The Lake Cabin She Gave Away

What I did not know, sitting on that swing in May, was that Shelby had already decided the cabin was hers. Not someday. Not in the will. Now. And more than hers. She had decided it was going to belong to her mother and father.

I found all of this out the way you find out the water heater has been leaking for a month. All at once, with the floor already rotted under you.

It was the third week of July. There is a thing we do at Little Kettle, have done for forty years, which is the lake association potluck on the Saturday closest to the full moon in July. Everybody on the lake comes, and the old families who sold out and moved to town come back for it, and Merle smokes a couple of pork shoulders and the Brauers bring the beans and somebody always brings too much Jell-O. It is the one day a year the whole lake is one family again. Walt loved it. He ran the horseshoe pit every year like it was the state fair.

I had not gone to the potluck in two years. Grief does that. But this third summer Hazel called me in early July and said, Ruth, you have to come back to us, we miss you, Walt would want you at the pit. And she was right. So I told her yes. And here is the part that matters. I did not tell Danny and Shelby I was coming. Not out of any suspicion. It simply did not occur to me that I needed to announce to my own family that I was going to a party at my own cabin’s lake. I thought I would surprise them. I thought June would be so happy to see Grandma walk up. I bought a sheet cake at the grocery in Bell Prairie and I drove up on that Saturday afternoon with the windows down, feeling better than I had in two years.

I turned off the county road onto the gravel at about four in the afternoon. The potluck is held at the landing by Merle’s, but our cabin is a quarter mile before the landing, and the road takes you right past our driveway. I slowed down the way you always do at your own driveway, and I looked, and I did not understand what I was looking at.

The swing was gone.

That was the first thing. The porch where Walt’s swing had hung for seven years was empty, and there was new railing on it, white vinyl railing, the kind you buy in sections at the home store, bolted over the top of the cedar Walt had milled. The old screen door was gone and a new door stood in its place, a fiberglass door with a little decorative window and a seasonal flag hanging off a bracket, a flag with a loon on it and the word WELCOME.

I sat in my car in the middle of the gravel road with my foot on the brake and my sheet cake sliding on the seat.