Marissa and I arrived late, just as we always did. To my regular annoyance, and despite my best efforts, Mari couldn't seem to get anywhere on schedule. I thought even our wedding day would be delayed until she showed up right on time with a smile that gently mocked, "told you I'd make it."
This wasn't our wedding, though; this was a vacation. Specifically, a Labor Day weekend spent at our friend's lake house, or, more accurately, his family's lake house. And since it was a vacation, and since only our friends awaited us, and since they'd long since grown resigned to Mari's lack of punctuality, she didn't feel anything like the urgency she had five years before on the day we said, "I do."
Our friends from our college days loitered on the dock, each whiling away the time in their preferred manner. Kyle and Heather, inseparable high school sweethearts still together almost fifteen years after they met, laughed at something as they watched together on a single tablet. Tyler, former college athlete but eternal jock, argued heatedly with his girlfriend of the moment, although I couldn't make out the bone of contention between them. Lakshmi, the brains of our college circle and a literal nuclear physicist, frowned at her phone, body language radiating misery as she jabbed at the touchscreen rapid-fire.
Rounding out the group were two faces, one familiar and one new. The handsome couple leaned in close and smiled as they engaged in quiet conversation, before Blake turned to greet our approach. "Dale! Mari! So glad you could make it!" Mari hugged Blake. "And this..." He gestured, "... is my fiancée, Gina. We're going to announce on Insta this week." The newcomer gave a shy wave.
"Fiancée?" Mari gushed, bringing the dark-haired beauty into a bearhug. "Oh, my God! That's wonderful! I can't believe it!"
That made two of us. The last time we'd gotten together there, three years prior, Blake was just pulling himself out of the wreckage of his disastrous divorce. I couldn't believe that, either. Yeah, he and Jen had partied like mad in college, but we all thought they'd both settled down. She sure as hell had plenty of good reasons to, given her rich, handsome, charming, and funny husband; who would cheat on a guy like Blake? His ex had, though, and it completely shattered the guy.
We all missed the next two theoretically annual trips for unrelated reasons. The first year, Kyle and Heather got COVID. Then, the onset of the war in Ukraine kept Lakshmi from attending; her wife, Olivia, worked in some nebulous department at the Pentagon, and it was all hands on deck. While Liv wasn't part of our core group, Lakshmi was, and she wanted to stay in D.C., too. It sucked, but we all knew the weekend wouldn't be the same without Shmi, so everyone penciled it in for the following year.
Truth be told, I had doubted that we'd all make it this time, either, and I suspected this trip might be our last hurrah. After college, we'd all scattered to the winds. Blake took a cushy position at his father's firm in L.A. and brought Tyler along for the ride, as he had since they were kids. Shmi finished her masters, then moved to D.C. and met her wife. Mari and I migrated to Dallas, where she worked as a nurse, while I found employment at a telecom company. Kyle, after finishing up his J.D., moved back to the Midwest with Heather, where the two of them settled in quite nicely as lawyer and stay-at-home wife.
Adult responsibilities had crowded out free time for all of us, and Kyle and Heather had two young kids on top of that. Add in the kind of drift that almost always occurs after college as people grow into their adult selves, and I'd seen the cracks starting to form when we'd last met three years previous. Shmi and I had shared similar thoughts on late night Discord chats, although Mari told me we were being too pessimistic.
Still, if this would likely be our last weekend together, I wanted to make the most of it. Grabbing Blake's hand in a firm handshake and slapping him on the back, I gave my congratulations.
They certainly were in order, if looks were anything to go by. Gina worked as a model, and she looked it: long legs, slim, great tits, a ready smile, and stunning green eyes. Mari, with her athletic body, red hair, and pale blue eyes, had been one of the hottest girls on campus when she and I started dating, and my wife still turned heads. Gina, though? Gina was sex on a stick.
"I'm the lucky one," she enthused, "and I'm so glad to meet all of you. Blake keeps telling me about his wonderful college friends and how he misses them so much. We're going to have so much fun together this weekend!" For just a moment, while looking at me, I would have sworn she licked her lips as she said this last bit. Then, however, her gaze returned to him, and I chalked it up to my imagination.
Excusing myself as Mari and Gina got to know each other, I made my way to Kyle and Heather. We repeated a variation of the hug/handshake/good-to-see-you dance one performs on reuniting with old friends. The pair could have almost passed for brother and sister, both blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and pale-skinned, and both epitomizing "young Midwestern mom and dad." Heather played further into that stereotype when she immediately opened up the photo app on her tablet to show me page after page of her kids' pics. I oohed and ahhed as appropriate, before extricating myself a few minutes later.
I don't mean to sell them short; I was very fond of Kyle and Heather, both individually and as a couple. However, I also had little in common with them other than our shared pasts, and I didn't want to exhaust my small talk options in the first half hour. I moved on, and they headed towards Mari, Gina, and Blake, all of us promising to catch up more once we reached the lake house.
