We find ourselves at “the tip of the thumb in Michigan,” in Greg Schutz’s “You Are the Greatest Lake,” winner of the 2024 Reprint Prize. Our narrator is on a weekend getaway at the tail end of the pandemic with her partner Thom and his daughter Dot, and there seems to be nothing more in the world that she wants than to be let in and accepted by Dot. There’s a balancing act that plays out across this story, as she teeters between overt attempts to connect with Dot and distant admiration. There’s a role she’s trying to play, and she can’t seem to find the right motions, the right words. Schutz’s prose throughout this story is pitch perfect and had us hooked from the first line. —Cole Meyer, Editor-in-Chief
“You Are the Greatest Lake” was first published in Sycamore Review, and will be included in Joyriders, out next month from University of Massachusetts Press.
We’re at the tip of the thumb of Michigan. The sky threatens sun, so Thom’s run to Caseville for groceries. His kayak lies belly-up in the yard. His waders, latex and neoprene, hang in the mudroom, smelling sourly of rubber and sweat and preserving the shape of his legs. In the quiet rental cottage, I put a pitcher of lemonade in the refrigerator to chill. From the back porch, I can see Dot in the bay, practicing the dead-man’s float. Dot is Thom’s daughter, nine years old.
“I love you,” I say.
Distantly, she stirs in the water, as if she’s heard me.
The yard rolls down to the lake, grass giving way to pebbles and shells, pebbles and shells pouring smoothly into the water to form the firm gravel bottom that Thom says draws bass into the bay on cloudy mornings and afternoons. I know nothing about smallmouth bass except what he’s told me: a striped bronze fish, football-shaped, with the slung jaw of a linebacker, that he paddles and wades for, casting. I know that in broken light they rise from the depths to prowl the bay for crayfish and leeches, mayfly larvae and minnows. I know the bay is broad and flat as a pan. A mile out or more, there are shoals where Thom can anchor, slip into the water, and walk. A hundred yards out, where Dot is floating, it’s only three feet deep. Still, I worry. Thom makes allowances for her I could never imagine for a daughter of my own. She’s so small.
“Dot!” I call from the edge of the water. “Hello, Dot?”
Dot lifts her head.
I cup my hands around my mouth. “I made lemonade!”
After a moment, her voice comes back to me: “What?”
“Lemonade! Want some?”
No answer. She may not understand; she may not care. Out in the bay, her body looks exactly like a tiny floating body. I wrap my arms around myself, though it’s late spring—the second plague spring, the world fitfully itself in places, though only in places—and warm. I climb the yard and pour a glass of lemonade. It hasn’t chilled yet.
“Too soon,” I say, just to break the silence. On the porch, I lean against the railing, sipping lukewarm lemonade and watching Dot and waiting for Thom.
* * *
Thom would like to marry me, he thinks. I’d like him to keep thinking this, and eventually to believe it. Of course it’s not so simple. He and his wife are separated, not yet divorced, though proceedings have begun. It’s a process, as I would know. “How do you get over a person hating you?” he asked me once. “Real hate. Like you didn’t know you could make a person feel.”
I told him I didn’t know, and I don’t. I don’t hate my ex-husband, and I hope he doesn’t hate me. We were married for fifteen months, back in law school together—a floating dream, at the end of which we unclasped hands and simply drifted apart. He met the woman he’s living with now, and I met—eventually—Thom. I took Thom from his wife.
Tonight I lie atop the stiff mattress in the cottage’s only bedroom. Dot’s in her sleeping bag on the floor, sweetly snoring. Thom curls like a comma, his hairy back to me. It’s not easy—he’s a tall man—but I do my best to hold him. The back of his neck smells bluely of minerals, like the lake. When he stirs, I run my fingers through his hair.
“You’re a good man,” I whisper, not because I believe it, necessarily—we’re past the point, he and I, of staking such claims—but because I know it’s what he needs to hear.
He’s going to lose custody, an adulterer, left to accept whatever arrangements are offered. This is what he fears. Even now, he sees Dot mostly on weekends. He hasn’t moved in with me, into my bungalow on Hemphill Street in Ypsilanti, where we first fell in love, or into something else first and then into love, but keeps a separate apartment for himself, for Dot, for the impression it offers to the world—and perhaps also to himself—that he has not chosen for me but simply against the marriage, that throughout the pandemic he has remained committed to his wife and daughter, in a way, podded with them, as people are calling it, shielding them from disease vectors such as strange women. Thom and I are both vaccinated at last. Still, this trip of ours, together with Dot, as the first vacation rentals begin to reopen, feels somehow as secretive, as full of the potential for scandal and hurt, as anything we’ve ever done.
