The Name in the Lodge Record Book

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We drove the 600 miles home mostly in silence. Not the bad kind. The kind where you are both thinking about the same thing and neither one of you knows how to say it yet.

I did not call my father. I thought about it at every gas stop. But Ken was right.

It was his to tell, and I did not want to hear it through a phone at a truck stop in Virginia, Minnesota.

Jenna met us in the driveway. Hailey jumped out and showed her the picture on my phone before she even said hello, and Jenna hollered and hugged her and spun her around in the gravel.

That night in bed, I told Jenna about the book. She lay very still and listened. When I got to the part about the name, she turned on the lamp and looked at me.

“Matt,” she said. “Your dad was married before your mom. Wasn’t he?”

I had known that, in the way you know things about your parents that nobody ever talks about.

A short first marriage, very young, up in Minnesota. It ended before he met my mother. That was all I had ever been told.

Nobody had ever said there was a child. Not once, not at a holiday, not at a graveside, not in 39 years.

The next Saturday, my father and Uncle Jim and Ryan and the others drove up to Canada for the men’s week.

One spot short, and $1,800 short on the cabin. Jim told me later it was the quietest trip they ever had.

I did not hear from my dad while he was gone. I did not hear from him when he got back, either.

One week went by, then two. Hailey asked about him once at supper, and then she did not ask again.

Then, on a Tuesday night in the middle of July, my phone rang at nine o’clock. It was my father. He never calls after supper. He never calls at all, really. He texts me the weather.

“Matt,” he said. His voice was rough, like he had a cold. “Are you sitting down?”

I went out to the back step and sat down on the concrete, still warm from the day, and told him I was.

“Ken showed me the book,” he said. “He waited till the last night. He brought it down to the dock after the others went in, and he sat there with me while I looked at it.”

I did not say anything. I could hear him breathing on the other end, slow, the way he breathes when he is working up to lift something heavy.

“You had a sister,” my father said. “Her name was Katie.”