Twenty-One Mile Swim Read Free

that. For weeks he has been talking aboutit.”
    “Yes, but —”
    “I saw an advertisement in this morning’s paper,” interrupted his father. “The boat is for sale for seventy-five dollars.”
    “Seventy-five dollars?” Joey echoed. “It can’t be too big at that price.”
    “It’s big enough for what I want,” said his father. “It’s ten feet long. The oars are included in the price.”
    Joey smiled. The boat was less than half the length of Ross Cato’s sailboat. But, as his father had said, it was big enough
     for what he wanted.
    “Have you called the person?”
    “Yes. I said I’d be coming over sometime this afternoon to see it.”
    “Okay. Let’s go.”
    They drove to the opposite side of the lake where the seller of the rowboat lived in a small home with a dock leading some
     fifteen feet out into the water. A sixteen-foot Chris Craft outboard, resting in a hoist near it, captured Joey’s eye.
    “That’s what we ought to have, Dad,” he said.
    “Maybe someday,” said his father, hopefully. “Today, though, we’ll settle for a little rowboat.”
    It was an old one. How old Joey couldn’t guess. But the paint on it was peeling and the sides were rough from a lot of use.
    “I’m sorry,” said his father to the man selling the boat. “It looks pretty old. I don’t think it’s worth seventy-five dollars.”
    “How about seventy?”
    “Make it sixty,” said Joey’s father.
    “You play a hard bargain,” said the man. He was tall, gnarled looking, and in his sixties.
    “Take it or leave it,” said Joey’s father with finality.
    “Okay, I’ll take it,” the man said drily.
    “Thank you,” said Joey’s father and wrote out a check.
    They were able to tie the boat on the roof of the car, and then they drove home and parked alongside a gray two-door Ford
     parked in the driveway.
    “Aunt Liza’s here,” observed Joey.
    “I see,” said his father. “And I can already tell you almost everything she has told your mother about my buying a boat.”
    “Why? Doesn’t she like boats?”
    “She likes nothing to do with water,” said his father, turning off the ignition. “Ever since her boy Janos drowned, just thinking
     about water scares her to death.”
    Joey wondered what she would have thought if she had seen him riding in the sailboat, especially during those moments when
     it had heeled at such a precarious angle that it seemed it might tip over.
    They got out of the car as the other children came running out of the house. Joey and his father took the boat off the roof
     and, with the other children’s help, carried it down to the lake.
    “Where you going to keep it, Daddy?” asked Gabor.
    “When it’s not in use, on shore. Right here, far enough from the water so that the waves will not get to it and maybe work
     the boat down into the lake. Anyway, it will be tied so it won’t get away.”
    Gabor put an arm around his father’s waist and hugged him. Then his father picked him up, and Gabor gave him a kiss on his
     cheeks.
    “I love you, Daddy,” he said.
    “And I love you, Gabor,” said his father.
    “Oh, boy,” said Joey, grinning. “You know what
that
was for, don’t you?”
    They returned to the house and found Aunt Liza’s reception just as lukewarm as Joey expected it to be. She was his father’s
     sister, a dark-haired, plump woman in her early forties, who, like her brother, had been born in Hungary and immigrated to
     the United States before she was in her teens.
    “You must be crazy, Gabor,” she exclaimed, talking to him in Hungarian. “After what happened to Janos, I thought you would
     think twice before you bought this place by the lake. Now you go and purchase a boat. Wasn’t Janos’s drowning lesson enough?”
    “Accidents can happen no matter what you do,” Joey’s father replied tersely.
    “But you need not put yourself in a placewhere you know it could unexpectedly happen,” she came back at him. “Janos was a good