Chapter 16: Sunday Dinner

The Dettmer house sits on a hill above the marina, white clapboard with a porch that looks straight down on the docks.

Emmett carried a wooden box up the front steps.

It was about the size of a bread box, oak, with brass hooks inside the lid and DETTMER MARINA KEYS stenciled on the front.

I carried a pie from the Daily Grind, because you don't arrive at a Wisconsin table with your hands empty.

At five o'clock on the dot, Mrs. Dettmer opened the door.

She looked at the pie, and then at the box, and then at her son.

"He's in the dining room," she said.

The air in front of my face was clean white nothing.

Nobody in that house was typing a word, and for once the silence felt less like a favor and more like a held breath.

Their father sat at the head of a long table with a cane hooked on his chair.

A roast sat in front of him, and he wasn't carving it.

He was thin, with a face like a worn dock plank and the same flat gray eyes as Emmett.

Brock sat at his right, in a clean shirt, with his hands folded in his lap.

Shayla's chair was empty.

"She's at her mother's," Brock said, before anyone asked. "She's not well."

"She's soaked through and humiliated," said their father. "You can say it."

Nobody said it.

Emmett set the box on the table next to the potatoes.

I took the chair beside him, where I could see everyone's hands.

Their father's were shaking a little, but not from the hip.

Brock's were laced so tight his knuckles had gone white.

"Sit," the old man said to me. "Eat. Her pot roast dries out."

"Thank you, sir."

"Sir is plenty."

"Yes, sir."

We ate for four minutes in a silence so thick you could have stood a fork in it.

Then their father put his knife down.

"Emmett," he said. "You've got something in that box."

"Yes, sir."

"Before you open it, I want to hear it from your brother." He turned his head. "Brock. The night of graduation, 2016. The boat."

Brock looked up too fast.

"Dad, come on. We've been through this."