The Lake Cabin She Gave Away

After Walt passed, I did not go up as much. I want to be honest about that, because the whole thing turns on it. The first summer I could not make myself walk in the door. The second summer I went up twice and cried both times and came home. I was still working at the clinic. My knees were bad. The dock needed a man to put it in and take it out, and I did not have a man anymore. So I did what a lot of widows do. I let my son handle it.

Danny was thirty-four by then, married three years to a woman named Shelby. They had a little girl, June, who was six that summer and the best thing in my life. Danny worked for the county highway department. Shelby had gone to school for interior design, which she reminded people of often, though as far as I ever saw she mostly did real estate staging and sold things on the computer. They lived in a rented townhouse in Brainerd and they were, by their own telling, always one break away from the life they deserved.

I liked Shelby at first. I want that on the record too. She was pretty and quick and she made a fuss over me in the early days, and I was lonesome and I let myself be fussed over. She called me Mom. She asked for my hotdish recipes and posted pictures of them with my name spelled wrong. When Walt died she cried at the funeral louder than Danny did, and I remember thinking, at the time, that a daughter in law who cried like that must have really loved him. I know better now. Some people cry loudest at the part where everyone is watching.

The arrangement with the cabin started small and reasonable, the way these things do. Would Danny mind putting the dock in come May? Of course not, Mom. Would they want to use it a few weekends while I got my feet back under me? I would be glad for it, I said. Let it be full of kids again. I gave Danny a key. I never thought twice about the key. He was my son. His father built the place.

The second summer, Shelby started calling it “the lake place” instead of “your cabin” or “Grandpa’s cabin.” Little thing. I noticed it the way you notice a splinter, a small wrongness you keep touching. “We’re heading up to the lake place this weekend.” “We left some of June’s things at the lake place.” I told myself I was being a sour old woman about a figure of speech. That is the thing about how these go. Every single step, somebody reasonable is standing right there telling you that you are the unreasonable one, and half the time the somebody is you.

By that third summer, the summer this all came to a head, I had been up to Little Kettle exactly one time since ice-out, in early May, to walk the shoreline and sit on Walt’s swing for an hour. Shelby had texted me a week before that visit to ask if I was coming up, and when I said I was, she had suggested, very sweetly, that the following weekend might be better because they would have the place “aired out and nice” for me. I did not think a thing of it. I went the weekend she suggested. The swing was still there. The post was still there, Walt’s carvings still in it. Everything was as it had been, a little dustier, a little more lived-in, a child’s water shoes by the door. I sat an hour and I drove home and I told Hazel on the phone that it had done me good.