Page 27 of Except Emerson (Detroit ABCs #7)

“This a regatta and Levi is rowing in it,” Ava explained. “For the past year or so, he’s been doing this crew stuff but he didn’t tell anyone. I found out.”

Having heard from her brother about some of the things she’d done to keep track of her younger siblings, I wondered far how she’d gone to accomplish that.

“He rows these boats?” I asked. “He never said anything to me, either.” Although, didn’t these people practice very, very early in the morning?

We’d had a team at college and I remembered them coming into the cafeteria after having been out for hours already, and they’d eaten enough that I was afraid that there would be a food shortage.

Levi was often up early, very early, as I knew by the timestamps on his texts.

Then I had another thought, and I stopped walking. “Does he know that we’re here?” I asked.

“No, it’s another surprise!” Everly said, and she and her mom looked thrilled by that, too.

I didn’t feel the same way. “If he wanted to keep this a secret, we should respect that.” Everly’s face started to fall, and I felt bad. “I’m sorry, but—”

“You’re probably right. I’ll text him now to let him know,” Ava answered.

“I don’t think he’ll care, because Levi doesn’t usually get too worked up about anything, but if he does…

I don’t think he will,” she assured her daughter.

She did her trick of whipping out her phone and typing with one hand, and somehow (at the same time), she applied lip gloss and brushed her daughter’s hair.

We continued to watch the various groups of men and women walk around with big boats and oars, saying “heads up” and swinging them in a way that I was mindful of potential decapitation.

After a few minutes, she looked at her phone again and nodded.

“He says that I’m a pain in the butt, but he’s ok with us watching him row. ”

“I bet he didn’t say butt,” Everly whispered to me, and her mom pretended not to hear that. We carried the chairs over to where Ava had decided would be the perfect spot, and then she supervised us setting them up, putting on the hats she’d brought for all three of us, and applying sunscreen.

“She holds Elliott down with her knee and gets him so greasy,” Everly told me, and Ava said that she had to do what was necessary because she was serious about sun protection.

She was also serious about seeing these races.

It turned out that the bag we’d carried had been exceptionally heavy not only due to the lotion and the hats, but also because Ava had packed two pairs of binoculars and a monocular.

Everly took that for her use. “I used to want to be a pirate,” she confessed, and I said a lot of that lifestyle appealed to me, too. The tote bag also contained a small cooler with snacks, three water bottles, a portable charger, a sun umbrella, books for Everly, and a petite bullhorn.

“I really want him to hear us cheering,” Ava explained.

“She’s so loud. You should hear her when I play basketball,” her daughter said.

“That’s lucky,” I answered. “How nice for you.” She smiled at her mom, and they looked exactly alike.

How lucky that was, too—I looked nothing like my own mother, and she had certainly never come to any of my races to cheer when I’d been on the ski team.

Given my skill level, there hadn’t been a lot to cheer, of course.

I had no idea what was happening on the water, but an older couple sat near us and they were very knowledgeable and happy to answer all our questions.

The woman also told me about some problems that they were having with their daughter, a woman in her thirties who was getting a divorce and acting pretty wild.

I listened to quite a long story about that.

I also had my phone open to search for more information about rowing, and Everly and I listened as it read the answers to our questions aloud.

We learned from the online schedule of events that Levi was rowing in an eight, and we learned from our seatmates that meant eight guys and a coxswain in the boat together.

They rowed backwards, so the coxswain directed things and Levi was in the third seat, which meant he was part of the “bow four.”

Several races went by on the river, and Ava’s various viewing instruments helped us watch. Unfortunately, we only got to see parts of them since they started far upriver and then ended past where we sat. We weren’t able to get a clear idea of who crossed over the finish line first.

“When they show skiing on TV, the camera moves down the course and that makes it more exciting,” I mentioned to Ava.

“Yeah, this is a little difficult…oh!” She was checking her phone again. “Levi’s race just started!”

We all immediately stood up from our chairs and strained to see the boats coming.

At first, all I could spot was vague movement, and then I got a glimpse of yellow, his team’s color.

“That’s them! That’s them!” I yelped, and everything got a lot more exciting.

