The Week in March Nobody Wanted

The calendar came into the group text on a Sunday night in December, a photo of a sheet of notebook paper on Mark’s kitchen table.

It had twelve months down the left side and three names across the top. Mark had used a blue pen. Steve’s initials were in red. Mine were in pencil, the way you write something you might erase later.

I was on the couch in Duluth with a basket of towels in my lap, and Scott was watching the Wild lose. The phone buzzed twice.

Mark had the third week of June and the week of the Fourth of July. Steve had the first two weeks of August and the opener weekend in May. They had split the Labor Day weekend down the middle and given each other a deer week in November.

My name was in one square.

The second week of March.

Under the photo, Steve had typed, “Nic gets March. Bring a space heater, ha.”

Then Mark: “You’ll have the whole lake to yourself. Just you and the ice.”

Then a thumbs up from Steve on his own joke.

I sat there with a towel half folded over my knee and read it three times. Scott glanced over, saw my face, and muted the television.

“What is it?”

I turned the phone around. He leaned in and read it, and I watched his jaw go tight the way it does when somebody cuts him off on Highway 53.

“March,” he said.

“The second week.”

“There’s three feet of ice on that lake in March, Nic.”

“Closer to two by then,” I said. “But yes.”

He put his hand out for the phone, and I knew what he was going to do. Scott is not a hothead. He has worked the ore docks for twenty-two years and he does not raise his voice at anybody. But he would have called Mark right then, polite and level, and said something like, “This doesn’t look fair to me,” and it would have been the right sentence.

And it would have made everything worse.

“Don’t,” I said.

“Somebody ought to say something.”

“I already did,” I told him. “Last year. You were there.”

He was there. We had driven over to Mark’s house in Grand Rapids the spring after Dad’s funeral, the three of us and our spouses around Mark’s kitchen table with a pan of bars, to figure out how to share the cabin. I had suggested a rotation. Everybody picks a week, then the next person, around and around, and the next year the order flips.

Mark had said that was too complicated. Steve had said they lived twenty minutes from the lake and I lived two and a half hours away, so it made sense for them to have more of it. Mark said they were the ones who put the dock in and took it out. Steve said they were the ones who shoveled the roof.

We voted. It was two to one.

I did not want to ask a second time and lose a second time. And I did not want my husband calling my brothers to fight for me, as if I were a girl who could not speak for herself. That would only prove the thing they already seemed to believe, that I was not really one of the three anymore.

So I took my phone back from Scott, and I typed two words into the group text.

“Thank you.”

Then I put the phone face down on the couch cushion and finished folding the towels.