The Breakfast Order At My Lake House
I should have paid closer attention to that sentence. I did not.
They showed up at the lake house on a Friday afternoon in late August, no call ahead, three suitcases and a cooler and Jill’s old inflatable kayak strapped to the roof of Blake’s SUV. I was out deadheading the marigolds along the porch steps when I heard the gravel crunch in the driveway, and for one happy second I thought it was just Jill, surprising me the way she used to when she was in college and homesick. Then I saw the second person getting out of the driver’s seat, stretching, looking up at the house the way you look at a listing you are already mentally renovating.
“Mom!” Jill said, and hugged me, and for a moment it was just my daughter’s arms around me and the smell of her shampoo, the same one she has used since high school, and I let myself believe this was going to be a nice surprise visit. “We thought we’d come stay a few days. Maybe longer. Blake’s been wanting to see the place.”
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll make up the blue room.”
Blake came around the car with his hand already out for a shake, which struck me as a strange way to greet your mother in law after eight months of marriage, but I shook it anyway. “Patty,” he said, like he was trying the name out loud for the first time, even though we had met three times already. “This is some property. Gordon built this himself?”
“He did.”
“Incredible.” He turned in a slow circle, taking in the dock, the boathouse, the long green slope of the yard down to the water. “You know what you’ve got here? You’ve got an asset most people spend their whole lives chasing and you’re just, what, sitting on it. Using it a few weeks a summer.”
“We live here all summer,” I said. “It’s not sitting idle.”
“Sure, sure.” He smiled the half second smile. “I just mean, big picture. There’s a lot you could be doing with a place like this.”
That was the first conversation. By dinner that night I had already started the slow, confusing work of trying to decide whether I had imagined the edge in it.
The note on the counter came the next morning, Saturday, and the one after that, and every morning for the rest of the week. Blake did not ask me to make him breakfast. He left instructions, the way you would leave instructions for a housekeeper you had hired and did not particularly respect. Sunday it was an omelet, specific vegetables only, egg whites only, no cheese because he was “watching his markers.” Monday it was oatmeal with a precise ratio of milk to water that I had to read three times to understand. He never once said thank you that entire week. He said things like “that’s closer” and “we’ll work on the toast” as if he were coaching me toward some standard only he understood.