- Headed back toward the motel where her friends are boozing, the narrator stops off at the store to get some food. She feels super-awkward speaking French to them, since apparently she has a "school accent" that marks her as not their kind. She wishes she had just pretended to be American.
- After leaving the store, she retrieves her friends from the motel bar. David, Anna, and Joe have made friends with the son's owner, Claude. Claude gets the narrator a beer.
- Joe asks if there was any news about her dad, and she says no. She tells the others she'd like to go down the lake for a couple of days, and they agree; David wants to do some fishing.
- We then learn that the narrator's plan is to run away without seeing her father—if they get there and find he's okay, that is. Apparently she doesn't want to talk to him about her failed marriage and divorce, which she thinks her parents never forgave her for.
- They get Evans, a local business owner, to run them down the lake to the island where the narrator's family cabin is.
- As they pull up to the dock by the cabin, the narrator remembers her brother drowning after falling off that dock. Yikes—there's a lot of sadness and drama going on with this family.