On the table was a platter of fish caught from the reservoir that morning, a tomato salad harvested from the garden thirty feet away, and a bowl of something Josephine had never heard of before.

“Do you like the bulgur, Pheeney?” Marilynn, Josephine’s sister, held the bowl out to her.

“Where do you find this kind of thing?” Josephine nodded for more. Marilynn scooped a small mound for Josephine and scraped the last grains onto her husband’s plate. It was the hottest day of the summer and Josephine and her son, Ben, were visiting the Marilynn and Lawrence Loch lake house. Marilynn and Lawrence’s three sons had caught the fish that morning, then returned to the house in Minot before Josephine and Ben arrived.

“Bulgur’s one of the most important ancient grains,” Dr. Lawrence Loch said, expertly cutting past the flesh of a tomato. He was a heart surgeon: Doc Loch, people called him, even the guys they hired last summer to fix their porch. “It’s been around this whole time.” He winked at Ben, who missed it, looking at his plate.

This was Josephine’s first time seeing Lawrence after finding out he’d had an affair. He didn’t know she knew, and Marilynn didn’t know she hadn’t been surprised. Josephine could never trust the kind of man who, when Josephine and Marilynn’s mother exclaimed at family dinners We need surgeon’s hands!, took the knife out of his eighty-five-year-old father-in-law’s struggling hands to cut into a roast.

“Everyone have more, leftovers are bad luck,” Marilynn said.

“I always thought they were good luck since it means you don’t have to cook the next day,” Josephine said.

“We usually don’t have leftovers with Mare’s cooking,” Lawrence said. He pinched his wife’s elbow then served himself more tomatoes. Josephine had been watching him pinch Marilyn’s elbow for almost fifteen years and it still made her want to cough. “More tomatoes, Bennie?”

“Ben doesn’t like tomatoes,” Josephine said, immediately wishing she’d let him answer for himself.

Ben chewed on his lip as if thinking hard about the answer. Some people thought he was slow, Josephine knew, but she was starting to see it from his point of view, that everyone else was too fast. So much of his life was spent like this moment around the table, surrounded by adults staring at him, waiting.

“Is that true, Bennie? I don’t believe it.” Lawrence lifted a large scoop of bright red pyramids gleaming in oil and studded with herbs. “These are garden tomatoes, a whole other food.” Red tumbled onto Ben’s plate. He lifted a red pyramid into his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and avoided everyone’s eyes.

“Josephine, more fish?” Lawrence put down the bowl and picked up the platter. “The boys are getting too good at this,” Lawrence said, a joke he’d already made when Marilynn first put the fish on the table. He put a small piece on her plate before she could answer.

“Too bad we missed them,” Josephine said.

“They wanted to stay,” Marilynn said quickly, “But LJ has pre-season practice.”

Josephine had never been close with Marilynn’s sons, who were now between fifteen and nineteen years old. For twelve years, she’d pinned them to the day she told Marilynn she was pregnant. She had gone to their place in Minot when she knew Lawrence was at work; the boys were all under five, crawling over furniture and up walls, slapping their palms on her thighs, hiding and telling her to find them then whining that she wasn’t doing it right. She broke down at the first bite into a homemade lemon bar.

Who is he? Marilynn had said, a toy truck being driven up her leg.

He was the guy who flirted with Josephine when she brought their parents’ station wagon in for an oil change, then the guy who crossed the whole floor of Maynard’s to reach her in the accessories department and invite her to a party. She’d never done anything like that and the next weekend she heard from one of his friends that he’d been so drunk he couldn’t tell a pike from a perch, his words. When Josephine found out she was pregnant, she went to the garage. One guy said he moved to Denver and another guy said Des Moines.

“LJ started this year,” Lawrence said.

“Remember what Kennedy did with leftovers?” Josephine said, looking at her sister, unable to hear, again, about her oldest nephew’s athletic accomplishments. “Other people’s?”

“Kennedy?” Marilynn, reaching for something on the table and found only her own napkin, which she opened. “Pheeney what in the world made you think of him?” She folded the napkin into a tight square.

“Kennedy the president?” Lawrence sipped from a glass of water, no ice.

“No,” Marilynn smiled at her husband as if he’d made a joke. “One of Pheeney’s boyfriends from high school. I don’t remember much about him, actually,” Marilynn said, then turned to Ben. “What is your favorite food, Bennie?” Marilynn put the folded napkin on the table and straightened her back, giving his answer her full attention.

Kennedy was Marilynn’s boyfriend, not Josephine’s; Josephine never had a boyfriend in high school.

Giving up on Benjamin’s answer, Lawrence said, “What did Kennedy do with leftovers?”

“He used to grab other people’s food at the diner,” Josephine said. “After they left, if they didn’t eat it all. He called it rescuing.”

Josephine remembered squeezing into the booth, always pushed in the corner, her bladder always full, sometimes sitting on her hands so that she could pretend to be like the other girls and not want any of the leftover fries or untouched half of a BLT.

“You were at diners with boyfriends in high school?” Lawrence whistled. “The wild one.”

“Apparently,” Josephine said. The three adults watched Lawrence’s joke condense over the head of Ben, Josephine’s fatherless child.

