Mitch began to swim to the metal ladder that hung off the back of Rye’s boat and Sherri followed him, giggling and splashing. But then she stopped, and the bubble of her enthusiasm was momentarily ruptured when she remembered her watch, the one her father had given her. She felt for it, but her wrist was bare. For just a moment she wondered if she’d put it on, but she was sure she had. She wasn’t allowed to wear jewelry with her costume, so she made a special point of wearing it when she wasn’t on the job. It must have slipped under the water, and she went back under in hopes of finding it. When she surfaced, Rye gunned the engine and drove away, with Mitch waving goodbye, laughing. Some of the water from the choppy wake went up her nose and she began to cough. “Hey!” she called out. “Hey, that’s not funny.” She slapped the water in frustration. What if a ski boat headed in her direction? How would the driver ever see her? “Come back!”

They looped back around to get her, but those few minutes when she wasn’t sure if they would return felt like a lifetime. She pulled herself back on the boat and wrapped herself in a towel. “That was a horrible thing to do. You guys are assholes, you know that?”

Mitch handed Sherri a beer, and Rye looked at her wet T-shirt clinging to her chest. “Hey, come here,” Mitch said, and he wrapped her into a hug. “I’m sorry, we were just fooling around. Don’t go getting all sad.”

She gazed at the choppy surface of the water and thought about her watch sinking to the bottom of the massive glacial lake. It had been her last connection to who she was; part of her drowned along with it, and there was no going back.

The concert would soon start, but just as they got ready to head to shore, Rye backed the boat up over the ski rope and it fouled the propeller. “What’ll we do?” Sherri asked.

“Well,” Rye said. “You guys can swim to shore, or we sit here and wait for another boat to come by and tow us.”