’t speaking, but she’s deemed the subject a “private matter.”
Thankfully, Charlie shows up every afternoon after he and Sam are done working on the tree house. I don’t mind the hammering anymore. There’s something wholesome about the sound of two brothers working together, even when I hear them bicker across the bay. Charlie does odd jobs around the cottage—raking fallen pine needles and fixing a loose step. He spends so much time here that I wonder if he’s avoiding Percy and Sam. I can’t get the way he looked at them out of my head.
On Wednesday, he escorts Nan to her first Stationkeeper Singers choir practice, and she returns with plans to team up with him for the community euchre night. On Thursday, he arrives in Sam’s red pickup, the back full of lumber. He’s going to build a proper railing for the stairs that lead to the lake so Nan can get down to swim. He sets up a table saw on the deck. His T-shirt lies in a heap beside it. He’s wearing a black bathing suit and a pair of steel-toed boots. Itreallyworks for me.
We’ll go for a swim when he’s done, just like we did yesterday and the day before. I inflated the moose for Charlie, but he’s claimed ownership of the Pegasus-unicorn. I swim along the shore while he floats, and then I join him, laying out on the moose. Yesterday we ended up talking for well over an hour, about our jobs and our condos and our favorite spots in the city. We discussed our families and our university years, the music we listen to, where we’ve traveled, the books we love best. I learned that Sam is a cardiologist and that Percy’s working on a novel in her spare time. I found out that Charlie’s last relationship ended after Christmas—he and Genevieve were together for a few months, and he was the one to break it off. I changed the subject when he asked about my ex—I don’t want to bring Trevor to the lake. And Charlie gave me a vague answer when I asked what he and Sam had been arguing about the other day. Clearly he doesn’t want to bring that to the lake, either.
I watch him now from the sewing table, my gaze drifting to his shoulders as he uses the saw, his bronzed skin glistening under the sun. Nan tells me I’m drooling.
“I am not.” Salivating, maybe. I can’t help it if Charlie insists on waltzing around without a shirt. So what if I sneak a few glances? I’m only human.
She looks at me over her glasses from her spot in the armchair, a queen on her throne. “I don’t blame you. If I were a younger woman, I’d let him put his shoes at the end of my bed.”
“There’ll be no leaving of shoes. He doesn’t see me that way.”
“Oh please.”
“He doesn’t.”
“He does,” Nan says. “When you aren’t staring at him, he’s staring at you. It’s like watching a tennis match.”
“We’re friends,” I tell her.
Just friends, I remind myself.
“It’s hard to work when you’re staring at me like that,” Charlie says when I bring him a glass of water.
“It’s hard not to stare when you’re sweating like that.” Perspiration runs in rivulets down his chest. I follow it down the flat expanse of skin to his belly button and the line of hair that dips below. He’s breathing heavily.
Charlie does a double take when he stops working to accept the glass from my hand. “That’s new.”
I’m wearing a yellow bikini that I bought at Stedmans earlier this week, after Willa got back to me about the swimwear photos. The email was two letters.
Ok.
No greeting. No salutation. I stared at the screen, a hand covering my mouth. And then I started to laugh. I might not work forSwishagain, but I’d held my ground. No one is going to give me permission to be the kind of photographer I want to be except for me. I needed to do something to celebrate, so I drove into town and purchased a thirty-four-dollar string bikini (number two). It shows a lot moreeverythingthan I’m used to, but it’s sweltering, and I feel emboldened.
“It’s new,” I tell Charlie.
“Make sure you stay in the shade,” he says. His face is flushed. He rests his hands on his knees and bends over, panting.
“Are you all right?”
“Just out of shape.”
