After talking about Lake Beulah with Arthur, Sherri found it hard not to compare the lakes. Beulah was farther from town, and much bigger and more prestigious than Booth. It was really three lakes merged together with channels that were dug through the land that separated them. But that lake, much as Sherri loved it, had a quality of otherness, because it felt like it belonged to the Chicagoans. “Poor Man’s Lake Geneva” was what people called it, but it was still too rich for the townies. A state representative lived there, and so did families with names like Gillette, and the people who’d built railroads and bridges all over the world. It was the home of sailors and spoiled kids who filled up the churches in summer, when Sherri would look around and not recognize a soul. Booth Lake was much smaller and simpler, and sweeter, even, if a lake could be sweet. It had the Girl Scout camp on one side and simple cottages dotting the shoreline, and a small island with a cabin on it sat smack-dab in the middle. She felt this lake belonged to her. Actually, with Roberta standing next to her, she felt like it was theirs; the very best part of their childhoods had happened here.

On one end of the beach sat the raft. Only the teenagers went on it, and couples would sneak underneath it to make out in the air space between the wood and the empty barrels while the adults, oblivious, sat on blankets or in tattered folding chairs chatting with neighbors about farm subsidies and corn futures, whose kid did what to whom, and the annuals they’d planted in their gardens.

Roberta walked over to the big and little slides, set sideways in the sand on the opposite side of the beach from the raft, staged to be put into the lake next. “Do you think Walter’s finger is still out there?”

Sherri pretended to make herself vomit. “That was so disgusting.”

When they were kids, Walter Dougan, goofing around as always, had tried sliding sideways and gripped the rusty undersides of the handrail, catching his index finger on an errant bit of metal as he slid down. When he’d surfaced, he’d looked at his hand and screamed bloody murder. He’d bled so much everyone thought he would die. For years after that, the kids would plug their noses and swim upside down, saying they were looking for Walter’s finger, or they’d make up ghost stories to tell around campfires about the finger gripping the ankles of swimmers and pulling them into the depths of the spring-fed lake.

“I wish we’d brought our suits,” Roberta said. She wore a baseball-cut T-shirt and cutoffs, and still had a glob of syrup stuck in her hair.