The Little Cabin Across the Lake

He climbed into my lap without asking, the way the little ones do when they have decided you are furniture.

He had syrup on his chin and a sunfish scale stuck to his knee. I wiped the syrup with my thumb.

“Gamma,” he said, sleepy. “Do you got a bed here?”

“I’ve got a bed,” I said. “It’s a small one, but it’s mine.”

He thought about that a while. Then he said, “I like your small one,” and put his head against my arm, and in about two minutes he was asleep, breathing slow and warm through his mouth.

I did not move for an hour. My leg went numb and the sun moved off my hat and onto my nose, and I did not move.

A loon surfaced not thirty feet off the dock and looked at us, and dove again.

I thought about Don. He would have loved this cabin. He would have been out in that canoe with Cooper at dawn, he would have teased me about the chenille bedspread, and he would have been the one holding this boy.

I thought about Diane, across the water in a room with a quilt on the bed and a box of tissues, and her husband in an apartment in Litchfield with a woman from the bowling league. I knew which of us I would rather be.

That is a hard thing to think, maybe. But it was the truest thing I thought all week, sitting there with that sleeping boy, and it changed something in me toward her that I have not been able to change back.

Saturday was our last morning. Checkout at the resort was ten. I was up at five, packing, and at six I made one last batch of batter, a double batch, because I figured the kids would want a send-off.

At seven, I went out on the dock. The mist was thick that morning, thicker than any day all week, lying on the bay like cotton batting. I heard the paddle before I saw the canoe.

It came out of the white slowly. Only one person in it, paddling from the stern, a little crooked, the bow riding high because there was no weight up front.

It was Ashley. No children. No Nate. She was wearing a ball cap and a gray sweatshirt I recognized as Nate’s, sleeves pushed up, and she had a life jacket on, buckled, the way she makes the kids wear theirs.

Behind her, across the water, I could just make out Nate on the far dock in the mist with the three kids lined up beside him.

Max was waving with both arms. Nate was not waving. He was watching his wife.

Ashley bumped my dock too hard and nearly went in. I caught the gunwale.

She tied up with a knot that would not have held a minnow, climbed out, walked down to the end of my dock and sat, with her legs over the water.

Her eyes were red. She was holding an envelope in both hands, the way you hold something you are afraid you will drop. She set it on the boards and slid it toward me, my name on the front in her handwriting. “Don’t open it yet,” she whispered. “Please just sit.”