Thom leans his dreaming body into mine. I am his one regret.
I practice the ugly side of estate law, the parts that get gnashed out in court. It’s not so different from divorce, in a way. A central loss—of love, of a loved one—unglues a family, leaving each member to claw for advantage. They take sides, cementing fierce new loyalties. I mouth Dot’s name into the back of Thom’s neck. It forms an ellipsis: Dot, Dot, Dot. Below the bed, she growls sleep at the ceiling. I close my eyes and follow her down, arms open, sinking.
* * *
Near shore, the bay is the color of the pines it reflects. The open water is the depthless gray of the overcast sky. Thom rises before dawn. By the time I pour my half of the coffee, he’s already stepped into his waders, into the kayak, into the water. I can spot him only by the distant hint of patterned motion against the irregular surface of the bay as he casts. There’s no opposite shore here and, for a little while this morning, not even a horizon. Sky and water merge. When I stare too long at the place they should meet, I begin to feel ill. We are at the edge of something vast.
Dot pads into the kitchen, knuckling an eye.
“Good morning,” I say.
She doesn’t look at me. “Morning.”
“Like some breakfast?”
“Huh.” She pulls a chair out from the table.
“Would you like cereal? Maybe an Eggo?”
Dot folds her arms atop the table and lays her head down, concealing her face. Her downy hair will soon darken; Thom and his wife are both brunettes. But her scalp is softly, pinkly visible through her hair, and I can’t help but hope this never changes. My ex-husband and I didn’t have any children. I never thought I wanted any.
“Eggo,” she mutters at last.
So I place a frozen waffle in the toaster, heat the bottle of syrup in the microwave, spread a pat of margarine once the toaster spits the waffle, douse everything in the warmed syrup, and set the plate in front of her, along with a glass of milk.
“Fork,” Dot says.
I bring her a fork.
“You know,” I say, “that looks so good, I think maybe I’d like an Eggo, too. Could I eat my Eggo with you?”
“Huh.”
It’s an all-purpose sound, the thing she says when she has nothing else to say. Dot often finds she has nothing to say to me. She’s only recently stopped wearing a mask in my presence, even in Thom’s apartment, treating me, perhaps not inaccurately, as a threat. Does she understand what I’ve done, what her father has done for my sake? Does she hate me for it? I’m waiting to find out. And while I wait, I make myself an Eggo. We sit across the table from one another, eating our Eggos together.
* * *
Around ten, Thom paddles back, boat and body growing as they slowly cross the bay. I watch from the kitchen; Dot watches from shore. She’s been lying in the grass, reading The Black Stallion—a book I remember from my own childhood, about a boy and a wild horse marooned on a desert island together. I wonder if she’s reached the part where the boy gathers moss to feed the horse, or where the horse first pushes its soft nose into the boy’s waiting hand. But of course I can’t ask her; I wouldn’t know how to begin. I keep hearing the ringing falseness of my voice this morning, inviting myself to an Eggo. Meanwhile, Dot’s concentration—flat on her stomach, bare feet swaying like seaweed—is complete. She only tears her gaze from the book to look out across the water at the blur of distant motion that is her father, the man I love.
For lunch, I’ll make sandwiches.
Ashore, Thom opens his arms. Dot leaps into them, book forgotten in the grass. He carries her up to the cottage.
The fishing’s been good: For the first time all weekend Thom’s smiling, at ease, pleased with himself. “They move so silently,” he says of the bass he has caught and released. “The big ones have this effortless gliding motion, like whales.” He slides his broad hand across the table. It becomes a gliding bronze bass, swimming over to the plate of sandwiches, pausing to nip at a pickle spear. Dot giggles. The bass takes notice: Thom’s hand tenses, fingers arching. Dot snorts, stifling laughter. Thom’s hand darts out at her and she grabs it, squealing, and bites down on one of his fingers.
“Yowch,” Thom says mildly. “Let me go, little fish.”
