She didn’t take her eyes off the water as Nate plopped down in the chair next to hers. Even though she didn’t look at him, she could smell him: sweat, grease, old oil, years of dust and grime.
She made an effort to hide her smile but only half succeeded. Without so much as a glance at him, she reached into the cooler beside her, withdrew an icy cold bottle of beer and handed it to him.
Nate drained it in one go, and she handed him another one. When it was half-empty, she passed a paper bag of burritos to him. He ate the first one in three bites.
“Smugness chokes a person,” he said, his mouth full. “Too much of it and you die on the spot. And you can’t be buried in hallowed ground.”
Terri couldn’t contain her laughter—and when she looked at him, it increased. There were cobwebs clinging to his shirt and in his hair. Not clean, new cobwebs, but the kind that were so filthy the spiders had abandoned them.
“Go on,” he said. “I deserve it.”
“If it helps, Dad said you did a great job. Better than I would have. And best of all, you didn’t complain about having to do it. No siree bob, you cleaned that whole workshop all by your little self. Dad said you even cleaned under that old transmission. How’d you move it?”
Nate was on his third burrito. He didn’t say anything, just held up his arm and flexed a bicep.
“Ooooh,” Terri said. “Impressive.”
He held out his hand and she gave him another beer. “So when’d you figure it out?”
“It was the notebook and Anna acting like she was downright eager to do anything my dad wanted. You heard it all?”
“Every word you yelled to your father went through my ears. Kind of like a verbal machine gun going off.”
Terri felt guilty at what she’d said and opened her mouth to apologize.
“Don’t,” Nate said. “It was all true. Or used to be, anyway. My first two years in college I had a second major in beer drinking. I set records in my fraternity. I was world-class.”
“Yeah?” Terri was smiling as she sipped her own beer. The lake was Y-shaped and her house was at the fork. With a bit of twisting and turning, they could see all of it. At one end a flashlight was moving along the path that ran beside the water. A rowboat with a light on the end was stealthily going southward. “So what made you stop drinking—or did you?” She nodded toward the empty bottles on the little table in front of them.
“This indulgence is a rarity. Brought on by having to clean out an eighteen-foot-long boat repair shop all by myself.”
“And I thank you for it. It’s been years since anyone could get farther inside than three feet. I hear the place is now so clean it could be used as a cafeteria.”
“I just wanted to prove to you that I could actually do things.”
“And I wanted to get out of having to clean that mess.”
Nate held his bottle out to her and they clinked. “We both got what we wanted.”
“So we did. What I want to know is what happened in your third year of college.”
“Ah. That. The summer after the second year, I went home to Colorado and slept. Since I’d done little but party all year long, I was worn-out. I was on the couch, half-asleep, and when I opened my eyes, my dad was staring down at me. He said, ‘We all make choices about what we want to do with our lives.’ Then he stuck a finger in my belly—which was pretty soft.”
“Then what?”
Nate shrugged as he wadded up the paper from the fourth burrito. “That was it. I took some summer courses at the University of Colorado, and when I went back to Dartmouth, I changed my major to business.”
“All from one comment from your dad?”
“That’s right.”
“But a business major? Dad said you worked with Kit. Wasn’t he some sort of diplomat?”
“Yeah,” Nate said, and she heard the hesitation in his voice.
“Top secret? Can’t tell me anything?”
Nate gave a half grin. “More or less. Uncle Kit is an expert on the Middle East and he wanted someone he could trust with him, so he asked me to join him, and I did.”