“I love this,” he said, easing into the boat and feeling the lake tremble beneath him. “No school for me,” he said, taking up the oars and shoving off, everything clean, perfect, still. “Not today.”

“Right,” she said, “let’s play hooky together,” and whether that made sense or not, since she was playing hooky on a permanent basis, didn’t matter. He took it for what it was—a gesture, a pleasantry, an invitation. She was back, at least for now, and now was all that mattered.

There was the smell of the water, fresh-turned under the oars, a smell that took him back to the time before he’d met Joanie, when water skis sustained him and his parents were young and psychology just a word in the dictionary. Mist rose, dissipated. Sparrows hopped along the shore, a crow called from the top of a pine. The boat glided on a string. Behind them, in the distance, was the house, where people would be stirring or not. It was the final week of school and the kids, Corey included, had been going in selectively, and aside from Susannah, and sometimes Joanie, depending on her mood, nobody really bothered much about them anymore—they could feed themselves and they were adept at exercising their powers of ambulation through the simple expedient of putting one foot in front of the other. Let them go to school, let them stay home: it was all the same. In the next moment the house dropped out of sight and he felt himself expanding till he could have absorbed the entire lake and the hills beyond it like some fantastic amoeba of the mind, and all was well, all was very, very well.

She was right there facing him, inches away, her legs tucked under the seat. The oars were extensions of his arms, the waters parted and the boat slipped across the surface, trailing its wake behind them in a continuous pattern of loops and folds that sparked under the sun. It was a big lake, deep, clear enough at this time of year to see twenty feet down. He rowed till they were out in the middle, far from the sight of the house or any of the other buildings, then shipped the oars and let the boat drift. “This is nice,” Lori murmured, leaning back, her face to the sky. Then she stretched her legs, lifted her feet in tandem and eased them down in his lap, all the while watching his eyes to gauge his response. “You mind?”

In answer, he stroked her ankles, her feet, her slim tanned calves. The boat drifted, the water lapped. After a while he said, “You’re up early this morning—I mean, that was a surprise.”

“I don’t know,” she said, “I’ve just been wanting to do that, get up early, I mean. You know, embrace the day, all that?”