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beautiful boat.
    She was a sailboat, made of rich brown wood—oak, and mahogany—and although even Ann could tell she wasn’t very big, she was big enough, with a long cabin where you could cook a meal and sleep overnight and use the bathroom if you needed to. That was half the reason they were here in the summer before the house was finished—their dad was in love with the boat, which he’d named the
Bounty II
. The first
Bounty
being the boat he’d owned for a while when he worked in the Caribbean, back in the day. He was in love with that one, he was in love with this one too—or so Ann’s mom said.
    “That’s your true love, Bill, right there in the water. Children, say hello to your new mom.”
And everybody laughed.
    But even young as she was, Ann thought her father’s feeling toward the boat was more complicated than love, and maybe not as nice either. Her father bought the boat in February from a dealer he’d met when they all went to the Boat Show the month before. Their parents had agreed a small power boat made the most sense. They might use it for errands to the marina across the way, or visiting other cottagers, or fishing, or water-skiing.
    When they got there, it was a different story. Ann didn’t notice anything strange about her parents at first—she fell under the spell of the fancy booths and the music, the smell of beer nuts and the pretty women who stood at all those booths, and all those boats. There was a stage show with dancers in the middle. They had scuba divers too, in a big glass tank. You could knock on the glass and the diver would knock back.
    But once that magic wore off, Ann started to pick up on things. Her mom was talking constantly—more than usual, in fact. Philip hurried ahead of them, almost too far to shout. Her dad, meanwhile, became very quiet. He stopped for a moment, in the space underneath a parasail that dangled from the ceiling and stared into the fabric until Ann nudged him. When they paused at a dealer’s show space, it was usually at their mom’s suggestion. He jammed his fists into the pockets of his coat and nodded while she asked him what she thought about this, or that, and he hurried them along.
    Ann was starting to wonder whether her dad really wanted to buy a boat. He looked like he just wanted to leave.
    But after lunch, they stopped at a booth from a North Bay company called Clinker. There weren’t any boats here—just photographs that were wrapped in plastic, of sailboats for the most part, and a stack of three thick binders. The booth was being run by an old woman who wore a white Clinker sweatshirt and a sun visor. Her skin was wrinkled and brown as leather.
    Their dad stopped, and looked at the photographs, and said to their mother: “Go look at the jet skis. I’ll catch up.” And as they went off, mom shaking her head, Ann watched as their dad stepped uncertainly up to the booth and introduced himself to the woman there.
    The next month, as they sat in the tidied-up kitchen of the old house waiting for an appointment with their realtor, it emerged that he had bought them a boat. The
Bounty II
. Not, he admitted, exactly what they’d discussed. It had a motor on it, true, but that wasn’t the point of it. The boat was made for sailing. It was made, really, for sailing on bigger water than the lake. Twice, he said, the previous owner had sailed it down the St. Lawrence River and out into the Atlantic Ocean, south as far as the Caribbean Sea. That was where the photograph had been taken—on a bright day in the Caribbean, no land in sight. The water was a deep green, the sky uninterrupted blue. The boat was still, its sails down, mast stretching above the top of the frame. Someone—an old man, with a baseball cap and a white beard—sat in the cockpit, right hand frozen in a cheery wave.
    Yes, their father said, in fact it had cost more than they’d planned to spend. “But she’s a beautiful boat,” he said, and their mother looked at the