Page 147 of Puck You Both

"The lake doesn't have an HR department." Theo raises his coffee to the kayaker, who paddles considerably faster.

I've stopped arguing this one. Some men have a morning routine, my boyfriend has a naked jurisdiction, and the dock falls inside it. Besides, the one time I brought up the neighbors, he asked me, with total sincerity, whether I'd rather he stretch cold. There's no winning conversation with a man who has already decided the lake is his bathroom mirror. So I drink my coffee and supervise the sunrise, and the sunrise is thorough, covering all of him, and I take my time confirming that.

Old habits.

By ten the kitchen is a crime scene, and the crime is pierogi.

This was Patrick's idea. His father's recipe, taught in person, except in person means Tomasz on speakerphone from miles away, supervising by sound alone like a submarine captain. The phone sits propped against a flour container in the dead center of the island, and out of it comes a sound of loving disappointment.

"Synek. The dough should whisper. Yours is shouting."

He means mine. He can hear my dough. I don't know how he can hear my dough, and I’m not asking. Every question makes it worse.

I did everything right, is the thing. I weighed it to the gram and measured the water temperature with the thermometer I bought for this exact purpose. Even my work station is organized into zones. Meanwhile, few feet away, Theo, who added flour until it "felt like Tuesday," who cracked an egg one-handed into the general vicinity of a bowl while talking, has produced a dough so supple on the first try, Tomasz asked him whether he was sure he had no Polish grandmother.

"It's insulting," I mutter at the island.

"It's called talent, thank you," Theo says, flour to the elbows, flour in his curls, flour in places flour shouldn’t ever reach. "Some of us cook with the soul."

"You cook with your eyes closed."

"And where do you think the soul lives?"

Patrick works between us, sleeves rolled, pinching his rows shut with machine precision, translating when his father slips into Polish without realizing, editorializing when it gets too honest. Every few minutes he leans over, takes my mangled attempt, and quietly reworks it with one hand into something his family would recognize. He thinks I don't see him doing it, and I let him think that.

"Wall." Tomasz's voice drops into coaching register, and hearing my name in that accent still sits me up straighter, the same as it has all summer. "You are strangling it. The dough is not your opponent."

"Everything's my opponent."

A pause on the line. "This is why your save percentage is so good and your pierogi are so sad."

Theo goes down flour-first onto the counter. Patrick doesn't laugh, but the row he's pinching goes crooked, one dumpling out of fifty. I point at it in silence, and he fixes it in silence, and Tomasz, who can apparently hear pointing, says, "Leave your boyfriend alone, synek," to me, about Patrick, and there is no recovering the morning after that.

We boil them in shifts. Mine are identifiable by their structural ambitions. They're eaten anyway, all of them, at the porch table, with brown butter and pork scratchings, and Tomasz stays on the line through the tasting like a critic at a premiere. When Theo moans through his first bite, the phone says, warmly, "That one was mine, I taught that one," a claim that cannot be checked from Wisconsin.

The call had come on a random Tuesday in the very first week of July. Patrick's agent, early-morning, and Patrick took his phone onto the dock alone, and closed the door behind him, while Theo and I stood by the window, pretending to do the dishes, rinsing plates we took out of the cabinet, because there were no dirty ones, watching a man's back through glass while his dread came home to roost. His shoulders gave up nothing. They never do. He was out there eleven minutes, and Theo dried the same plate the entire time. When Patrick finally came in he looked at us, then at the single towel between us we were both pretending to be using at the same time, and rolled his eyes. "Anyway. Somebody signed a five-year deal this morning."

"Somebody," Theo echoed.

"A goalie, I hear. Thirty years old. People said he was aging."

"PATRICK."

"Guess I still got it." Patrick said, and let the whole thing crack open across his face at last.

There was screaming. Some of it was Theo's. The rest of it I will deny.

He announced nothing and posted nothing. The only paperwork that got celebrated in this house arrived last week in a fancy folder, and it wasn't his, it was ours, and it changed one thing, and one thing only: the lake house stopped being leased and started being owned. My place holds our Chicago base. Patrick's holds Milwaukee, because Theo had long forgotten he has his own place.

This one holds the summers, and the deed says all three names.

Three homes, one household. No announcements on that one, either. We're getting very good at boring.

***

THE WOLVES BREAK the boring on the last weekend of August, arriving in a convoy I can hear from the porch two full minutes before I see it.

I text Becker one instruction: slow down by the mailbox, it's new. He texts back a question mark. Theo, reading over my shoulder, goes very dignified and walks back into the house, because no one is allowed to mention the first and last time we let him drive here.