vemod

The rain started the second Tuesday and Kari didn’t come down to the dock, so I sat in the boat with the bailer for a while and then went back up.

I should say where this is. Sundberg’s is on the south side of Woman Lake, about four miles out of Longville on the county road, past the place that sells firewood on the honor system. Nine cabins, a lodge with a pop machine and a rack of Rapalas that had been there since I was small, a fish-cleaning house, and two paddleboats, one of which worked, and a rowboat that hardly got touched. Arnie Sundberg put up the first four cabins after the war and his son Dale was running it by the time we started going, which was 1982, the summer I turned seven. Dale was bald and wore a green Sundberg’s Resort cap and said he’d never worked a day in his life. The cabins went 1 through 10 with no 7. My dad asked about that one year and Dale said there’d been a 7 and it burned in the sixties. Another year he said Arnie just never liked the number. Cabin 8 was the nicest one, it had a screened porch on two sides, and a family from Iowa had it every year.

The Lindquists had 5 and we had 6. That had been the arrangement as long as I could remember, the first two weeks of August, and my dad and Kari’s dad went out at six every morning in my dad’s Lund and came back at nine with walleyes or without them some days.

I was twenty that summer. Kari was nineteen. We had been something or other for two years, since the night after the turtle races when she was seventeen and we walked out to the end of the point, and I don’t need to get into that. After that she went back to Rochester and I went back to Anoka, and then I was at St. Cloud and a year later she was at Winona, and in between there was the phone.

The phone was a problem. I called on Sunday nights when the rates dropped, and the phone on her floor was in the hallway by the stairs, so half of any call was her saying what and me saying nothing, I said what are you doing, and her saying nothing, talking to you. People walked by. I could hear the door to the stairwell. In April the bill came and it was a hundred and forty dollars. I paid it. I stopped calling as much after that, and Kari said she understood, and then in May she called me on a Tuesday afternoon, which she’d never done, and we talked for twenty minutes about her roommate’s car, and that was the last real phone call.

Back to the rain.

By ten it had let up enough that my dad went out on the deck and looked at the sky for a while, the way he did by looking at it and saying nothing and then coming back inside and announcing what the sky had told him. He said it would clear by noon. Kari’s dad, who was sitting at our table drinking our coffee, said he’d give it one thirty. They were both wrong. It rained until four.

The mothers did the puzzle. There was always a puzzle going in the lodge, a thousand pieces, donated or left by somebody, and the one that year was a covered bridge in Vermont with a lot of red leaves. Kari’s mom and my mom had been doing it since the first Sunday and were down to the leaves, which is probably where most people quit. Erik, Kari’s brother, was twelve and played the pinball machine without putting any money in it, just flipping the flippers. I read part of a paperback somebody had left and went up to cabin 5 around one to see about Kari and she was asleep, or was in her room with the door shut.

I got the minnow bucket off their porch since it was ours anyway. My St. Cloud sweatshirt was on the back of a kitchen chair in there. She had taken it the first summer and I had never asked for it back. I left it.

---

The thing I keep coming back to is the first week was fine. She drove up with her family on the Saturday and I had gotten there the day before, and when the Lindquists’ Caravan pulled in she got out of the back seat and looked at me across the gravel and it was fine. We swam off the dock that night. We took my dad’s boat out Sunday with the nine-nine on it and ran over to the bay by the public access and fished for nothing in particular and caught a northern that was mostly slime. She wore the sweatshirt in the boat. We went into Longville for the turtle races on Wednesday, which we’d done every year since we were kids.

The turtle races. Longville does them on Wednesdays in the summer, on Main Street, and has done since the sixties or thereabouts. You rent a turtle from a kid with a kiddie pool. You put the turtles in the middle of a circle painted on the street when the starter noise goes off and the first one over the line wins and you get a ribbon, or a coupon for something. Hundreds of people come. The turtles probably don’t care for it. Kari’s turtle went the wrong way and then stopped.

