The Cabin Door Mom Knocked On

“I’ll drive up tonight,” Nate said, “and park in the driveway till he shows up.”

“No.”

I do not know where the word came from. It came from somewhere flat and certain in my chest.

“If you park there, he gets a phone call, and he cancels the bookings and moves the money and tells Mom the neighbors made a mistake. And then she spends the rest of her life wondering if she imagined it.”

Nate was quiet. “She needs to see it,” I said. “Not hear it. See it.”

Why didn’t I just call Brett and have it out that night? I did try, the next day.

I called him at the shop. He picked up on the second ring and answered like a man holding two phones.

“Doc! Hey. What’s up?” “I’m thinking of driving Mom up for opener,” I said. “She misses the lake.”

There was a very small pause.

“Oh, you don’t want to do that,” Brett said. “Dock’s a mess. Furnace is out. Place smells like mice. Take her to the Cities for supper instead.”

He said it in such an easy voice. It was the same easy voice he had used to tell Mom the same thing in April, and I understood then that he had a speech ready for every question I might ask.

“Okay,” I said. “You know best.” I hung up and wrote down the name of the listing and the date.

Friday night, Mom did not eat supper. I had shown her the listing on my phone, and she had read it for a long time. “He’s Hobart’s son,” she had said finally, and that was all. She sat at my kitchen table with her purse in her lap, and she stayed there so long that Nate finally brought her a blanket.

Around nine she asked me for a pen.

She took a blue folder out of her purse, the old one that held the papers from the county, and she unfolded the deed to the cabin and set it on the table. She read the first paragraph under the lamp.

“Your father stood in the county office in 1994 and signed this with a pen that leaked,” she said. “He got ink on his shirt pocket.”

I did not say anything. I did not trust my voice. She folded it in thirds and put it back in her purse.

“I’m not going to wave it at anybody, Allie,” she said. “I just want to have it with me.”

At half past three in the morning she was dressed and standing in my kitchen with her purse.

“I’d like to go to my cabin now,” she said.

The drive from St. Cloud to Little Pine is two hours and ten minutes, up Highway 371 past the sleeping towns. Every gas station along the way was lit up like a ship. Pickups with boats in tow were lined up at the pumps, their drivers standing in the cold with their hands wrapped around paper cups.

Mom watched the parade of boats through the window the rest of the way. She had watched the same parade for thirty-one years.

Nate followed in his truck with the Lund on the trailer, because I had decided, somewhere around Pillager, that whatever happened at the cabin, my mother was going to fish opener. If I had to take her out on the lake in a rowboat, she was going to catch a walleye.