The Breakfast Order At My Lake House

Jill did not seem to notice, or if she noticed, she had decided it was not worth mentioning. She had changed in small ways I kept cataloguing without meaning to. The old Jill cleared her own plate. This Jill sat at my table and let her husband’s breakfast go cold in front of her while she scrolled her phone, and when I set a plate down for her too, she said, “Oh, I’m doing intermittent fasting now, Blake got me into it,” in a voice that sounded borrowed, like a phrase she had picked up from him the way you pick up an accent from living somewhere long enough.

On Tuesday, Blake found me on the dock in the early evening, coiling the rope on the pontoon the way Gordon taught me, and he sat down on the bench at the end of the dock uninvited and said, “Can I be honest with you about something, Patty?”

“You can,” I said.

“I worry about you out here alone.” He said it so gently, so reasonably, that for a second I almost thanked him for the concern. “A woman your age, this far from town, this much property to maintain. It’s a lot of liability. Have you thought about what happens if you fall? If the furnace goes in January and you’re alone out here?”

“I have neighbors,” I said. “I have Stan at the marina. I have an alarm system Gordon put in before he passed.”

“Sure, but that’s reactive. I’m talking proactive.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and I noticed for the first time that he had a habit of never quite looking at your eyes, more at the space just beside them, like he was reading a teleprompter only he could see. “What if we restructured things so the house was working for you instead of the other way around? Rental income in the off season, maybe a home equity line to free up some cash for your retirement, let me manage the logistics. I do this kind of thing professionally. I could have a plan to you by the end of the month.”

“The house isn’t for rent,” I said.

“Not yet,” he said, and smiled, and I have thought about that phrase more times since than I can count. Not yet. Like it was a foregone conclusion he was simply waiting on me to catch up to.