Thursday she was quiet. Friday she went into town with her mom and didn’t ask if I wanted to come. Saturday our families did the fish fry together the way we always did at the end of the first week, and she sat at the other end of the picnic table next to Erik and helped him with his corn, and her dad told the story about the guy in cabin 4 who fell off the dock in 1988 with a full beer in each hand and came up still holding both. The guy’s name was Roger. Later in the story it was Rodney. Erik wanted to know if the beer was still good after, and Kari’s dad said that was the whole point of the story, and then my mom got up to get the pie.

Then the second week, and the rain.

It cleared Tuesday around four like I said and by five the lake was flat and Kari came down to the dock in a pair of cutoffs and a Winona State T-shirt and sat at the end with her feet in the water, and I came down after a while and sat about a foot away from her.

“Did you sleep,” I said.

“Kind of.”

“Your mom said you were sleeping.”

“I was reading.”

A boat went by out past the weed line, a pontoon with a big family on it, somebody’s radio going. The Twins were on. They were terrible that year. Puckett was still playing and that was about it. My dad listened to every game on WCCO on the deck with the radio turned most of the way down, and if you asked him the score he’d say they were losing. Usually they were. The radio was a Panasonic with a crack in the dial cover that he’d had since before I was born and it picked up WCCO fine from there.

“Erik wants to go to the races again tomorrow,” she said.

“We could go.”

“He wants to go with you, specifically. He thinks you’re funny.”

“I am funny.”

She didn’t say anything to that. She moved her feet in the water. A little ways down the shore Dale was pulling a sunk paddleboat up on the sand with a rope and not making much progress and not asking for help, and I thought about going down there and didn’t.

“We should talk about stuff,” she said.

“Sure.”

“Not right now.”

“Okay.”

“I just mean at some point.”

“Okay,” I said, and we sat there until the mosquitoes came, and then we went in.

---

Wednesday we took Erik to the turtle races. Kari’s turtle won its heat and lost the final and she got a ribbon. Erik’s didn’t leave the circle. I bought us all cones from Frosty’s. We drove back with the windows down and Erik in the back seat telling us about a kid at his school who had a pet snake that had gotten out in the house and lived in the walls for a year. Kari’s arm was on the window and her hair was all over and she was laughing at the snake thing. I had the cassette in that she’d made me the first summer, which I’d been playing the whole two weeks, and I reached over to turn it up and she reached over and turned it down at the same time, and we both pulled our hands back, and Erik kept talking about the snake.

Thursday the dads went out at six. Thursday my mom and I went into Walker for groceries because there were four days left and the plan was to eat everything. Thursday afternoon Kari and Erik and I swam and she was fine, she was actually fine, she held Erik under and let him up and he went after her and she screamed. My dad came down and stood on the dock with his coffee and watched them and said you’d think they’d get tired of that. Friday morning I woke up at five and couldn’t go back to sleep and went down to the dock in the dark and sat in the Lund, and the dads came down at ten to six and my dad said what are you doing, and I said I couldn’t sleep, and he said well move over, and I went out with them. We fished the break off the point. Kari’s dad caught two and my dad caught one and I didn’t catch anything and nobody said much. Around eight Kari’s dad said, apropos of nothing, that Erik had made the peewee A team and there was a camp in August next year, the first two weeks, down in Rochester, and it was a good program. My dad said that so. Kari’s dad said it was a good program. My dad reeled up and checked his minnow and put it back down.

“Well,” my dad said. “Dale’ll want to know.”

“I’ll talk to Dale.”

“Sure.”

---

Friday night was the last fish fry. Both families at the big table on the deck of cabin 6, the walleyes from the morning plus a bag of fillets from the freezer that were from who knows when, and corn, and my mom’s potato salad, and Grain Belt for the dads and pop for Erik and for Kari and me.

