The Lake House That Was Never Theirs

The sign was small, just a wire frame stake with a plastic placard that said COMING SOON, planted crooked in the grass I had mowed myself two days before. I stood in my own driveway outside Saltillo, Mississippi, with a bag of groceries going warm in my arms, staring at a lockbox somebody had screwed onto the porch door of the lake house I had lived in for five years.

My name is Rolla Marchetti. I am thirty four years old, I teach fourth grade at Saltillo Elementary, and until that Thursday afternoon in October I believed I understood exactly where I stood in my family. I was wrong about almost all of it.

The house sits on four acres above Bear Creek Lake, a squat brick place with a screened porch and a dock my grandfather built with his own hands the summer after he came home from the Army. He raised my father, Seward, in that house. He taught me to bait a hook off that same dock when I was seven years old, patient in a way my father never quite managed to be. When my grandfather died five years ago, on a February morning so cold the lake had a skin of ice on it, I was the one who drove out at six in the morning because nobody else would go check on the pipes.

I never left. Not really.