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walked unsteadily away.
    Mr. and Mrs. Henry House
spent their wedding night at the Crittendon Inn at the far northern tip of the county. The old hotel was situated high on a bluff overlooking the narrow strait between the peninsula and Washington Island, right where the battle between lake currents and prevailing winds made the waters so treacherous—and the site of so many shipwrecks—that the early sailors named the passage Porte des Morts.
    But that night the lake was calm. The thunderstorm that had raced through earlier did nothing more than wash away the heat and haze that had been lingering for days. Moonlight entered the third-floor room where Sonja House lay on the four-poster bed next to a window, and her husband of only a few hours sat in a chair next to the bed. The night breeze cooled her body, naked and still sweaty from lovemaking, and she pulled the sheet up to her shoulders.
    “Could I ask a favor?”
    Henry laughed. “I guess you know I’m not about to say no. Not tonight! But be ready: Those that ask for favors have to be willing to grant them.”
    “Would you sell Buck? Please—I’m not asking you to. But would you
if
I asked.”
    “If this doesn’t sound like a trap . . . If I say yes, then you’ll go ahead and ask for real.”
    “No, no. Please. I don’t mean it like that.”
    “Then what? Are you trying to find out if I’d obey you?” He picked up his cigarettes from the window ledge, lit one, and blew smoke out toward the strait. “Or is this some kind of test to see which one I’d choose? Jesus!”
    “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said this.”
    “You’ve been around Buck. You know he’s gentle. He’s not going to cost us much in feed. We’ve got the barn and room for him to run. I don’t know what the hell this is about. Are you afraid of him?”
    “It was just something your mother said, and I . . . Never mind.”
    Henry slapped his bare thigh. “Mom! I should have known! She was against my having a horse in the first place. It was Dad’s and my idea all the way, and she never wanted to have a damn thing to do with Buck. She resented having to take care of him when I was in the Army. She tried to get me to sell him before I went in, but I told her I’d just as soon take Buck out and shoot him as see someone else own him.”
    She didn’t know what to say but to repeat her apology. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
    “No,
Mom
shouldn’t have said anything. Was she drunk? I bet she was drunk.”
    Sonja nodded.
    “A lot of men around here have boats. Boats never much interested me. I’ve got a horse. It’s nothing to make a fuss about.”
    She could tell he was trying now to rid his voice of anger, but he had not entirely succeeded. Beneath this new cheerful note she heard another, unyielding as stone. Sonja had grown up in the home of a fisherman—she knew more about men and boats than about men and horses—and early in life she learned the lesson the seaside teaches: Water can avoid being broken on rocks only by finding a way to flow around them.
    The sheet was not enough to keep Sonja warm, and she reached for the blanket, but as she did, Henry stopped her hand. She hoped his intention was to cover her body with his, but instead he yanked the sheet from her and leaned back in his chair.
    “I’m cold.”
    “Well, you’re just going to have to stay cold until I get my eyes full. That’s the favor I want.”
    “Very well,” Sonja said, rolling over and turning her back to her husband. She drew up her knees for warmth.
    Henry laughed. “That view suits me too!”
    He reached out and put his hand on her backside, and in spite of the intimacies of the previous hour—he had touched her in places and ways she had never touched herself—she flinched at his caress.
    Their firstborn
child was named for neither her parents nor his. Henry and Sonja favored the first month of summer above all others, and though their daughter was born in the dead of 1947’s