They couldn’t keep their hands off each other, and they couldn’t stop talking. They chatted while they worked, and on long walks through Beulah Bog, and in the middle of the night when they’d take the rowboat out to the middle of the lake with some beers, a candle, and a sleeping bag and look up at the stars. Sherri lay with her head against Arthur’s chest, listening to the reassuring thump of his heartbeat.

“The old chapel used to be somewhere over there,” she said, pointing at a fancy new Mediterranean-style home on the island. “People around the lake would take their boats for Sunday services there in the summer, but we never did, because my mom was busy at St. Peter’s.”

“You remember it?”

“Mostly I remember when they burned down the monastery. Something you’ll learn soon enough is that watching controlled burns is the height of entertainment here. That’s how they train the volunteer firefighters. When they torched the old hotel and the building where the brothers lived it was ten times better than fireworks.” She felt sad that the retreat center was gone. In its way, it must have been like a more holy and meditative version of the Playboy resort, and it must have meant a lot to the people who’d been there.

“My mom told me that the monastery had a flat-bottomed steamship,” Sherri continued, “and the brothers would sing church songs so loud that their voices would echo off the water in order to make friends with the farmers, who were Protestant and didn’t approve of Jesuits. I feel like I can still hear them, do you?”

“I do,” he said. The sound of water rippled against the metal hull of the rowboat. “Lakes are so mysterious.”

“It’s like they can remember,” Sherri said.

He kissed her on the top of her head. “Exactly.”

“Arthur, why aren’t you married?”

“I was engaged once, to a woman named Victoria, but she fell in love with her professor. It was horrible. I was so heartbroken that I bummed around Europe for a year and tried to find myself. I worked in an olive orchard in Spain, hiked the Basque country, slept in a tent on the beach. I read a lot of poetry, too. That’s what you do when your heart breaks. I’ll bet your dad had it bad for someone and never really got past it.”

“Did you? Did you get past it?”

“Yes. Entirely.” Arthur pushed Sherri’s hair away from her face and gave her a kiss that felt like the period at the end of a sentence.