The Little Cabin Across the Lake

So I let the check stand. Then I got up, went to the hall closet, and dug out Don’s old fishing map of that chain of lakes, the one he had marked up with pencil the year we rented a boat for a weekend.

I spread it on the kitchen table under the light. The rental house sat on the east side of a long, narrow bay.

Straight across the water, on the west shore, Don had drawn a little square and written “resort, good bait.”

I called information, which tells you how old I am, and got the number. A woman named Jean answered on the fourth ring.

She and her husband had run the place for twenty-two years. Six cabins, a fish-cleaning house, a swimming beach.

“Funny you should call,” she said. “Cabin One just cancelled for that week. It’s our smallest. One room, a two-burner stove, a screen porch, and its own little dock. Bathroom’s tiny. Nobody wants it in July because it’s got no air.”

“How much?” I asked.

“Six hundred for the week. Saturday to Saturday. Canoe comes with it, if you want it.”

I sat there with the phone against my ear and Don’s pencil square under my finger.

Then I said I would take it, and I read her my card number off the back of the duck checkbook, where I keep it written down.

I did not tell Ashley. I did not tell Nate. I texted Ashley back a simple message: “Of course. I hope your mom gets the rest she needs.” That was true. I did hope it.

Then I took that cherry pie out of the refrigerator and baked it after all, because the cherries were not going to keep, and I was not going to let a text message waste good fruit.

I drove up the following Saturday in my Buick with the pie, a cooler, two bags of groceries, my good cast iron skillet, and a stack of library books I had picked out special for Cooper and Addie. Old habits.

It is about three hours from Long Prairie, up through Motley and Remer, past hayfields and little towns with a bar, a church and a bait shop each. I stopped in Remer for gas and a rhubarb malt.

Jean met me at the resort’s big log lodge, where the office is, in a sweatshirt that said “Lake Life” and handed me a key on a wooden fish.

She walked me down a pine needle path to Cabin One herself, apologizing the whole way.

Cabin One sat just down the shore from the lodge, close enough that its dock ran along the lodge’s long deck. It was small, all right. Knotty pine walls, a double bed with a chenille spread, a table with two chairs, a refrigerator that hummed like a tractor. The screen porch faced east, right out over the bay.

And there it was, straight across the water, maybe four hundred yards off.

The big rental house with its long deck and its white pontoon tied up at the dock. Somebody had hung beach towels over the rail.

I could see small shapes moving on the deck. One of them was in a red swimsuit, and I knew without anybody telling me that it was Addie, because Addie has owned a red swimsuit every summer since she could walk.

I stood on that porch with my hand flat against the screen and had myself a little cry.