Tyler and... I'm just going to call her Candy. I know I heard her name, but I can't remember it. She was almost certainly a Candy or a Traci or a Topaz or somesuch; while Tyler didn't have a physical type, he sure as hell had one when it came to their personality, and that type was "bold Comic Sans." Their heated discussion had turned nasty, and I wanted nothing to do with it.
Of all our group, Tyler had changed the least. That's not a compliment; the former linebacker had helped Blake get through middle school intact, back when his family's wealth only invited scorn and wedgies, before he'd come into his good looks and charm. The lunk had earned himself a friend for life, whether he deserved it or not, and he'd been coasting on that association for years.
Tyler and Candy's animated discussion gave me the perfect excuse to slip past them and on toward the main reason--other than Mari's insistence--that I'd agreed to one more year at the lake house. "Hey, nerd."
My adorably tiny friend craned her neck to look up at me, her furrowed brow relaxing as she realized backup had arrived. "Hey, dork." Her arms encircled me in a tight, heartfelt hug. "I would have killed you if you hadn't made it."
"Such love!" Pulling away and looking down, I asked, "Everything okay, Shmi? Where's Liv?"
She tried to smile, but her heart wasn't in it. "Work. Again. I flew in last night, and she was supposed to get here this morning. But with everything going on in the world..." Lakshmi shrugged and waved her phone.
Shmi had a gift for understatement. Every major geopolitical hotspot seemed like it had heated up in the previous few months. With the election only a couple of months away, even North Korea had reentered the conversation, rattling its saber with new ballistic missile tests that lobbed a dummy warhead far enough to upset the talking heads.
"Anyways," she continued, in the clipped Indian accent she'd inherited from her parents, "She's not going to make it but told me to go ahead without her." With a snort, Shmi groused, "Just like her. I'm sure she'd already decided to... Eh, whatever. I'm here now, you're here now. Let's try to have fun."
"Sorry, hon. C'mon, let's go--"
"Dale! Bro!" Fuck. It had spotted me, and here it came. "I want to introduce you to--"
"Why does she have a phone?" Candy squawked. "You said I couldn't have one! Why does she get to have hers and I don't?"
One of the original rules at the lake house was that we were supposed to disconnect: no TVs in the bedrooms, no phones, no laptops. Kyle and Heather would have to leave their tablet in their car before we embarked, too. The lake house had a radio for emergencies, a TV with a Blu-ray player in the living room, and an expensive sound system complete with an impressive vinyl collection, but the point was for us to hang out together without the distractions of the outside world. That had shifted slightly since college--no way would Kyle and Heather have joined us if they couldn't be reached once they had kids--but the spirit of the agreement remained intact.
"Babe, I told you. Shmi does government shit, so she has to have her phone if there's, like, an emergency or something." Candy rolled her eyes and stalked off in a huff. "Sorry, bro. She gets like that sometimes. Eh, whatever. It's awesome you could make it!" The big lug dragged me into a crushing bearhug. That's a pretty impressive feat; I'm not a small guy at just over six foot and around 200 pounds, but he picked me up like I weighed nothing at all. I'd asked him not to, but he never listened. He pretty much never listened to anyone except Blake.
"Put him down, Ty." His best friend's tone sounded a little different than it had back in the day. Before, I remembered a certain resigned amusement, a 'boys will be boys' spirit behind the chiding. Now, though, I heard a bit of an edge there. A tiredness, maybe.
Tyler set me back down with a mumbled, unhappy, "Sorry." That was new, too. The Ty from college, or even the one from three years before, would have obeyed, but his manner would have been, at most, that of a slightly chagrined schoolboy who'd gotten his knuckles rapped with a ruler. This Tyler seemed more like a whipped dog.
Blake slapped him on the shoulder and turned his charm towards me. "No harm done, right?" Tyler seemed mollified when I shrugged, and that was enough for Blake to turn his back on both of us. With his shout of, "Come on, everyone! Time to go!" the assembled throng began moving our luggage to the pontoon boat docked nearest the parking lot.
Blake's grandparents had built the lake house back in the early 70s, the first of a planned luxury resort development. His family had made their money in timber, and the land had originally been slated for harvesting, but the gorgeous clear blue water of the lake and the temperate summer weather made the switch a no-brainer.
Unfortunately for them, the Endangered Species Act passed just after the first spacious house went up, and three nearly extinct birds were found to live in the surrounding forest, putting an end to the planned development. Since then, one had come off the endangered species list and another had gone extinct, but the third stayed firmly in limbo.
The town we parked at, founded decades before the EPA and with a population in the hundreds, had a little more leeway in their observance of the act. Its inhabitants could still fish and boat to a limited extent, and a few of the folks that lived in the town had cabins lining the banks of the lake, but they all reached them by water. The forest had largely reclaimed the logging road that had brought the materials for the first-and-only luxury lake resort home, so Blake's family followed suit, contracting with a local man to ferry their family back and forth to the house, as well as keeping it stocked in the summer months and checking on it during the offseason.
