She made herself look away.
Kyle set the grill lid ajar and turned to them. “I’m going to need at least one story while these cook. Something good.”
Arden tucked her feet up under her on the patio chair. “Oh, I have a Sean story.” She grinned at Maren. “You need to understand something first. Sean had what I can only describe as a gift.”
“A gift? For?”
Arden’s eyes went bright. “For making other people’s terrible ideas sound like good ones. He never had the terrible idea himself. He just…I don’t know, refined it. Improved on it. Added the part that made it spectacularly worse.” Arden shook her head in fond horror. “This was so bad because Bear was involved. He had the terrible idea and the size to execute it without thinking twice. Shane supplied the confidence.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Kyle interrupted with a wink.
Arden snorted and toasted her husband. “So Ben supplied the engineering skills and the voice of reason that no one listened to.”
“Why am I not surprised about that, either?”
“Shush, shush, or I’ll never get to the end of my story.” Arden took a drink. “Elias supplied the snacks, which, as I recall, were those Lunchables thingies. Of course he called them MREs.”
“Sounds about right.” Kyle took a swig of his beer. “How about Waylon?”
“Oh God, Waylon supplied the ‘extraction plan.’” She air-quoted the words. “Waylon had the fastest dirt bike in the county and absolutely no sense of self-preservation. The combination was heart-attack-inducing.”
Maren laughed. “His poor mom. And Sean?”
“Sean was the voice of temptation.” Arden did a low, solemn impression: “Guys, guys, hear me out. What if we—” She broke off, grinning. “And then whatever came next was something that sounded reasonable until suddenly it wasn’t, and by then everyone was already nodding and no one knew exactly when the thing had gone sideways but they were all-in.”
“He sounds like a natural-born operator,” Maren said. “Just like my brothers.”
“He absolutely was. Which, in retrospect, explains a lot about his career choice.” Arden took another sip of her drink. “And the St. Vrain, which was his favorite place on earth and also explains why he became a Swick. Okay, that summer I think Sean was twelve or thirteen, so I was nine or ten. He and the boys had decided they were going to build a raft.”
“Of course they did.” Maren could just picture it.
“A military raft. This was important. Not a fun raft. A raft for a mission.” Arden held up her fingers to count. “Ben had engineered the thing—inner tubes, pallets, and one very old aluminum lawn chair he’d liberated from his garage. He’d also stood right beside the raft they’d just built and listed, very clearly, every single reason it might not work. Then they launched it anyway.”
“And Ben still went along?”
“Ben still went along. He said afterward he just wanted to see if he’d been right. Guess what? He had been right.”
Maren laughed. “That tracks.”
“Sean drew a map of the river full of dotted lines and little X’s for what he called enemy positions, which were, in fact, the rapids and the big rocks in the middle of the river that anyone with any sense would have called obstacles.”
Maren pressed her fist to her mouth. “Oh no.”
“The plan was to float from just off Apple Valley Road all the way to Second Avenue through town. Recon mission. Theywere going to ‘mark the enemy positions’ on the map, which apparently meant throwing rocks at them, which, again, big, dangerous rocks in the river. Fed by snowmelt. In June.”
“Where were you in all this?”
“At home, being an obedient eight-year-old,” Arden said, with such precise innocence that Maren laughed out loud. “I wasn’t recruited as a scout at all.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I watched the whole thing from the riverbank.” Arden shook her head in fond horror. “They launched the raft and it immediately began to spin because Ben had engineered it for buoyancy, not steering. There was a brief debate—you could tell from the arm gestures, since the river drowned out their voices—and Ben’s arm gestures had a distinctI told you soquality even from a distance. Sean produced the map as evidence that steering was someone else’s problem. Then the current caught them good and the debate became irrelevant.”
Maren was already laughing.
“Gabe was the first one in the water because he was in the lawn chair and it slid right off. Shane went in about a second later, though to be fair to Shane, he jumped in voluntarily because he said afterward he wanted to ‘control the situation,’ which I always thought was generous framing.” Arden looked up at the mountain ridgeline, like she was watching it happen all over again on the horizon. “Then Bear and Waylon followed Shane. Elias somehow managed to ride the raft all the way to an eddy near the footbridge before he bailed. By now the rest of them had made it to shore. Elias grabbed the raft and half-dragged it to the riverbank. Sean and Ben stepped off like they’d planned the whole thing. Ben immediately crouched down and started checking what had held and what hadn’t. For next time.”
Maren covered her mouth. “There was a next time?”