Ben finished his tomatoes.

“Now there’s a smooth plate!” Lawrence said. “Garden tomatoes are a whole different food, especially when Mare gets a hold of them. Jo, you should get her recipe.”

“Great idea,” Josephine said. She already had the recipe, crammed into the box of Mare’s other recipes that their mother kept giving her, hand-copied in tight cursive.

Marilynn busily gathered the empty platter and bowls.

“Bennie, have you ever seen a real Indian arrowhead?” Lawrence put down his knife and fork.

Ben shook his head.

“Do you know how the Indians made them?”

Ben looked at his mom.

“Come on, I’ll show ya!” Lawrence left his plate on the table and Ben did the same.

“Benjamin, are you forgetting something?” Josephine said.

“Thank you,” he said, and made to carry his plate back to the sink.

“That’s okay, Bennie, you go ahead with Uncle Lawrence.” Marilynn took his plate and put it on top of her husband’s.

“That was delicious, Mare,” Lawrence said, pinching her elbow again. Marilynn never told Josephine the details about the affair; she was too protective of boys and grown men, especially when they didn’t deserve it.

Benjamin followed Lawrence out to the shed in the back, which was dark and cool and full of tools and arrowheads and other manly things that Benjamin didn’t see anywhere else. The screen door slammed and rattled.

“I don’t know when Lawrence is going to fix that door,” Marilynn said, waving dismissively. “Bennie’s so sweet.” She left the plates by the sink and sat where Lawrence had been, in a large chair with cushioned arms. “How’s he doing?”

Josephine couldn’t see anyone in the family without them asking about Benjamin as if he were terminally ill.

“He’s doing great,” Josephine said. “Since when was Kennedy my ex?”

Marilynn smiled while looking up at the ceiling. She could say anything while smiling, which confused some people and set others at ease.

“Doesn’t it seem like a strange time to bring up that kind of thing?” She looked at Josephine, still smiling that smile that she never let slip.

Marilynn could have had any bachelor in North Dakota and probably South Dakota, too, if she’d ever gone there. Josephine made the mistake last month of going to her twentieth high school reunion. Almost everyone who’d flown in from wherever they’d settled asked about her sister. Marilynn was one year above and legendary with the girls—the one who swam in the lake at night, the one who wasn’t scared of bright colors or singing in public, the one who married a surgeon!

“A lot of people asked about you at the reunion.” No one there would have been surprised that Marilynn was still thin and did not have a single gray hair despite raising three boys. They were born seventeen months apart, Marilynn first, but starting at twenty-five everyone thought Josephine was the older one. She had put on the weight and taken the gray hairs and then the wrinkles for the both of them. And she only had one child, a boy younger than all of Marilynn’s.

“Are you glad that you went?”

The reunion had taken place the weekend after Marilynn found out about the affair. Marilynn had stayed at Josephine’s “to watch Ben” and asked Josephine to tell people that she had the flu. Josephine knew that if she had gone, everyone would have seen the same resting smile that she had in high school; no one would have noticed that there was something far away about her, more space between the smile and what it came from.

Lawrence’s dry explanation of geological pressures and the possibilities of arrowheads sifted through the screen door.

“You okay?” Josephine said.

Marilynn stood up and cleared more plates. “We’re working through it.”

That was their mother’s line, a confidence that fueled their family when their car broke down and gave them something to hold onto when their youngest sibling dropped out of high school.

“We’re not telling anyone,” Marilynn said. “He doesn’t know you know.”

“I know,” Josephine said.

Marilynn married Lawrence when she was nineteen and was pregnant a year later. Lawrence was already done with medical school and working in surgery, so Marilynn didn’t need to finish college. Marilynn and Josephine were the only two people in the world who knew that Marilynn was pregnant at eighteen before meeting Lawrence, until Josephine drove her to the city and they both lost their allowance savings.

“But really, do you remember how Kennedy did that?” Josephine followed Marilynn to the kitchen. Marilynn had loved Kennedy in ways she could never love Doc Loch. Josephine used to cover for her when they babysat their siblings and Marilynn snuck out to be with Kennedy. She used to feel her way through the kitchen in the dark after their parents went to bed to unlock the door for her. They all called him Kennedy even though that wasn't his first name or his last.

“I really don’t. How’s work? Don’t, sit, I’ll get those.”

Josephine ignored her and scrubbed at plates. Marilynn stood next to her to dry. “Work’s work,” Josephine said. She worked at the welcome desk in the hospital where their father ended his career in family medicine. She had volunteered there as a candy striper in high school and everyone used to joke that she would take her father’s place when he retired. She hadn’t heard that one in a decade.

“Anything new at the hospital?” Marilynn said.

Right now Denton the mail guy would be coming with a bundle of cards and notices to be delivered to patients. It had taken them the past year to move from acknowledging each other to chatting, sometimes him leaning over the counter like they were at a diner. She didn’t tell him she was taking a few days off. It would give them something to talk about when she got back.

“Same as same,” Josephine said: this one, a line of their father’s, which made Marilynn smile.