Dot releases his hand and beams up at him.
I am amazed at the red toothmarks just behind Thom’s cuticle, the saliva shining his nail.
“Do you like your book?” I ask.
Dot’s face drains.
“The Black Stallion,” I say, “was one of my favorite books when I was a little girl.”
She studies the bubbles in her apple juice.
Thom takes my hand. His finger is wet. It burrows into my palm and I hold it there, squeezing tightly.
* * *
After lunch, Dot becomes a superhero. She drags the garden hose into the backyard, using the trigger to launch jets of water in all directions. “I am the Greatest Lake!” she announces. “I’m made entirely of water!”
Thom sits with me on the porch, placid and happy, his long pale legs splayed in front of him. “Give her time,” he says.
“You could help me out a little.”
“This is helping,” he says, watching Dot. “Time is helping. Hanging out. Not pushing things. Just being. Just time.”
Thom’s better at patience than I am. A carpenter, he’s spent his life measuring twice to cut once. These days his daughter disappears every Sunday night and he doesn’t see her again until Friday afternoon. Deep down, he feels he deserves this. I want us to pool our lives together. One day, he promises. I’m waiting, I say. But I can feel him measuring, measuring, preparing for the cut, and I can’t help but wonder which side of the blade I’ll be on.
“I can communicate with fish!” Dot shouts, hosing the forsythias.
In her bright swimsuit bottom and drenched, billowing shirt, she appears costumed, streamlined, aquatic. I imagine her slicing through the water of the bay, easy and graceful, a little whale. The image brings an ache to my chest, as if she were swimming away from me. Dot fires water straight into the air and does a stomping, stiff-limbed rain dance as it showers down.
“She hates me,” I say.
“Hey.” I smell fish on Thom’s hands. His lower lip leaves a rim of moisture beneath my own. “She’s a little girl,” he says. “She hates peas and carrots and fruits with pits in them. She still hates bathtime and the boy at school who put an earthworm in her hair. It’s not that way with you. With you, she just doesn’t know.”
For Thom, this counts as a speech, a performance. I’d like to believe him. A précis of my childhood would include my own parents’ unhappy marriage, infidelities, and contested divorce, shortly followed by my mother’s early death—ovarian cancer, though by the time it was caught it hardly mattered where it had begun—and after that my father’s cool, watery bemusement at my surprise return to his life, an attitude vacillating between half-fond distance and half-distant fondness. But recounting these things to myself has started to feel like being forced to listen to someone else’s dull, garish, idiotically eventful dreams. Turn the page, I think.
Dot, at these moments, is who I’m thinking of. Mooning over.
This little girl, someone else’s child.
Thom slides back into the waterproof skin of his waders, but instead of marching to the lake, he joins Dot in the yard, clomping around in his felt-soled boots. “Fear not!” he cries. “It is I, the Master Angler!”
I stay where I am, happy to go unnoticed. I’m not ready for Dot to make a supervillain of me—the Vector—or else grow suddenly silent in my presence, her face as still as the surface of the bay. Once their game has carried them around the side of the cottage, I step quietly into the yard and pick The Black Stallion from the grass—miraculously, it is dry—and carry it inside. Dot has folded down the corner of the page she is on. I’m impressed by the attentiveness of the gesture. In the living room, I turn the armchair toward the window that overlooks the lake and arrange an end table and a floor lamp on either side. I set the book on the end table. This would be a comfortable place for Dot to read. She could look out the window and watch her father fish, if she wanted.
I understand that I am trying to trick her into staying inside, close to me.
At the heavy oak table in the mudroom, I open my laptop and log onto the firm’s intranet, where there are always PDFs awaiting me. I remind myself I’ll always have my work. Outside, heroes are springing into action. “Dot,” I say. Her name in my mouth is round at one end and pointed at the other, a raindrop. My fingers, tapping keys, are a clock.
* * *
The next day is Sunday, the end of our long weekend on the shore, and Dot wants to fish. After breakfast, Thom unpacks her small rod and ties a golden hook to the line. The knot he uses is a complicated, twisting thing, his fingers moving faster than my eyes can follow. Along the edges of the yard, he and Dot pry up rocks and rotten logs to gather angleworms and grubs. I watch from the kitchen. Dot is fearless, plunging wrist-deep into dirt.
