Dear Dad,

I can’t believe you got me the cookie scooper! I know it’s not super fancy and doesn’t look like much, but I have made a million cookies a million times faster, and it’s awesome! So thank you!

And yes, when you come to visit this summer, I promise to make the oatmeal raisin cookies.

Ellie

June in Oklahoma is like living on the sun. Or at least that’s what it feels like in the bed of the pickup as it bounces down the road to No. 9 landing.

“You know we’d get arrested for this in Nashville,” I yell through the open window into the cab of the truck. I’m in the back with Bert and Coralee in a nest of life vests and inner tubes.

“Good thing we moved, then!” Mom yells back.

Coralee laughs and slaps Bert on the back so hard he drops his phone. “What in the world has gotten into your mother?” she shouts toward me, her hair whipping free from her ponytail.

I shrug and look up at Mom. Her sunglasses are pushed up into her hair, which is crazier looking than ever now that she’s growing it out again. Hutch follows us in the van with my chair and enough Gatorade and chips and watermelon to last us all summer.

It’s not even ten in the morning when we get to the lake, and we have it all to ourselves. Hutch puts me in my chair in the shade while everybody unloads. The sky is wavy with heat and I’m sticky with sweat. I lift my thighs up from where they’re suctioned to the chair.

It’s perfect.

“All right.” Mom kneels down in front of me and rubs a fifth coat of sunscreen onto my shoulders. “Are you sure about this?”

“Mom.”

“Ellie.”

“If you back out now, I will fire you. I will fire you as my mother.”

“Well, good luck to you, then,” she says, and starts to get up.

“Come on!”

I can see Coralee and Bert standing with their feet already in the water.

“Okay, okay. Just promise me you’ll be careful.”

“Okay, yes, I promise.”

She wheels me over the wet sand right up to the edge of the lake. Hutch is waiting there, and he bends down and tightens the straps on my life jacket and the floaties on my arms and legs.

“Ready, Ellie?” he says.

“Ready.”

And then he lifts me out of the chair and walks into the water.

The lake’s still cool this early in the summer, and my skin is so hot that the shock of it gives me goose bumps. Once we’re deep enough, he lowers me all the way in and I lie back with my arms out.