Coffee at Seven Across the Loop

“Ma’am, we’re going to let your daughter take the host post this year.” Dwayne Kolb said it standing at the edge of Mom’s site, holding a clipboard against his chest like a shield.

It was the Saturday before Memorial Day, a little after ten in the morning. The sun was already warm on the gravel, and the lake was flat and bright through the pines behind the bathhouse.

Mom had her blue enamel coffee pot in one hand and a dish towel in the other.

She had been wiping down her folding table for the season, the way she did every year before the first campers rolled in.

She set the pot down very carefully. She folded the towel in half and laid it over the back of her camp chair. Then she looked at the ranger and waited for the rest of it.

“It’s nothing against you,” Dwayne said. “The county just has a concern. Somebody raised it with me, and I’ve got to take it seriously. You understand.”

“Somebody,” Mom said. It was not a question. She did not make it sound like one.

I was standing by the picnic table with a box of bathhouse supplies in my arms, paper towels and pink hand soap, and I felt my face go hot clear to my ears.

Across the loop, my sister Kendra was sitting on the step of her camper in a pair of scrubs, drinking something out of a tall steel cup. She did not look over. She did not have to.

“Who raised it?” I asked.

Dwayne glanced at me and then at the ground. He was 38, a decent man with a sunburned neck and a wedding ring he turned with his thumb when he was nervous.

He had been the ranger at the county lake for two seasons.

“I’d rather not get into who,” he said. “There’s been talk about memory. Keys left in the firewood shed. A check-in that got missed last fall. I’m sorry, Mrs. Satterlee. I’m just doing what I think is right.”

Mom nodded once. “All right, Dwayne. When do you want me out of the site?”

“There’s no rush. End of next week is fine. Kendra said she’d help you move.”

That was the first time anybody said her name out loud, and Mom did not even blink. She just picked the dish towel back up and went on wiping a table that was already clean.

My name is Josette Satterlee.

I am 46 years old, and I close real estate deals for a title company in Norman, which means I spend my days making sure people sign the right line and nobody gets cheated out of what is theirs.

I want you to understand that before I tell you the rest. I know what paper can do and what it cannot.

And I knew, standing there with a box of pink hand soap, that no piece of paper was going to fix this.

My mother, Rosemary Satterlee, was 74 that spring.

She had been a grade-school secretary for 31 years at the elementary school in our town, and there was not a child or a parent in three counties she could not name on sight.

When Dad died 12 years ago, she sat in her kitchen for most of a year.

Then a friend from church told her the county lake east of Norman needed a volunteer camp host for the summer, and she signed up the next morning.