The Little Cabin Across the Lake

Not a long one. Just enough to get it out, the way you cough to clear your throat before you sing.

Then I unpacked. I put the pie on the table, the skillet on the stove, the books on the windowsill, and a can of coffee on the shelf.

By the time I was done, it looked like somebody lived there.

Jean came by with an extra fan and two life jackets for the canoe.

“In case you get visitors,” she said, and winked, though I had not told her a thing. Resort women know more than they let on.

Around seven that evening, I heard tires on the gravel. A white co-op pickup with a ladder rack came crawling down the resort road, and my son got out of it, still in his work boots.

He had come straight from the storm job. His face was sunburned in a mask where his safety glasses had been, and he looked so much like his father at that age that it took the air out of me.

He walked out on my little dock and stood there with his cap in his hands, turning it around by the brim the way Don used to when he was about to say something hard.

“Mom,” he said. “I didn’t know until last night. About the room. I swear to God I didn’t know.”

“I know, honey. I never thought you did.” I patted the bench beside me on the porch, and after a minute he came and sat down on it, heavy, like a man who had not sat in a while.

“Ashley’s mom is in bad shape,” he said. “She cries after the kids go to bed. She doesn’t eat. Ashley’s scared to death about her. I think she just grabbed the first thing she could fix.”

“Then Diane needs that room more than I do,” I said. And I meant it, even with the sting still sitting in my chest like a swallowed cherry pit.

He looked out at the water for a long time. Across the bay, a loon called, that long lonesome sound that goes right down your spine.

The big house had its lights on now, gold squares on the dark water.

“I could talk to her,” he said. “I could tell her it’s not right. You paid for that room, Mom. Fourteen hundred dollars.”

“Don’t you dare,” I said. “You’ve got a wife who’s scared for her mother. You go home and be good to her. I’m happy right here. I’ve got a porch, a pie and a lake.”

He laughed, a little, the first time since he got out of the truck. “What are you even doing over here, Mom?”

“Making pancakes at seven tomorrow morning,” I said. “Bring the kids. Jean says the canoe holds three, and she left me two life jackets for little ones.”

He sat a while longer. Then he cut himself a piece of pie, ate it standing up on the dock, and drove back around the lake with his headlights bouncing through the pines.

I did not sleep much that night. The cabin was warm and the fan rattled, and I kept getting up to look out the screen at the big house. The last light over there went out a little after midnight.