Dale came by at seven with the book. He did this the last Friday every year. He’d come around to every cabin with a big spiral ledger that was falling apart and ask if you wanted the same weeks next year and you’d say yes and he’d write you in and take a check for fifty dollars. He’d been doing it so long nobody thought of it as anything. You just did it. He came up on the deck and said how was the fish and my dad said it was fish, and Dale opened the book on the corner of the table and said, “Same two weeks? First through the fifteenth?”

“Same for us,” my dad said, and got out his checkbook.

Dale looked at Kari’s dad.

“We’re going to have to let you know on that, Dale,” he said. “Erik’s got a hockey thing.”

“Hockey thing,” Dale said.

“A camp. It might be those weeks. We’ll know by Christmas.”

“Sure,” Dale said. “I’ll put you down tentative.”

“Tentative’s fine.”

Dale wrote something in the book. It took him a while. Then he said what he always said, which was that he wasn’t going to be around forever and one of these years he was going to sell the place, and he went down the steps to cabin 4.

Erik wanted to know what tentative meant. Kari’s mom told him. My mom asked if anybody wanted more potato salad. Kari got up and started clearing plates, and I got up and took the plates from her and carried them in, and she came in behind me with the corn bowl, and we stood in the kitchen of cabin 6 for a minute not doing anything with the plates. Then she said she was going to go help Erik find the flashlight, and she went.

I went down to the dock after. It was about nine and the sky still had some light in it the way it does up there in August. She came down around nine thirty. She had the sweatshirt on. She sat down in the same spot and I was in the same spot and it was the same foot between us.

“So the hockey thing,” I said.

“It’s a good program.”

“That’s what your dad said.”

“It is, though.”

“I’m not saying it isn’t.”

A loon out past the point. One. Then nothing.

“You could still come up,” I said. “You don’t have to come with them. You could drive up. You have a car.”

“I don’t have a car.”

“Your roommate’s car.”

“That’s her car.”

“I’m just saying it’s possible.”

“I know it’s possible.”

I picked at the dock. The boards on Dale’s dock had been there since Arnie, and they were gray and soft on top and you could pull long splinters off them with your fingers, and I had been doing this since I was seven, and there was a spot by the third post where I had carved something when I was ten that I had never told her about.

“You could also just call,” I said. “Like, during the year. You could call me.”

“I did call you.”

“Once. About the, what, the roommate’s car.”

“It was a whole thing with the car.”

“Okay.”

“You stopped calling me.”

“Because of the bill.”

“I know about the bill.”

“So.”

“So I know about the bill,” she said.

The pontoon went by again, or a different one. No radio this time. Somebody on it said something and somebody else laughed. Kari pulled her feet out of the water and sat with her knees up and the sweatshirt pulled down over them, the same way she had sat on this dock at seventeen and at eighteen, and I still have a picture of her like that somewhere.

“I don’t want to do this tonight,” she said.

“We said we were going to talk at some point. We could talk now.”

“I know. I just don’t want it to be tonight.”

“So when.”

She didn’t say anything. The thing about Kari that I never could do anything with was that she could not say anything for a very long time, and would, and the longer she didn’t say anything the more it was on me to fill it, and I always did, and I did then.

“It’s fine,” I said. “Your dad’s got the thing. We’ll see what happens.”

“Yeah.”

“Christmas, he said.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s fine.”

“Michael,” she said, and then didn’t say anything after that, and I waited, and after a while I said I was going to go see if my dad needed help with the boat, which he didn’t, it was nine forty at night, and I went up.

---

Saturday morning was checkout. Checkout at Sundberg’s was ten but nobody left at ten, you left when you left. The dads went out at six anyway. That was the last morning and they always went out the last morning, and they came back at eight thirty with nothing and said the fish knew they were going.

My dad backed the station wagon down to the ramp and we got the Lund on the trailer, and then he spent forty-five minutes on the trailer lights because the left one was out again. He had me get in and hit the brakes while he stood behind. Hit the brakes. Okay. Left signal. Okay, hit it again. Hold it. Okay. Then he’d get under there with the pliers and say a word and come out and say do it again.

