Chapter 10: The Rope Swing

I didn't say anything.

There wasn't anything to say to an empty inbox.

"You want me to read some cryptic note so you can say you warned us?"

Hugo put the phone away.

"No. Arabella will manage. She always does."

He picked up the weight sheets and walked out of the shed into the sun.

Nobody spoke until his car was gone.

Then the quieter old shipwright set his plane down on the bench.

"Your brother's an ass," he said.

It was four words exactly.

Bess fell off the bottom rung of her ladder laughing.

My plank had set while I wasn't looking.

Firewood.

Seth came over and took the gloves off me, one finger at a time.

"Come on."

"Where?"

"It's the Fourth of July. Nobody works on the Fourth of July. It's practically in the Constitution."

He walked me out of the shed and across the grass to the old oak at the edge of the cove.

The rope swing hung from a branch twenty feet up, a fat knotted rope worn smooth by four generations of hands.

Under it, the water was deep and green.

"No," I said.

"You can swim."

"I can swim fine. I did laps at the Y in Fall River every morning from nine to seventeen."

"I was the fastest kid in the pool."

"Did you like it?"

I opened my mouth to say yes, and stopped.

"I liked winning."

"That's not the same thing." He pulled off his T-shirt and dropped it on the grass.

I looked.

I couldn't help it.

He was brown to the waist and broad and there was a pale line of sawdust across his stomach where his shirt had been.

He saw me looking, and didn't do me the favor of pretending he hadn't.

"Strong swimmers go first," he said.

"That's not funny."

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