The Man Who Slipped Away Each Night

Larksong Lodge was a cluster of little cedar cabins around a main lodge house, and the main lodge had a long dining hall where everybody took their meals together at big pine tables. That was the owner’s idea, a widow herself named Pat Oleska who ran the place with her son. Pat said strangers become friends over a shared plate, and she was not wrong, though she was not entirely right either.

The first night I sat at the end of a table, near the kitchen door, which is where a lifelong cook sits whether she means to or not. And a woman sat down across from me and introduced herself as Darlene Fisk from Lincoln, and before the butter had gone around twice she had told me that she was on her third husband, that the second one had cleaned out her savings, and that a woman alone past sixty had to guard her money like a dog guards a bone.

“You see that one,” she said, and tipped her chin down the table.

I looked. There was a man there I had noticed already, the way you notice a kind face in a room of strangers. He was about my age, maybe a year or two older, with white hair cut close and a sunburned neck and big quiet hands. He was listening to a story some fellow was telling about walleye, and he was laughing in the right places, and he had the manners to wait until the other man finished before he reached for the bread.

“Walt Behrens,” Darlene said, low. “Came in yesterday. Widower, so he says.” She let the so he says hang there like a smell. “You watch him, honey. A man that good looking and that polite, alone, at a place like this. They come here on purpose. They sniff out the widows. My sister lost twelve thousand dollars to a man she met on a church bus tour.”

I did not know what to say, so I said what my mother taught me to say, which was nothing, and I passed Darlene the salt.

But a seed is a seed, and it does not care whether you wanted it planted. It grows anyway.

I met Walt Behrens properly the next morning, on the dock.

I had gone down to the water early because I cannot sleep past five, thirty one years of a school kitchen will do that to you, and he was already there with two cups of coffee from the big urn in the lodge, and when I came down the dock he held one out to me like he had been expecting me.

“I guessed cream, no sugar,” he said. “You look like a cream no sugar.”

“What does a cream no sugar look like,” I said.

“Like a woman who has had enough sweetness disappointed her that she stopped trusting it.”