Today, Thom paddles out into the bay until he’s disappeared from sight. I scan the horizon for him, but there’s only the endless rolling of the waves. Dot is unconcerned. Rod in hand, she walks the shore, catching tiny fish. I steel myself and approach cautiously, as I might a wild animal.
Dot, however, is aglow with success. She shows me a fish as round and flat as a little tea saucer. “This one’s called a bluegill.” This may be the first time she has ever spoken to me unbidden, words offered like a gift.
“Bluegill,” I say.
I learn that another fish, with the same round shape but prettier, speckled colors, is called a pumpkinseed. Dot pops the golden hook free from the fish’s mouth and lowers the fish gently into the water. It darts away, pauses for a moment as if to catch its breath, and then flits farther into the green reflections of the trees where it cannot be seen.
“Pumpkinseed,” I say. Dot nods, very serious.
I follow her down the shore, my head empty as a sleepwalker’s. I move like Dot, with fluid gliding steps so as not to frighten the fish, and keep my careful distance so as not to frighten her. The clouds feather open; a white sun appears. Dot’s hair lights like a lamp. Frowning, she turns to the sky. Looking at her, I see Thom, hip-deep atop a distant shoal, squinting as the light burns his shadow onto the water. UV rays, he’s told me, are the problem. They drive the bass deep. Dot rubs the back of her neck. In her mind, I imagine, she follows the fish, sinking down and down. She is the Greatest Lake. Sweat glistens on her upper lip.
“I’m thirsty. Are you thirsty?” I’m thinking of the lemonade in the refrigerator.
Dot blinks up at me, reminded of my presence. I might as well be the sun, spilling my dangerous heat.
“No,” she says.
I smile and don’t press my luck. This has been a good morning, something to build upon. By the time I’ve reached the top of the yard, the clouds have knit together again.
* **
For an hour, I try to work in the mudroom, but how can I concentrate on the boilerplate language of quitclaim deeds? The words drift away from me. “Pumpkinseed,” I say, picturing Dot’s face. I close my laptop and sit in the armchair by the window. Down below, Dot’s toes are in the lake.
I’m sitting there, drowsy and warm and contemplating lunch, when Dot screams.
Something has happened. Her small rod bows sharply to the water. Out beyond the reflected pines, a small bright patch of bay turns to froth. A heavy brown fish flings itself clear of the water, crashes down, and flings itself tumbling into the air again: one of Thom’s bass. The fish thrashes across the surface. Dot, at the other end of an invisible line, is hooked to it.
I’ve never heard Dot scream before. There’s no ragged tremble of adult emotion, only a high, pure tone that reaches through windows and walls to pluck me from my chair and carry me out the door and down the lawn without my feet ever touching the ground. Still, it seems to take a very long time to arrive. “I’m here,” I keep shouting, lying, “I’m here,” but by the time I finally reach her, it’s over: The bass has torn the rod from Dot’s hands. She stands open-palmed and shaking.
“I was pulling in a little fish,” she gasps. “And then this bass came up and—it took it.”
Thom, I’m sure, patient as he is, a carpenter who builds things piece by piece until at last they stand complete, would know the right thing to say now. But I’m not Thom. I’m nobody’s parent, and lately it seems to me I’ve hardly ever known how to understand myself as anybody’s daughter. The bay is empty, and I’m dry-mouthed with love. So I leave my sandals on the shore. The water is cold; my skin prickles. My hands trail in the water. The pebbles are smooth beneath my feet, the broken shells sharp as teeth. I find Dot’s rod and draw it, dripping, from the bay. The bass is gone. At the end of the line is only a tiny fish, fins stripped and body crushed, a golden hook fixed to its cheek like a pin. A pumpkinseed.
The red gills flex. I feel little muscles pulling against my palm. The mouth opens and closes as if trying to speak.
“Let it go.” Dot’s voice is small. “Let it swim away.”
“Dot,” I say, “I can’t.”
I mean that it’s too late now; the damage is done. I can’t stitch torn fins, affix lost scales. When I pop the golden hook free, it leaves a hole I can’t close.
“No,” Dot says, as if I’ve misunderstood. “It needs to swim away now.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
Her eyes wash over me, the dying fish in my hand. She pins elbows to ribs, fists to thighs, as if she were the one being squeezed.
