The Free Reunion at the Lake

Now it was the third year, and my mother was out too.

Josh came in from the garage while I was still sitting at the table. My husband is a quiet man. He works at the feed mill in Royalton and he fixes small engines on the weekends for half the neighborhood, and he does not waste words.

He looked at the stove, then at me. “Potatoes are done,” he said, and turned off the burner. Then he sat down across from me. “Who called?”

I told him. I showed him Tracy’s post on my phone, and the line at the bottom. He read it twice, the way I had.

“Huh,” he said.

“What does the county charge for that pavilion?” I said. “Do you have any idea?”

“No idea,” Josh said. “Call them in the morning.”

So I did. At nine the next morning, between a cleaning and a filling, I stood out in the back hallway by the sterilizer and called the county parks office.

A woman named Deb answered. She sounded like she had answered that phone for thirty years and expected to answer it for thirty more. I asked about the big pavilion at Pine Lake, the one by the boat landing.

“The lake pavilion,” she said. “Seats about a hundred and twenty. Electric, water, two big grills. It’s two hundred dollars for the day, eight in the morning to ten at night. Fifty dollars of that is a damage deposit, you get it back if you leave it clean.”

I asked her to say it again, and she did.

“Two hundred dollars,” I said. “For the whole day.”

“For the whole day,” Deb said. “Is there a date you’re looking at? July fills up.”

I asked about the second Saturday in July. She tapped at her keyboard for a long moment.

“That one’s open,” she said. “Do you want it?”

I stood in that hallway with the sterilizer ticking beside me and I did not answer for long enough that she said, “Ma’am?”

“Can I call you back this afternoon,” I said.

“I’ll be here till four thirty,” Deb said.

I went back to the front desk and checked in a woman with a cracked molar and I thought about it all morning.

That night Josh got an envelope out of the junk drawer and a pencil from the cup by the phone. He does his figuring on envelopes too. I married a man like my mother, and I’ve never been sorry.

“Forty adults,” he said, writing it down. “Seventy-five a head. That’s three thousand.”

“Three thousand,” I said.

“Pavilion’s two hundred, and she gets fifty of that back.” He wrote it down. “Chicken for sixty people. Say three hundred, if she bought the big tubs. Rolls, cake, plates. Call it four hundred for the food.”

He drew a line under the numbers and wrote the answer, and turned the envelope around so I could see it. It said 2,450.

“Every year,” Josh said. “Three years.”

We sat there with that envelope between us.

“You going to call her?” Josh said.

That was the obvious thing. I knew it was the obvious thing. Call Tracy, say what I knew, ask where the money went. Kim at our front desk would have done it before lunch.