The Week I Camped Across the Lake

The Phone Call From Concord

Wednesday afternoon a thunderstorm rolled through about three o’clock, the kind that comes up out of nowhere in June and turns the lake black.

I sat in the truck cab with the rain coming sideways and my stomach in a knot. Sophie hates thunder.

Hannah texted me at three twenty. “We’re all in the dining hall. She’s counting the seconds between the flash and the boom. She says the storm is about four miles off and moving east. She’s right. She’s teaching the little ones how to do it.”

By eight the sky was washed clean and pink, and she was on the dock, waving at my lantern, and I waved back.

That was the night my phone rang at nine fifteen with a number from Concord.

I almost did not answer. Then I did, and Brent said, “Matt. It’s Brent.” And then he did not say anything for a while, and I let him not say it.

“Amy keeps texting me,” he said finally. “Every night. Every single night. She doesn’t say anything mean. She just tells me what Sophie did.”

“I know,” I said.

“I panicked,” Brent said. “With the baby coming. Kayla’s not working right now, she’s been sick the whole time, and I looked at our account and I saw two thousand dollars and I just. I panicked. That’s the truth.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And that’s not all of it.” He breathed out hard. “I don’t know how to be her dad, Matt. I never did. Every weekend I’d get her and I’d do something wrong and she’d melt down and I’d feel like the worst man alive. It got easier to just not go.”

“I thought she’d call crying the first night,” he said. “I really did. And I’d be out two thousand dollars and I’d be the dad who sent her off to get hurt. I figured if I said no, at least I wouldn’t be that guy.”

“So you were the other guy,” I said. I kept my voice even. I was not trying to win anything. “The one who said she wouldn’t last a night, where she could hear it.”

He didn’t answer that. I didn’t expect him to.

“I’m not going to tell you what kind of man you are, Brent,” I said. “That’s between you and her. But she’s lasted three nights. She’s going to last five. And every night at eight thirty she’s on that dock waving at a lantern.”

“Your lantern,” he said.

“A ranger lent it to me,” I said. “It isn’t mine either.”

He was quiet a long time. Then he said, “What time’s pickup Friday?”

“Eight thirty in the morning,” I said.

He said okay. He said he had to go. And I sat in my gray chair in the dark with the phone in my lap and wondered if I had just done the right thing or a foolish one.