Josephine picked up a napkin ring from a contraption specifically designed for stacking napkin rings. She tried to imagine spending money on that kind of thing. The heavy plates and mugs in calming earth tones, the tidy spice rack holding glass jars of the same brand, none of them expired, the commissioned painting in the laundry room of the three Loch boys sitting on a towel in front of the reservoir outside of the Loch lake cabin, tan and happy, the view their parents might have seen dozens of summer evenings from the front door, all of these things and so many more used to make Josephine feel like the Loch family was one smooth whole, grown organically without cracks or footholds. But anything that gets its strength from being beautiful is fragile.

“Let’s swim,” Josephine said.

“Now?”

“Why not?”

“Let me go tell Lawrence.”

“So he’ll make us wait an hour? We’ll be quick.”

The sisters came out of their rooms at the same time, Marilynn in a red suit that Josephine had never seen, and Josephine in the same navy blue one she’d had since before Ben was born, stretched to its limits. The red in Marilynn’s matched her cheeks.

They stepped on to the front porch in bare feet, no towels. Marilynn went down the steps and raised her arms to the sky, interlacing her fingers. There was always something exotic about her that made people look.

“Good idea, Pheeney. Can you believe I haven’t gone in the water all summer?”

If Josephine lived by the north side of the reservoir she’d swim every day. The public beach on the south side was always crowded and limited to a small boundary marked by rope and buoys.

They walked to the shore, tapping the silence of the hot afternoon with their barefooted steps. The surface of the water was still and perfect, like the early winter mornings when Josephine left for the hospital before the plows broke the snow apart, and everyone else slept, missing it.

“How can it stay so cold?” Marilynn dipped her toe in the water, laughing. The north side residents had voted on no buoys, no rope, and someone had anchored a wooden dock twenty yards offshore; one of the cabin owners was a lawyer and had made sure there were enough signs indicating swimming for private residents only, covering liability.

“It’ll warm up once we get moving,” Josephine said. The water hardened around her ankles but she pretended not to notice and stepped in up to her thighs.

“Pheeney, how can you stand it?”

It used to be Marilynn who was the first in the water. She was the first to swim under without holding her nose, the first to join the swim team, the first to learn the flip turn, and the only one to get a medal. Only once, Josephine beat Marilynn in an official race. They were in lanes on opposite ends of the pool, but Josephine knew where her older sister was the whole time, saw her smooth-bald capped head with every rotation of her own for breath. Josephine got third and Marilynn got fourth with a 2.4 second difference, and all Marilynn had said was "Those Century High girls are getting fast!" At the next meet, Marilynn got first and Josephine didn’t place at all.

Josephine stared at the water and its quiet dock, trying to remember if the dock was in the painting on the laundry room wall.

“When was the last time you raced?” Josephine said. She felt light and strong, like something was climbing up from in her. Marilynn looked up at the sky, the sun talking to her spread arms. “To the dock, go!”

Josephine dove, a shallow scoop that she wasn’t sure her body could still do. The dock was twenty-five yards away, a distance so short there wouldn’t be time to think only to hear Marilynn scream from the cold and then a splash, always smaller than Josephine’s, and then feel her sister behind her, the familiar heat of her getting closer, a build until they got halfway when Marilynn would push past but the water wrapped Josephine in a whiteness: only flying and floating all at once—

—her hand smacked the raft.

She pulled herself up onto the warm, splintering wood.

“It feels the same!” Josephine laughed and closed her eyes to feel the sun fall through her, pinning her to the wood for three, quiet, warm, moments.

“Marilynn?”

She had won!

She opened her eyes.

No, Marilynn was not in the water at all. Josephine checked the shore for the red, lean shape, but the beach was hard and unbroken like a plate, the water still and firm without give, a smoothness stopping Josephine’s lungs and veins, everything paused in the absence of her sister—

—then two white birds broke the concrete water and turned into hands that fell down around an emerging head.

Marilynn went under again at the same time that Josephine dove from the dock and swam to her, her sister stuck halfway between the dock and the shore. She reached her instantly and put her arm under her chest, kept her head above water, and kicked away from the shore.

“Hands here,” Josephine said, placing Marilynn’s hands on the wood the way she used to put Ben’s on the piano at her parents’ house.

Marilynn could not find her breath. Her hair was darker from being wet, making her look younger but not like her old self: like a younger version of the woman the first Marilynn had accidentally grown into. She was scared.

“I couldn’t do it,” Marilynn said, breathing hard.

“Deep breath,” Josephine said, taking one with her.

If they could grow into the past from this moment back, it would be Josephine tapping on the door after curfew.

Josephine helped Marilynn onto the dock and they both sat with their veiny legs stretched in front of them, looking at the shore. The front door to the Loch lake house opened, and Ben stood on the porch.

“There’s Bennie, do you think he needs something?” Marilynn said, then coughed.

“He’s fine,” Josephine said. Lawrence stepped onto the porch behind Ben, put his hand over his eyes like a visor, and pointed at the dock.

“What if I can’t make it back?” Marilynn said.

Josephine realized she could have pulled Marilynn the other direction, to a bed to lie on, to towels, a doctor, a shore. But it hadn’t been that kind of rescue.