Chapter 11: Lake House

My father's lake house sits at the end of a gravel road in the Hocking Hills.

It has a deck, a dock and a boathouse he still calls the shed.

We went down on the last Friday of September, all four of us, in two cars.

Caleb drove his mother.

I drove my father.

My father spent the whole trip telling me which of his friends had bought the cabin by the ridge.

I answered in the right places.

I watched the grey Volvo ahead of us on the curves.

I thought about what he had said in his office: not like this, not while I'm lying.

He hadn't said anything about it since.

He had been careful all week.

At work he had fought me in two meetings without a trace of pity.

I knew what he was doing.

He was waiting for the right moment to tell me.

I was letting him, because I was afraid of what the truth would be.

The house had three bedrooms.

My father and Diane took the big one downstairs, and I took the back room with the single bed.

Caleb got the loft above the kitchen, up a ladder and through a trapdoor.

Saturday was a perfect day.

We swam off the dock.

My father burned the burgers, and Diane read in a deck chair under a floppy hat.

At the water's edge Caleb and I took turns pretending we had never touched each other.

It wasn't hard.

We'd had three years of practice at the opposite.

He tried to launch my father's old canoe, and it sank in four feet of water.

I laughed so hard that I fell in.

For a moment I forgot I was supposed to be hiding anything at all.

When I came up spluttering, he was grinning down at me from the dock with a hand held out.

Our parents were watching from the deck.

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