The Inn at Lake Devine by Elinor Lipman Read Free Book Online

be able to say it about anyone.” I didn’t really care to win the point I was making. I found that needling her in the brains department relieved the tedium of talking to her—she who couldn’t take, make, or get a joke of any kind. Not that it was satisfying, with no audience to play to. By midweek, I was even missing my sister, the queen of disdain, the master of the withering smile.
    I said to Robin one chilly morning on the dock, plucking a ruse out of thin air, “You know, in Tuesday Weld’s family, all the kids are named for days of the week.”
    “Really? They are?”
    “There’s Domingo, which is Spanish for Sunday—her brother—and a sister named Wednesday.”
    “Really?” Robin said again.
    “They call her Wendy for short.”
    I heard a laugh behind me.
    “Good one, Natalie,” said Nelson Berry. He walked right between us, his bare feet grazing our towel. At the edge of the dock, he hesitated for a few seconds, took his whistle off, and handed it to me for safekeeping. Feet together, he dove head-first, no tricks, into the shirred surface of the lake. He came up for air halfway to the raft, then switched to the backstroke, eyes conscientiously watching us, the minor guests.
    Robin said, “It’s good that he can just jump in and doesn’t have to get used to the water first. I’d freeze.”
    I, who had tried for my junior lifesaving certification at camp but had failed all parts of the test involving the rescue and towing of deadweight counselors, said, “That’s what a lifeguard does, runs and dives. You’re even supposed to do a kind of belly flop so your head stays above the water and you don’t take your eyes off the person who’s drowning.”
    Neither one of us took our eyes off Nelson and his straight-edged, rhythmic backstroke.
    Robin said, “I never saw him have to jump off and save anyone’s life.”
    “Not in all the time you’ve been coming here?”
    Nelson executed a snap of a racing turn against the barrels of the raft and was doing a slow crawl back, face out of the water and eyes meticulously forward.
    “I think everyone who goes out to the raft knows how to swim really good, and everyone who doesn’t stays inside the buoys,” said Robin.
    I stood up, the red cord of his whistle wrapped twice around my fist for safekeeping against wind and water and Robin Fife. Nelson Berry, age sixteen, with the Red Cross badge sewn to his navy-bluetrunks, knew my name and had used it in an unmistakably sympathetic manner. I slipped the whistle’s cord around my neck. Any second now it would be around his.
    N elson, everyone said, took after their father, who seemed happiest playing handyman, crisscrossing the lawn with a wrench or a trowel in his hand. Where Mrs. Berry was superficially gracious but internally cranky or worse, her bashful husband blossomed into a low level of jolliness, especially around kids. He called me Nat almost immediately, in what sounded like election to his exclusive club of favorite guests.
    He seemed to like me, even appreciate me. He flagged me down the first time I passed him kneeling in a flower bed and asked if I was having a good time on my vacation.
    I said I was. It was very nice here.
    “The lake’s not too cold for you?”
    I said, “Well, sometimes, but I get used to it.”
    “Our little one’s not bothering you?”
    I said, well, that was okay.
    He sighed. “She can be a pest, no matter how many times we tell her not to bother the guests.”
    I said I lived on a street in Newton, Massachusetts, with all girls. Every single family on my street had girls, so I was used to dealing with pests … in Newton. Newton, Mass.
    “Is that right?” he asked happily. “I had an aunt and uncle in Newton and I used to love to visit them. They lived near a lake. Right in the middle of the town, it seemed like.”
    “Crystal Lake?”
    “That was it. Their house backed right up to it.” He chuckled. “Big stone house. They were the rich