I look at Tomás. Tomás is looking at the lake with the specific expression of someone who has decided they and the lake have irreconcilable differences.
“Hey,” I say, sitting down beside him. Not crouching—sitting, properly, with my legs hanging off the dock the same way his are. “What’s the problem with the water?”
“It’s very deep,” Tomás says.
“It is,” I agree.
“You can’t see the bottom.”
“Not from here. You can in the shallows, at the south end.” I look at the water with him. “You know what’s interesting about not seeing the bottom?”
He looks at me with cautious nine-year-old skepticism. “What?”
“It means the lake has a lot of space to put things it wants to keep private. My grandmother used to say that bodies of water withdeep centers are the ones with the most secrets. And I’ve found, in my experience, that the secrets are usually the good kind.”
Tomás considers this. “Like what?”
“Like the fact that the eastern shelf has a colony of freshwater mussels that have been there for decades. Or that the pickerel in the north end of the lake are very old and very opinionated and will absolutely swim up to you if you hold still long enough. The deep part isn’t the danger. It’s the—backstory.”
He looks at the water again. Something in his expression has shifted fractionally, from closed to merely uncertain.
I am about to offer to walk him into the shallows myself when Muir comes along the dock behind us, returning from the gear shed with a coil of rope that needs mending. He takes in the situation in one quiet assessment and stops.
“The south shallows are good this time of day,” he says, to no one specifically, leaning on the dock railing with the rope in his hands. “Sandy bottom. You can see straight to it in the sun. Water’s about knee-deep for the first stretch.”
Tomás looks at him. “How deep does it get after that?”
“Gradually,” Muir says. “It doesn’t rush. The lake’s patient.”
There is something in how he says it that lands differently than the same words would from someone performing reassurance. Tomás appears to receive it as such.
“I’ll go to the knee-deep part,” Tomás announces, to his grandmother, who makes the face of a woman receiving an unexpected gift.
I look at Muir. He’s already reading the situation—the way I’ve positioned myself slightly back from Tomás, the careful distance I’ve maintained, the way I offered information instead of hands-on guidance. He knows how I move around children, about the discomfort that lives in my chest when it comes to teaching them anything in the water. I don’t know how he knows this. Four years away and he still reads me like the lake reads the weather.
“I can take him down to the shallows,” Muir says, straightforward, not making it a question. “You finish the equipment check. We’ll be back in an hour.”
It’s a rescue, the way he frames it. A division of labor, practical and clean, but a rescue nonetheless.
“That would be—” I stop. Start again. “Thank you.”
Muir nods, already turning to Tomás with the rope still in his hands. “Come on then. Let’s see what the lake wants to show you.”
Tomás follows him without hesitation, his earlier uncertainty evaporating in the face of Muir’s calm certainty. I watch them walk down the dock together—Muir pointing out the way the light hits the water differently at different depths, Tomás asking questions that Muir answers with the patience of someone who genuinely believes nine-year-olds deserve real information.
They’re gone for fifty-three minutes. When they return, Tomás is soaked and grinning, his grandmother taking photographs with the enthusiasm of someone who has witnessed a minor miracle. Muir emerges from the water with water streaming off his shoulders, his ponytail half-loose and dripping, and I have to force myself to look away.
That’s all it takes—the sight of him moving through the shallow water with Tomás, the way the afternoon light catches him as he turns to answer another question.
Then he opens his mouth.
“—the difference between the sandy shelf and the drop-off,” he’s saying to Tomás, his Scottish brogue rolling through the words like stones in a river, and I forget how to breathe. That accent. That voice. Four years and it still does something to me that I don’t have words for. “The lake tells you things if you pay attention to how the water feels.”
When they leave, Tomás looks back at the dock and waves at Muir, who’s already returned to his work—coiling rope, checking rigging, moving through the ordinary tasks of dock maintenance with the same unhurried focus he brought to teaching a frightened boy that the deep water wasn’t something to fear. He lifts a hand in acknowledgment, not making it into a moment, just a simple recognition that yes, he sees the boy, and yes, it was good.
I get in the Snack Hut and rearrange the biko display.
On Tuesday, the coffee appears.