The Glassers
Val and Rick Glasser are the social lynchpins of their Franklin Heights neighborhood. Val is a pharmaceutical sales rep whose biggest client is the Franklin Federals. Rick stays home with the kids (Wyatt, 10; Ava, 8; Reid, 6) and is starting a brewpub-trampoline called Tramp Bar.
A single road connects the Franklin metro area with Kormville Lake: highway 6, which drops to 25 miles per hour in Kormville proper.
Rick Glasser was going 52.
The officer looming in his mirror, larger with every stride, wore a *Sheriff* badge. It was already 11:45 a.m. The Glassers had wanted to be on the water by ten o’clock, but Reid had melted down over the doneness of his pancake, then nobody could find Ava’s life vest…
Rick spoke first. “License and registration, right?”
The sheriff looked at him like one eyeball was missing. “What’s that beast you’re pulling?”
“Wakesurfing boat,” Rick said, twisting back to look at their spanking new Moomba Mojo. “Gonna do some surfing.”
The sheriff said, “Son, you surf on the ocean. Here in Kormville we have a lake.”
Val Glasser said across her husband, unhelpfully, “I have a sales call at four so if there’s any way to truncate the Barney Fife shakedown routine and send us on our way—”
“The technology’s not all that new,” Rick said to the sheriff, explaining he’d read about the sport in Inflight magazine.
The sheriff gazed at the boat, drumming his fingers along his paunch. In the backseat, the kids ranged from scared stiff (Wyatt) to chewing their Batman action figure (Reid).
“Boy,” the sheriff said. “Leave it to you smarties up in Franklin.”
Val opened her mouth to speak—possibly to say lake surfing had been invented in the 90s and only required Google to suss out—but Rick gripped her thigh. Higher up than he’d meant to.
She raised her eyebrows.
“For sure, later,” he said. To the sheriff, “It’s a rush. We’d be thrilled to have you out some day and show you how it all works.”
Rick Glasser meant this, though he possessed only a vague understanding of the boat’s mechanics himself. “But just now, as Val mentioned—”
“Three hundred.”
The sheriff grinned. On his well-whiskered face, it was a dark, digging animal.
Rick had heard rumors about Sheriff Ruston when they’d first explored buying a lake house in Kormville. He figured this for an under-the-table fine. “I—well, I’m not sure I have that sorta cash on—”
“Not a problem.” The sheriff plugged a chip reader smartly into his phone. “I can take a card. I can take Paypal.”
Rick fished out his wallet. A moment later they were speeding along highway 6 again, lakebound, his own phone chiming with an electronic receipt for his charitable donation to the Kormville Kats, the town’s famed youth baseball team.
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