Abigail was eleven, but so somber and so small that we both felt she was younger. When she was around, we excluded her with the devotion of older siblings, but without any of the affection.

“Okay?” Vienna drawled, and stuck out her tongue. Abigail started to respond, but stopped, coughing into her elbow, and everyone in the boat paused to watch her. Abigail had coughed like this last year too, a dry sound that scraped up from the center of her body. As far as I’d heard, no one knew what was causing it, or what would make it stop. She wasn’t sick otherwise.

“Oh, you poor thing,” my grandmother said. “Still?”

Abigail smiled, curling toward the attention. “It doesn’t hurt or anything.”

“We’re doing another allergy panel next month,” Chelsea said. She slid her hand over her daughter’s shoulder. “The doctor just doesn’t know.”

Sitting back on her palms, Abigail turned her face toward the sun.

Vienna reached into the cooler and pretended to drink an unopened can of beer, laughing when her aunt glared at her. The conversation drifted on.

“They’re saying it’s global warming, you know,” Chelsea said. Chelsea looked young for someone’s aunt. It was her hair, how long and healthy it was. She brushed it back now and bared her cheek to the sun, her pretty shoulders. “Why we’re getting the bloom all the way up here. It’s supposed to be too cold at this elevation.”

Vienna’s grandfather pushed air through his teeth. “It’s just a hot year, honey,” he said. “A hot year don’t have to mean anything.”

“But that’s what a hot year does mean,” Chelsea said. “A hot year means it’s hot.”

My grandmother laughed.

Chelsea rubbed the back of her head. “It’s gotten hotter in your lifetime,” she said to her father, Vienna’s grandfather. “The weather’s changed so much in your lifetime. You’ve seen it.”

“Colder last winter than it’s ever been,” Vienna’s grandmother said, and her grandfather added, “Thought a ball was going to drop off.”

“Richard!” My grandmother lifted her hands in despair. “The girls, for God’s sake, do not want to hear about your privates.”

“Let’s not talk politics.” This from my grandfather, who lay back toward the rear of the boat, his thin eyelids closed.

“All right,” Chelsea huffed. “All right, then, let’s not.”

She was sour and quiet while our grandparents talked about the sunshine, the pies the lakeside diner had started serving, who was selling their cabins, and who might be buying them. When she spoke again, she said, “I heard the Clarks’ dog died from drinking the lake water.”

Vienna levered herself up on her elbows. “Really?”

“The little white Jack Russell, Bennie. I was talking to Patti Clark at the gas station. She said their boys took him down to the water and let him go swimming, and the next morning he was dead.”

“Oh,” my grandmother sighed. “Poor thing.”

“She said,” Abigail added—she had straightened too, attracted back to the conversation, like we were, by the smell of death—“that he had blisters on his mouth and he was bleeding.”