The Breakfast Order At My Lake House

The first morning they were there, I found a note on my own kitchen counter in my own lake house, written in handwriting I did not recognize, that read: two eggs over medium, dry wheat toast, black coffee, no small talk before nine. It was signed with a single letter. B.

I want to start there, with the note, because I think if I had crumpled it up that first morning and said something, the whole rest of that August might have gone differently. I did not crumple it up. I smoothed it flat on the counter, read it twice, and started the coffee. That is the kind of woman I had let myself become by sixty one, and it took watching a stranger treat me like hired help in my own kitchen to finally notice it.

My name is Patty. I have lived on Tamarack Lake, in the kind of small Minnesota town where the gas station closes at nine and everybody waves at everybody, for thirty five years. My husband Gordon built this house with his own hands the summer before our daughter Jill was born, a modest two story with a screened porch facing the water and a boathouse he was prouder of than almost anything else in his life. Gordon passed six years ago, of a heart that had been tired longer than any of us knew, and since then the lake house has been the one place where I still feel like myself. I spend my winters in town in a little rambler that is easy to heat and my summers out here, where the loons call at dusk and the dock boards still creak in the exact places they creaked when Gordon was alive to fix them.

Jill is my only child. She is thirty four, works in marketing for a company two hours south, and for most of her life she was the easiest person I have ever loved. Then, about eight months ago, she met a man named Blake at a conference, and six weeks later she called me to say they were engaged, and three months after that they were married at a courthouse in a ceremony so small and so fast that I did not get to wear the dress I had already picked out for it. I told myself I was happy for her. I told myself a lot of things that summer that I did not quite believe.

Blake called himself an investment strategist. He had a business card with raised gold lettering and a tagline underneath his name, something about “unlocking the value already sitting in your life,” and the first time he handed me one, at their wedding of all places, I remember thinking it read less like a career and more like a pitch. He was handsome in the way certain salesmen are handsome, clean part in his dark hair, a smile that arrived half a second before whatever he said and stayed half a second after, like it was doing its own separate job. He complimented my earrings that day. He complimented the lake house before he had even seen it, just from a photograph Jill had shown him, and he said, almost to himself, “that’s a lot of unrealized value sitting on a shoreline.”