“That’s kind of the point,” I said. “There’s a local Inn that has a restaurant. Not many tables I’m told. I’ve never been there but I hear people rave about the food. Do you want to meet there, come here or I’ll pick you up?”
Beverly hesitated and said, “Well. Uummm. I’m kind of embarrassed to say we don’t know how to get to your house by roads. We don’t have GPS in the car so your address won’t help. We can’t remember the address here. There’s a fifty-five on the house but I don’t know the street’s name. Can you pick us up in your pontoon boat? We’ll be standing on the dock at seven thirty with bells on.”
I chuckled and said, “Well, I’ll be at the helm of my boat with balls on.”
Beverly giggled and I heard Eva giggle and say, “You’d better,” in the background. They must have had me on speaker. Beverly told me vaguely how to go by boat because that was the only way she knew.
I hung up and said out loud to myself, “Well Jack. You’re going out on a date for the first time in nearly twenty years.” I used the internet to find the phone number for the local Inn and made reservations for eight o’clock. I was already trying to think what I had for clothes to wear. I pictured them as big city girls and they would be dressed to the ‘nines’.
I retreated to the deck and my book again. The sun was high in the sky and the day was getting hot fast. The cicadas were tuning up as the heat built. I heard a car coming down the gravel road. The tires popped loudly on loose stones. I thought it might be Jacob and Ashley but they always came separately in his truck and her car. The car passed by my house. It had to be Priya unless it was someone looking to drive through only to find out it’s a dead-end road. If it was the latter, the car would come back past my house in less than a minute or so. It didn’t return. I went back to my book.
I had my ever-present binoculars sitting on the deck railing and I would set aside my reader and grab the binoculars as each boat came into view. They were mostly pontoon boats passing through to another larger cove to the north. Speed boats towing kids on tubes and some water skiers or wake boarders thundered in. They did some maneuvers trying to shake the tubers loose to the screams of the kids. Then they’d zoom back down the lake.