Phineas begins a route-scouting service I haven't asked for but that becomes, within a week, entirely indispensable. He swims the dive areas ahead of each session and leaves a hand-drawn map on the equipment shed shelf. Where the mussel colonies are expanding, which pickerel are in which formation, whether the indigo sprites have relocated to the southeast channel, what the water temperature is doing at depth.
The maps are drawn in careful hand with waterproof marker on the back of old tour flyers. They're more accurate than anything I could produce with survey equipment. When I try to pay him, he looks at me with his wide yellow eyes and says the lake is his waterway too and he's simply sharing information about it.
"Buy him a bag of good peat moss," Cora says. "He grows it for his composting operation. It's the thing he actually needs."
I buy him three bags.
The note I get back from Phineas, written on the back of a mussel observation record, says only:thank you, the east channel has a new school of largemouth bass, thought you should know.
The driftwood arrives on Sandbar Island in the second week of August.
I findit on a low evening tide when Cora and I have paddled out to the sandbar for no particular reason except that it's the kind of evening that asks for it. Warm and slow, the lake flat calm, the sandbar accessible and low, its pale sandy expanse catching the last of the sun while the shadows of the mainland pines stretch long across the water.
The driftwood is ash, pale grey, water-smoothed, with the particular quality of wood that's been in the lake long enough to become something other than what it was.
It's roughly the right size. Two feet long, six inches wide, the grain running clean and clear beneath the weathering.
I pick it up and carry it back to the mainland and put it in the equipment shed.
I spend the next three evenings at the workbench after the tours are done, when Cora is closing up the Snack Hut or running her after-dark lake conversations with whoever the lake is talking to that evening.
I have a set of carving tools that live in the shed's lower drawer. I brought them from Scotland. They're old tools, well-used, comfortable in the hand.
I carveSIRENA & CO.in a typeface I've been developing in my notebook. Clean letters with just a suggestion of wave in the horizontal strokes, the kind of lettering that reads as professional at a distance and shows its handmade quality up close.
I sand it. I treat it with linseed oil to protect against the lake humidity and the morning mist and all the weather that a lakeside sign will face.
On the morning I finish it, I carry it to the Snack Hut and set it on the counter.
Cora comes in from the dock, her black hair in its working braid, her green San Pedro shirt salt-dampened at the hem from the early wade she does to check the shallows. She's carrying a dive log and a travel mug and the slightly distracted expression of someone running the morning's logistics in her head.
She looks at the sign.
She stops.
She doesn't say anything for a moment.
"Sirena & Co." she reads, quietly.
"From the driftwood on the sandbar. The grain was good."
She runs her thumb along the lettering. The wave in the horizontals. The ash grain running below the carved lines like water below the surface of a calm day.
"It's beautiful," she says.
Something in me settles.
"Where do you want it?" I ask.
She looks at it for another moment. Then she picks up the black marker that lives on the Snack Hut counter beside the specials board, and she writes, in her own handwriting, in the space below my lettering:Selkie-in-Training.
She holds the sign up.
"Front of the hut," she says. "Above the serving window. Where everyone coming down the shore path sees it first."
I'm balancingon the short ladder with the sign and the bracket hardware. Cora is below me on the dock, reading the level and telling me when I have it straight, which I don't quite achieve on the first two attempts because the fascia board is slightly warped from an old storm.
"Left," she says.