Chapter Seventeen
It’s a dim morning in the forest, aspen leaves rattling and twisting in the wind. The horizon’s turned a smooth, uniform battleship gray, the color of weather that’s here to do damage. Every now and then, the warm breeze has a cool bite to it, a lazy little threat that says Pay attention .
We should have been here an hour ago.
Lyle and I unlash the boats at the put-in spot for Slip Lyle’s cellophane “fire” was no match for Mother Nature’s water.
After dinner, Jasvinder volunteered to dry everyone’s clothes at the twenty-four-hour Laundromat in Pendleton.
People almost cried, they were so happy to be getting clothing that isn’t permanently damp.
Lori handed over a garbage bag of stuff while dressed only in a towel, much to Mitch’s dismay.
After that, there was nothing for the guests to do but climb into bed and make the most of the solar lights, which hadn’t recharged well under the dark afternoon skies.
The silver lining in the crappy-ass weather: Lyle and I finished evening chores an hour early.
We played Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock for who had to go to the breezeway and hang up the last of our soaking clothes after chores.
I won, so I’m waiting for him in the tent, wearing my driest wet T-shirt.
Fucking Anal Fisher. Liz and I have a long-standing name game with people we hate, but never have I felt the rightness of one of our revenge nicknames with this intensity.
I loathe him and Renee Garner and his gang of jerks, hogging the rapids shamelessly at Slip & Slide, having the loudest possible fun.
Even Renee looked uncomfortable with how long Fisher forced us to wait as they set off down the tongue one boat at a time, meandering from eddy to eddy with no regard for courtesy.
We sang songs and played bumper boats, but games get old fast when you’re parked above the rapids, going nowhere. Even faster when the light, indecisive cloud cover gets its act together and starts seriously drilling down rain like it could do this all day.
Brent started commenting about how the Love Boat was supposed to be original, but Fisher’s group seemed to be doing the exact same thing in the exact same place as us.
I wanted to dunk him for being a jackass and dunk him again for being right.
I struggled to smile through the acid in my stomach as Fisher made a mockery of our originality—the one thing Lyle and I were banking on to save this company.
When the tent flap finally unzips to reveal a dripping Lyle, our lamp is beginning to waver.
“We have a lot to talk about,” I say.
In reply, he strips off his T-shirt, holds it outside, and wrings a waterfall from it before tossing it over one of the ropes under the rain fly.
He steps inside, doing a hell of an impression of a Viking fresh from a character-building dip in the North Sea, frigid water dripping from his hair and beard.