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greens bled into each other, into me, filling every capillary, filling me completely, and I held it all in, I held it, I—
    Moans melted into gasps, then into laughter and some standard postcoital eloquence.
    “Wow.”
    “Yeah.”
    Rachel pulled away and, after some rather deft cleanup work, settled onto her back and resumed battle with the Lycra. Just as the waistband made its satisfying snap against her hips, I heard a low rumble behind us. A beat-up Ford Ranger was pulling into the lot, kicking up dust and tugging an equally beat-up boat.
    I put my hand on Rachel’s knee, trying to look as wholesome as possible. Behind us, a door slammed shut, and I looked back to see two men popping the latch on their topper window and pulling out a pair of poles. The one nearer to us turned, peering out from under the brim of a camo trucker hat, and gave us a wave and a nod. I waved back, then returned my attention to the lake. The canoe had drifted from sight, but the cattails still traced the shoreline, and the clouds still hung in the sky and peered up from the waters below.
    “Can you believe this?” I asked.
    “Hmm?”
    “We’re out here,” I said. “This is where everything happens from now on.”
    I let my eyes wander across the lake, over the evergreen, up to the open sky. Rachel smiled, then looked down and dragged her spoon around the container, finding the final pockets of yogurt. She cleaned the plastic deliberately, completely, just as if she were in the kitchen at my folks’ house or on the couch in her old Portland apartment. As if this dock were home.
     • • • 
    “F uck. Me.”
    This was
not
happening.
    “Is it a flat?” Rachel asked, pressing her elbows onto the bars and waddling toward me.
    We’d ridden just fifteen miles from the lake, but gone was the pleasant bright of morning. Now it was sunny in the bad way. No breeze, no water. Just harsh light filtered through floating dust. And there was plenty of dust. Bob Simeone had said County Road FF would be winding, gentle, and tree lined, and that it was. But it was also being repaved and at the moment wasn’t paved at all.
    I dropped to a squat and rolled my bike fore and aft, keeping my eyes focused on the hub of my rear wheel. The hub’s outer lips—I would soon learn that “flange” was the technical term—were both drilled with eighteen holes, each of which was meant to accept the nubbed head of a highly tensioned spoke. Thirty-six spokes in all, exerting equal force on the rim, sucking it in toward the hub. But one of these spokes had snapped, right where it emerged from the hub. The head spun freely in the flange, while the rest of the shaft dangled from the rim, amputated. One out of thirty-six, I thought, was small peas. My wheel disagreed. The injury to one spoke had distressed the whole system. I lifted the bike and spun the wheel, and the section of rim with the broken spoke swayed to the left, dragging on the brake pad with every revolution.
    “No, it’s not a flat,” I said, looking up at Rachel. “I blew a spoke.”
    “Already?” she asked. “Wow.”
    “I know.”
    I looked back to the Fuji, shook my head, and said, “I thought we were friends.”
    Rachel stepped off her bike. “Well, at least we’ve got extra spokes, right?”
    We did have extras, neatly attached to special notches that had been brazed onto each of our frames. And replacing spokes, in theory, had always seemed easy enough. Just pop off the tire, pull out the bad spoke, and slide in a new one. Bing, bang, boom. But my blown spoke was on the drive side of the rear wheel, the side facing the chain, and I could see I wouldn’t be able to do anything until I removed the cassette: the cluster of gears that hugged the hub. I thought back to the weeks before Rachel and I left. We’d made a couple of trips to the nearby town of Minocqua, where we learned basic repairs and nifty roadside tricks from my dad’s local mechanic, a kindhearted if laconic guy