I could see cabin 5 from the driver’s seat. Kari’s dad was strapping the cooler to the roof rack of their car and Erik was standing on the porch with his pillow. Kari’s mom came over to our cabin with a tupperware of the potato salad that she was returning. She hugged my mom. She hugged me through the window of the station wagon, which was awkward, and said it had been a good two weeks, and said see you next year, Michael, and then stopped, and then said or whenever, and went back.

Kari came out of 5 with her duffel around nine thirty and put it in the back of the car. She was wearing the Winona shirt. She looked over at the station wagon. I was in the driver’s seat with my foot on the brake. My dad said hold it, and I held it.

She walked over. She had the sweatshirt in her hand, folded. She put it on the hood of the station wagon, on the driver’s side, where I could see it, and she put her hand flat on top of it for a second.

“You’ll want this back,” she said.

“I don’t need it.”

“It’s your sweatshirt.”

“I have other ones.”

She left her hand on it.

“Hit it again,” my dad said from behind the trailer.

I hit it again.

“Okay. It’s good. Left signal.”

I put the left signal on. Kari took her hand off the sweatshirt and said okay and went back across the gravel and got in the back of the car with Erik, and Kari’s dad came around and shook my dad’s hand through the gap between the trailer and the boat, and they said the thing about the fish, and their car pulled out first.

I put the sweatshirt in the back with the life jackets.

“Okay,” my dad said. “Hit the brakes one more time.”

I had a dream within a dream last night that a friend was moving to Danville. She told me one night when we were out with other friends. She wanted a break from the hustle and bustle of around here. She said she needed to be somewhere things moved slower. I wondered about the schools for her kids and whether the town was really a good fit. I said I’d been there recently and it was a town. Not a great town, but a town. I didn’t try to talk her out of it. Then I woke up from that dream and the next day I saw her and she said she had something to tell me. She was moving to Danville. I remembered the dream from the night before and told her about it, how she’d have to find somewhere temporary to live between selling her house and moving there, how she was waiting to hear back about a job she applied for but the process was going really well so far, how she needed a break from the hustle and bustle of around here. I asked if that was all true and how she’d gotten that into my dream, but before she could answer me that dream ended and I wondered if she’d found out she was incepting me and shut the whole thing down. Or maybe my alarm went off.

Fog sat on the water and didn’t move. The boy couldn’t see the far shore, and when he looked back he couldn’t see the shore they’d come from either. Gray ahead, gray behind, the lake flat and black under all of it.

The water came right up to the side of the canoe and the boy could have put his hand in it. He’d done it the day before and his fingers had gone stiff and red and ached for an hour after. Up here the lakes held the cold into June, down deep where the sun never got, and even now in the morning it came up to the surface and stood in the air over the water.

His father paddled in the stern. The boy could hear it without seeing it, the blade going in and the pull and the water coming off it when it lifted clear.

He paddled too. He matched what he heard, more or less. He knew it didn’t do much. The steering came from the stern and so did most of whatever moved them.

His father had woken him while it was still dark out. He’d dressed in the dark, sitting on his sleeping bag, getting his arms into a flannel that smelled like the tent, smelled like the campfire from the day before, smelled like the humidity that was constant up here. They walked down to the canoe in the dark.

The paddle clipped the gunwale and the aluminum rang. His father didn’t say anything. The stroke behind him kept on.

He laid the paddle across his knees. His hands were cold, and now his fingers had an ache in the knuckles. He balled them up and shoved them under his arms.

His father could go on in the cold for a long time. The boy had watched him split a winter’s worth of wood one fall, not stopping.

He picked the paddle back up after a while. Dipped it, pulled. The water didn’t seem to give him anything.

A loon went off somewhere out in the fog, that long note that bends in the middle. He waited to hear another one answer it. Nothing did. The sound went out over the water and into the trees.

“Here,” his father said.

The paddling quit. They slid and slowed and then they were just drifting in the fog. A dark shape stood up out of the mist ahead. Rocks. A point with boulders stacked at the waterline, wet and black.

