Bob stopped one morning at Wiggins Boat Yard and Marina in Winter Haven, where Sarah had bought Eddie’s boat, and bought four large, square, unsinkable cushions, rust-colored, to match the boat, a Regal Empress 190XL, a twenty-foot-long, arrow-shaped speedboat with a 150-horsepower Johnson motor and a top speed of over forty-five miles per hour. Bob lugged the set of cushions in a large, gift-wrapped box from the car out to the terrace behind the clubhouse and then across the rolling lawns to the picnic grounds by the shore, where Sarah had arranged to have sandwiches, beer for the adults and lemonade for the kids, birthday cake and ice cream sent down from the clubhouse, and where Eddie, who had received his gift earlier that morning and had been playing with it ever since, had tied his new boat. When Bob saw the vehicle sitting low and sleek in the water, saw its abundance of chrome and curved glass and glistening deck, saw the snug interior fitted out like a sports car, he set the box of cushions on the ground by the picnic table and stood awkwardly in front of it, as if to hide it from sight, and wished he had bought something like a Swiss army knife instead.
Later, after eating the sandwiches and drinking several Heinekens, and after Eddie had blown out the candles on his cake (eleven of them, one for each three years, Sarah explained), Elaine presented the box to him, with her apologies. “It’s not much, Eddie,” she said, lifting it with difficulty to the front of her huge belly and passing it over the table to him.
Bob looked out at the lake and let his gaze fall on the new boat tied to the dock, where it moved on the rippling water like a thoroughbred racehorse trembling in a shifting breeze.
Eddie tore open the box like a child, then beamed happily at the sight of the cushions inside. “Hey! Thanks, Elaine! Bob! Thanks a lot. This’s great. Look, honey,
“Right. Perfect.”
Now, as if to atone for his feeble gift, Bob agrees to water-ski behind Eddie’s new boat, while his wife and sister-in-law watch from the shore and his daughters and niece, hugged by life vests and seated on the new cushions, watch from the boat. He’s never skied on water before; in fact, he’s never skied on any kind of surface, despite having been raised where people drive from cities hundreds of miles away just so they can spend a few hours careening down mountains on slats strapped to their feet.
With the motor burbling and spitting behind the boat, Eddie looks back at Bob and asks if he’s ready. Sitting next to her father in the cockpit, Jessica, looking sadly like a plucked chicken in her purple tank suit, seems profoundly bored. Emma stares at the gauges on the glittering dashboard in front of her, while Ruthie examines the tow rope where it’s clipped to the swivel at the stern, follows its coiled, half-submerged length to the dock, fifteen feet away, where it’s attached to a short bar that her father, grim-faced, extends chest-high in front of him and clings to with both hands.
“Be careful, Daddy,” Ruthie says.
Eddie laughs and revs the motor. Emma delightedly follows the needle on the tachometer with her index finger, and Jessica peers off to her right, as if at a photographer specializing in preadolescent girls. She skied first, expertly circling the lake twice, then on the second pass letting go of the rope twenty or thirty feet from the landing dock and sinking slowly into the water, rising again and languidly floating the skis to shore ahead of her. She had looked good to Bob out there, swooping from one side of the wake to the other, riding over the waves and sending a high, white fantail behind her. It looked easy.
Eddie agreed. “But not as easy as it looks,” he warned. “Don’t get pissed if you fuck it up at first.” He offered some basic instruction, assured Bob that he’d start off slowly and told him to be sure to let go of the tow rope when he went down; he’d come back and pick him up right away.
“What do you mean, ‘when’?
“Yeah, sure,” Eddie said, grinning.
The skis feel comfortable to him, like rubber slippers. He nods to Eddie that he’s ready and lifts the rope from the water, flicking it like reins on a horse.
Eddie guns the motor, the stern squats and the bow lifts, and the boat leaps forward, instantly straightening the rope, yanking Bob from the dock into the water. He sinks like a stone, then suddenly rises, standing, the skis rushing over the skin of the lake, and he’s doing it, he’s water-skiing! Eddie, glancing back, grins and raises his fist and cheers. Ruthie claps her hands with joy, and Emma follows, and even Jessica seems pleased.