Everly and Ava took turns hollering through their bullhorn and I was yelling, too, “Go Levi! Row! Row!” They seemed to be doing ok, not in the lead, but we couldn’t have cared less.

I realized that I’d been jumping up and down just like Everly, because I felt it in my hip, and I was breathless by the time a horn sounded a few times and the rowers relaxed and drifted a little.

“Did they win? Did they win?” Everly kept asking, and I said I didn’t think so but that her uncle had been amazing.

“He’s the best one,” she agreed, and I had to think that was true despite some of the things we’d read about the placement of rowers in their boats and how their seat numbers might have indicated skill level.

He was obviously the sweetest, which I witnessed again when he found us a little later and his niece ran and leaped on him.

He swung her around and they hugged before he put her down. “Surprise! You’re here,” he told her, but he was laughing.

“I want to row like you,” she told him.

“Me too,” Ava said. “Can I be just like you, Levi?”

“No, you’re not cute enough,” he told her, and put her briefly into a headlock before she said he was hurting her shoulder and hit him in the stomach.

As an only child, I watched in amazement but Everly seemed unfazed, and Ava whipped out the brush and repaired the damage that her brother had inflicted on her hair.

“You came, too,” he said to me, and to my surprise, he hugged me as well. I was pressed up against the t-shirt he’d put on over his funny, tight uniform, but it was over too quickly for me to put my arms around him.

“You rowed excellently,” I told him, and he laughed.

“Could you see that from here?”

“We have binoculars,” Everly explained, and displayed her pirate spyglass.

“You came prepared,” he said to his sister. “I expect no less.”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone that you were doing this?” I asked, and he shook his head.

“I don’t know. How about you three wait for me to put on shorts, and then we go eat? Are you hungry?” he asked his niece.

She was, despite the snacks she’d taken from the expertly packed cooler.

First, Levi had to do something to his boat which involved his crew working together to put it on a tall trailer.

While we waited, we watched more of the competition, but it wasn’t nearly as exciting as when he’d been on the river.

Everly, Ava, and I were in complete agreement on that.

They left for the restaurant in their car, but I waited to go with Levi in his.

When he came to meet me, now more covered up, I couldn’t seem to stop talking about his race and asking questions, too, about how he rowed, about the boat, and about the peculiar uniform they all wore that was extremely flattering on him. Extremely.

“I had so much fun,” I kept saying, and he looked at me and laughed.

“Did you?” He put his arm over my shoulders. “I should have told you sooner.”

“You told me about your book, and I didn’t say anything to anyone else about it. Even when Ava questions me about you, I keep everything to myself,” I pointed out.

“And I’m familiar with how she questions. It’s rough,” he said, which I’d learned was true. “I don’t know why I didn’t tell you. I guess because I was bad at it and learning, and then it felt like another way that I was wasting time.”

“But it’s so good for you,” I protested. “And I saw you talking to everyone, so it’s also an effective way to form relationship bonds and make friends.”

“Maybe you could try it. You could work out on an erg, a rowing machine, to see if it hurts.”

“Maybe,” I said. I didn’t want to immediately shoot him down, but I’d seen the way their hips moved as they pulled their oars and I had my doubts. “Why did you worry?”

“Huh?” He opened the car door for me.

“Why did you worry that I might consider rowing to be a waste of time? I don’t,” I added. “What would that matter, though?”

Levi got in the car and looked at me. “Because I care what you think.”

“What?”

“Why do you sound so shocked?” he asked me. “I care about your opinions. Why do you look so damn surprised?”

“I just never thought…I didn’t imagine…” I stopped and regrouped. “You were worried that I would think less of you .”

“Yeah, that sums it up. I thought you’d wonder why I was spending so much time sitting in a boat rather than putting my ass in a desk chair, doing the productive things that you like.”

“I’m not always productive. Yesterday, I took a break at noon and watched Woman in the Dark and The Thin Man , a Dashiell Hammett double-header.”

“But you made it up by working late. I know you did,” he told me. “You don’t cut yourself many breaks.” He started the car but we didn’t go yet.

“Well…” That might have been true. “Well, the only reason I worried about you being productive was because when we met, you seemed to feel very unhappy with yourself.”

“Did I?”