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Canyon Ferry, where he kept his sloop on a narrow wooden dock over green water.
Miss Annie
had been named for a pretty girl at the plant on whom Stuart had a harmless crush. Natalie had never been sufficiently interested to ask about the name, and Stuart liked having the secret that he thought might be expanded, perhaps to an exchange of small kindnesses, if ever he took the real Annie for a sail.
    Winter was almost upon them and snatching this warm day from such a short autumn was exciting. Natalie dangled her legs over the water with her omnipresent fat paperback while Stuart prepared the boat. He sponged the rainwater out of the bilges, pulled the sail cover off the main and let the condensation evaporate; he scrubbed bird droppings from the painted canvas deck, then rinsed it down with buckets of cold, fresh lake water that ran around the coaming and out over the transom. He was eager to “take the old girl out for a gallop,” as his easygoing father used to say.
    No one of his in-laws would have understood such a thought, except maybe Evelyn with her horses. He found these people rather twisted, but he was far too mild to make much of it. He presumed it to be part of the Western Way. Most of the Whitelaws failed to appreciate Stuart’s quiet self-knowledge and would have been surprised at how often his idlest daydreams featured detailed accounts of their complete humiliation. He still resented the fact that Natalie had long ago forbidden him to sing any of the sea chanties he’d so painstakingly memorized. Once the decks dried and everything was in order, Stuart said, “Shall we sail?” And without a word, Natalie turned down a corner of her potboiler, got to her feet and stretched. “This will be very pleasant,” she said fretfully.
    Stuart helped her aboard, then ran his eye around the inside of the boat, making certain everything was in order, fingers reaching out to touch white oak ribs, curves of cedar. Natalie picked a quiet spot in the cockpit so as not to be in Stuart’s way, made herself comfortable with her hands up the sleeves of an old sailing sweater. Stuart untied all the lines, coiled and stowed them in the forepeak, then walked the sloop the length of the dock, gave her a shove toward open water and jumped aboard. He let the main sheet run free while he raised the sail, putting the halyard on the winch and hoisting it tight. The boat began slowly to forge toward Confederate Gulch, a steady chugging sound against the hull as they worked their way across the vanished riverbed, whiffs of pine and barbecue, farm trucks in the distance and a dust cloud following a tractor. Stuart raised the jib, sat back in the cockpit with his hand on the tiller, looked over at his wife and said, “There.”
    Natalie seemed contemplative, certainly not desperate. Clearly the death of her father was always on her mind. But Whitelaw had never been close to his girls and at the end was quite senile, interested mostly in filling the birdfeeders around the house and keeping his wife constantly in sight. Yes, said the court to suggestions of senility, but of insufficient duration: the will was binding, its various booby traps ascribable to eccentricity not mental incompetence. Seeing him pottering around in his red watch cap, his family occasionally forgot what he had done to their lives. Natalie had even exclaimed that he was “adorable,” an epithet Evelyn could not quite go along with.
    From Confederate Gulch they tacked to the old brick grain silos on the west side of the lake, then east again toward the great bend north of the village of Winston, the lee rail just compressing against the swell and the rise and fall of the stem slicing forward into the water, quiet and thrilling. From time to time Natalie turned to watch the water race past. The sun was over the whole lake now, and the breeze carried the spray across the deck. Several other boats had set out, their sails vivid and white against the grain fields of