The Three Boxes On Our Bench

So I left the dirty cup in the sink and I drove up the county roads in the dark.

I will tell you the drive was beautiful. First Saturday of October in Wisconsin, the maples were turning, the corn was coming off in the fields, and the little towns went by one after another with their water towers and their Lutheran churches and their supper clubs not open yet at that hour. I passed a church with the doors open for an early Mass and I slowed down and I will admit I teared up at nothing, at just the ordinary sight of a church with its doors open in the morning. That is where I was by then. Everything was almost too much to look at.

I got to Kettle Lake a little before nine.

The resort was different. Of course it was. Danny’s six cabins were still there but freshly stained, and there was new gravel on the drive, and a sign I did not recognize. My heart dropped because I thought, somebody has bought it, somebody has bought the whole thing and they will have torn out the bench, what does a new owner care about an old bench on the point.

I parked and I sat in the car a minute. And then I walked down the path toward the water, toward the point, the way I had walked it a thousand times when I was a girl, and my legs knew the way even though the rest of me had forgotten, and the lake opened up in front of me just like it used to, like God clearing His throat.

The bench was there.

It was there, and it had been cared for. Someone had oiled the oak. Someone had set it square on the point facing the water. And when I got close I saw the armrest, the old armrest, and the 1949 carved into it by a man who was dust before I was born, and I put my thumb on those numbers the way I did when I was thirteen, and I sat down because my legs would not hold me anymore.

And then I saw them.

There were three boxes on the bench.

Three boxes, lined up on the oak seat where we used to line up ourselves, and on the top of each one, in three different hands, somebody had written RUTHIE.

Not Ruth Ann. Not Mrs. Mueller. Ruthie. Three times, in three different hands, and I knew every one of those hands, and I sat down on the end of that bench next to three boxes with my girlhood name on them and I cried the way you cry when you are completely alone and completely certain that you are not.

I did not open them right away. I could not. I just sat and looked at them and said their names out loud to the lake. Dot. Lorraine. Walt. Three boxes. Three hands. I did the arithmetic of it sitting there, who could have carried these, who could have known, and I could not make it add up, and I did not try very hard, because some part of me just wanted to sit in the not knowing a minute longer, in the pure fact of three boxes with my name on them, before the explaining started.