The Cabin Door Mom Knocked On

“I know,” she said. “Let’s go inside and see what he did.”

She did not use her key, because it did not work. Nate had a lock-pick set he had somehow acquired from a lockout job last summer, and he stood at the door muttering something about “not the cleanest thing I’ve ever done.”

“It’s her house,” I said.

“It’s her house,” he agreed, and it took him thirty seconds, which I will not describe any further.

We went in.

Mom stood in the middle of her own kitchen and slowly turned in a circle.

He had not wrecked anything. That was almost worse. The place was clean in a way it had not been since Dad was alive, because Brett had hired somebody to scrub it for his paying guests. The counters were bare. A basket of tiny soaps sat on the table next to a binder with a printed cover that read like a hotel’s.

Her things were gone.

The yellow curtains were still up. The coffee pot was still on the counter. But the loon, Dad’s carved loon, was not on the shelf above the sink. Neither were the framed photographs that had always lined the hall. Neither was the guest book.

“Allie,” Mom said. “Where’s the loon?”

We found it in the bunk-room closet, behind a stack of folding chairs, in a cardboard box with the word “storage” scrawled on the side in black marker.

The photographs were in there, too, face down, wrapped in a bath towel. Dad on the dock. Dad holding up a northern pike as long as his arm, grinning like a boy. Me at nine with a missing front tooth and a walleye bigger than my hand. Mom in a straw hat, 1999, laughing at whoever held the camera.

Brett had taken them off the walls and wrapped them in a towel so his guests would not see whose house it was.

I do not know how long my mother stood there holding the picture of Dad on the dock. Long enough that Nate quietly went outside and I put my hand on the small of her back.

“He wrapped them in a towel,” she said at last. “He was careful with them.”

“He was careful so nobody would ask.”

“I know.” She laid the photograph on the bunk and smoothed the towel over it. “But he was careful.”

She took the guest book out of the box and sat down on the bottom bunk. Dad started that book in 1996, the first summer, and every family that stayed on Little Pine for a weekend had signed it. Cousins, neighbors, my college roommate, a Lutheran pastor who lost a bet.

She turned to the last page. It was an entry from May of 2013, in my father’s squared-off carpenter handwriting.

“Opener 2013. Cold, bright, no wind. Doreen caught the first walleye at 6:40 a.m. Allie caught the biggest one at 7:10. Again. I caught a cold. Best day of the year, same as every year. Clifford.”

My mother read it. Then she read it again. She did not make a sound.

A single drop fell on the page, right beside his signature. She blotted it carefully with the heel of her hand, so as not to smear his ink.

“He wrote ‘again,'” she said, and her voice finally gave. “Every single year, Allie. He wrote ‘again.'”