Flat Water Tuesday Read Online Free Page A

in Fenton’s dorms and bring down the cream of the east coast within a few minutes. Maybe those three dorms, each with a service road leading right into the quad, were constructed as they were so you could save the kids if there was a fire, but I doubted it. The guys who built those buildings knew who they were dealing with.
    All that didn’t apply to the captain of the rowing team. Connor lived by himself in the Rowing Cottage. It was the first house you came to when you rowed down the river from the boathouse, a sentry standing on stilts. With its stern white clapboard siding, its dark shutters and brooding, heavily sloped roof, it looked like an island retirement house for a whaling captain, the kind you find outside of Niccalsetti on Lake Erie, for the wives of customers who sent my father pictures of houses they’d seen in Architectural Digest with three-page spreads and titles like “Hideaway in Martha’s Vineyard” or “Nantucket Dreaming.” My father liked having his crew doing the demolition and grunt work on those houses, houses that were meant to be on the ocean but were instead perched on that frozen lakeshore, built by people rich by Niccalsetti standards but not rich enough to get out. My father never kidded himself about those jobs. Most of what he did would never be featured in a magazine and after we had dug the foundations, or ripped the guts out of some ramshackle heap, another company would come in with its own architect to build somebody’s dream home. He would leave his card, CARREY’S JOINERY , and maybe a few pictures of kitchen cupboards he’d built for the few clients who cared about that kind of work, one of them being my mother. Half the cupboards in those pictures were in our kitchen. He would wait for the call that never came from families who didn’t care about wood, people who wanted brushed-steel kitchen appliances, pre-made fiberglass cupboards and granite counters. Day after day we’d load into the truck and drive to the next subcontracted demolition job or the next gutting. Never to build a kitchen or a bookcase. Still, my father refused to call himself a wrecker, or even a builder. Always a joiner, or a cabinetmaker. And no one he hired or begat ever questioned why.

 
    2.
    The Rowing Cottage was built right against the river and there was a sunken dock in front of it for the eight-man shells of long ago, before the school switched to fours. Connor’s father had bunked here thirty years before, and his grandfather and great-grandfather decades before that. He could look at the faded photographs on the walls lining the stairs and see his ancestors’ younger selves looking back at him; three generations of Payne manhood trapped in time. Connor’s great-grandfather, Cyrus Payne, was hardly recognizable as human. His team picture was browned and creased, the names scrawled in purpling ink beneath featureless, sepia bodies standing before the same river we practiced upon.
    If I had been in Connor’s shoes I’d have taken those pictures down and hidden them in the attic crawl space, first thing. You could feel the heavy weight of expectation in them, the uncompromising demand of the past for an undefeated present. In another twenty-five or thirty years, Connor could fully expect to see his own son take his place on that wall. The Payne men all looked out at the world from behind their upturned oars with an identical arrogant gaze, a gaze they’d keep for the people who cleaned their stables, washed their cars and built their vacation homes.
    After that day I never looked at those photos again.
    Upstairs, the landing opened straight into the dilapidated living area. Connor’s blue-and-gray captain’s oar was mounted on pegs above the small bay window that overlooked the river. The sleek, carbon fiber oar looked strangely new in the antique surroundings of the cottage, which were war-room Spartan. The furniture consisted of an ancient couch hemorrhaging stuffing, two scuffed