Lionel didn't swing the tiller. He examined the grain of wood in its handle. "You can talk to Sandra," he said.
"Sandra's busy," Boo Boo said. "Anyway, I don't want to talk to Sandra, I want to talk to you. I wanna come down in your boat and talk to you."
"You can talk from there."
"What?"
"You can talk from there."
"No, I can't. It's too big a distance. I have to get up close."
Lionel swung the tiller. "Nobody can come in," he said.
"What?"
"Nobody can come in."
"Well, will you tell me from there why you're running away?" Boo Boo asked. "After you promised me you were all through?"
A pair of underwater goggles lay on the deck of the dinghy, near the stem seat. For answer, Lionel secured the headstrap of the goggles between the big and second toes of his right foot, and, with a deft, brief, leg action, flipped the goggles overboard. They sank at once.
"That's nice. That's constructive," said Boo Boo. "Those belong to your Uncle Webb. Oh, he'll be so delighted." She dragged on her cigarette. "They once belonged to your Uncle Seymour."
"I don't care."
"I see that. I see you don't," Boo Boo said. Her cigarette was angled peculiarly between her fingers; it burned dangerously close to one of her knuckle grooves. Suddenly feeling the heat, she let the cigarette drop to the surface of the lake. Then she took out something from one of her side pockets. It was a package, about the size of a deck of cards, wrapped in white paper and tied with green ribbon. "This is a key chain," she said, feeling the boy's eyes look up at her. "Just like Daddy's. But with a lot more keys on it than Daddy's has. This one has ten keys."
Lionel leaned forward in his seat, letting go the tiller. He held out his hands in catching position. "Throw it?" he said. "Please?"
"Let's keep our seats a minute, Sunshine. I have a little thinking to do. I should throw this key chain in the lake."
Lionel stared up at her with his mouth open. He closed his mouth. "It's mine," he said on a diminishing note of justice.
Boo Boo, looking down at him, shrugged. "I don't care."
Lionel slowly sat back in his seat, watching his mother, and reached behind him for the tiller. His eyes reflected pure perception, as his mother had known they would.
"Here." Boo Boo tossed the package down to him. It landed squarely on his lap. He looked at it in his lap, picked it off, looked at it in his hand, and flicked it-- sidearm- into the lake. He then immediately looked up at Boo Boo, his eyes filled not with defiance but tears. In another instant, his mouth was distorted into a horizontal figure-8, and he was crying mightily.
Boo Boo got to her feet, gingerly, like someone whose foot has gone to sleep in theatre, and lowered herself into the dinghy. In a moment, she was in the stern seat, with the pilot on her lap, and she was rocking him and kissing the back of his neck and giving out certain information: "Sailors don't cry, baby. Sailors never cry. Only when their ships go down. Or when they're shipwrecked, on rafts and all, with nothing to drink except- "