“I’m sorry.” Spoken at last, the words keep bubbling up unbidden. I’m a primed pump, spilling stale, wet, mineral-scented regrets. “I’m sorry, Dot, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
Her reflection wavers in the water a moment.
“Huh,” she says.
She boils up to the house.
The yard is empty; Dot is gone. The windows of the cottage are filled with the bay. I clutch the tiny body because I cannot bear to watch it float away. Against my palm the little muscles pull, and pull, and pull, and stop.
* * *
A scream must carry a long way over water: Already there’s a flicker of purpose out there, slowly assembling itself into Thom. I wait for him on the shore. Dot waits in the house.
“What is it?” The lake streams from his waders. “What happened?”
“Oh, boy. Thom, I don’t even know.” My breath keeps galloping. “If I could’ve saved it, if I could’ve made it better somehow—” A rising wind blows waves up the beach, plastering my hair across my face no matter how I try to shake it away. “I’m so sorry, I kept telling her. That was all I kept saying.”
Thom takes my hands and tells me—reasonably enough, accurately enough—there was nothing else I could have done. “You have nothing to be sorry for,” he says.
“But I am sorry,” I say.
I look at him until he understands.
“We,” I say, “are the worst thing I’ve ever done.”
The wind plucks the bay into curls. Thom raises my hands to his mouth. We must smell the same now: algae and mucus and minerals, the wet scent of fish.
Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I know.”
* * *
After a quiet lunch, we pack our bags and clean the cottage. It starts to rain. The wet lawn shivers. The lake steams into the air.
Thom checks the forecast again. “Better leave now. It’s only going to get worse.”
Dot turtles her heavy backpack out to the car. We’ve said exactly nothing to one another since our exchange on the shore. I straighten the living room, returning the armchair, end table, and lamp to their original positions. The Black Stallion is still where I left it yesterday, the same page folded down, untouched.
Thom leans inside. His pickup is idling in the driveway, kayak complexly lashed into the bed. “Ready?”
“Almost.”
I pour the lemonade down the sink.
* * *
In the narrow backseat, Dot sleeps. Her mouth moves stickily, making big and little Os. Driving rain skins the windshield; Thom leans low over the wheel. “Pull over,” I say. “We can wait it out.” But he shakes his head. We both have work tomorrow, and he has to return Dot tonight. He’ll drop me off at my bungalow on Hemphill Street, and then he’ll take Dot home. It occurs to me we haven’t said whether he’ll come back to stay with me after that, or whether he’ll go to his apartment instead. I don’t want to bring it up. I’ll have to wait and see.
The storm brings early night. The tires hiss. I begin to feel ill. It’s the loss of horizon again: sky bleeding into water bleeding into sky, nowhere to fix my gaze.
“I need to get in back,” I say.
After Thom pulls to the shoulder, I get out. The rain soaks me in an instant, cold through my clothes, as if I’ve waded in again, or plunged overboard. In the back of the pickup’s cab I am sodden, dripping, leaning away from the little girl snoring beside me. Just now, I’d do anything not to disturb her. “Try and get some sleep,” Thom says. And even though this doesn’t seem possible, it happens. A long day, a long weekend, a long few years. As the heater breathes over me, my skin begins to steam. I close my eyes and sublimate, drifting to the ceiling. From somewhere far above, steaming, I touch Dot’s hair. The fine strands mat beneath my fingers, revealing delicate pink scalp. My hand slides behind her head. My heart pops like a cork. Thom pilots a submarine through the rain. We are sinking deep. I cradle Dot’s head as if she were my own. Little fish, I say. And she turns to me now, she recognizes my soaked and shining body costumed with water, and she calls me by the name of her hero.
Thom touches my knee, waking me. We’ve stopped. He says, “It’s time.”
Greg Schutz is the author of Joyriders, a story collection, forthcoming in March 2025 from the University of Massachusetts Press. His stories have appeared in numerous journals, including Ploughshares, Story, and American Short Fiction. They’ve been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes, anthologized in New Stories from the Midwest and Masters Review Anthology X, and listed among the distinguished stories of the year by both Best American Short Stories and Best American Mystery Stories. A graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, Greg has received fellowships and support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He lives in Michigan with his partner and their terrier, and can be found online at www.gregschutz.com.