“Cast toward the rocks.”

His father had rigged the rod the night before by the fire, steel leader, a silver spoon, his big hands doing the little knots. The boy sat up and cast it out there. The spoon went up and came down with a small sound and the rings spread out from it and ran toward the rocks.

He counted to five and started reeling.

He could feel the spoon wobbling, the buzz of it coming up the line into his fingers. Nothing took it. It came back clean and he cast it again.

His father was casting too. The boy heard the reel click and the lure hit and the whir of him bringing it in. They didn’t talk.

He cast again. Again. His shoulder was getting tired. He thought about the sleeping bag he’d left warm. He didn’t know what time it was, only that it was early still.

The ninth cast, the line came tight and stayed tight.

The rod bent and the boy hauled back and the water blew open. The fish came up green and white and threw itself sideways and the boy felt the whole weight of it go into his arms.

“Tug,” his father said.

The fish went down and the drag let out a thin high note. It was strong. He could feel it down there working, and for a stretch he forgot his hands and the cold and the gray, there was just the bend in the rod and the line cutting the surface and the fish running somewhere under the black.

It came up once more, smaller this time, and that was the end of it. The fight was gone. He reeled, pumping and winding, the way his father had shown him.

“Bring it back here. I’ll net it.”

He worked it toward the stern with the rod high. He heard his father lean and the net go through the water and the fish hit the mesh and beat against it, and then it stopped.

“Northern,” his father said. “Maybe fifteen inches.”

The hook came out, and the fish went into the live well. His father got resettled and the canoe rocked slightly.

His father picked up his paddle. “We’ll try the other side.”

They crossed. The fog had gone thinner and the boy could make out the far shore now, dark trees and a few white birch and gray rock standing up out of it. The strokes behind him were even. He paddled along with them. His paddle hit the gunwale again.

They came up on a weed bed and drifted the edge of it, green stuff visible down in the water. The cabbage weed stood up out of the bottom and the little fish worked through it and somewhere back in the dark of it the big ones lay and didn’t move. He cast. His father cast. Nothing.

He cast and brought it back, cast and brought it back, and the spoon kept coming back with nothing on it. Behind him was the same. The fish weren’t here, or they were here and not eating, or they were down in the weeds where you couldn’t get at them.

The fog kept lifting off. He could see more of the lake by the minute, the open water behind them, the point where he’d hooked the fish, the brightening edge of the sky. Light was coming. He couldn’t see the sun but he could feel the gray starting to give it up.

His father reeled in. The boy heard the rod go down and the paddle come up, and he did the same, and they moved off along the weeds.

The only sounds were the paddles and, now and then, the clang of his blade on the hull. He tried to be more careful about it. His arms were tired and his mind wandered off and the paddle found the gunwale again, and then again. Each time it rang out over the water and his father said nothing.

Another point. More rock. They drifted it and worked it over, every foot of bottom, and got nothing.

His arm was burning now. His back had stiffened from sitting and his hands felt raw. He thought about saying he wanted to go back to the campsite. He had the words ready and he’d had them ready for a while, and his father would turn the canoe without a word, but that’s not what his father would have wanted. So he cast again. His shoulder didn’t want to and he made it.

The fog was about gone. The sun had cleared the trees back behind him and the light lay gold on the water ahead and he could see the whole lake at once, small and ringed all the way around with forest. He could see where they’d launched, the rock and the dim shapes of the tents and a thin thread of smoke still going up off last night’s fire. It looked a long way off.

“That’s enough,” his father said.

He reeled in and laid the rod down in the bottom of the canoe and sat with his arms hanging. The fish in the live well had gone quiet.

His father picked up his paddle. The boy picked up his. They started the long way back.

He dipped and pulled. The blade went down into the black and came up dripping and went down again. He couldn’t feel that it did anything. His father’s strokes did the work, pointed them back.

He kept at it. They didn’t talk. They hadn’t talked in an hour, maybe more. It was the regular thing between them, the same quiet that often sat at the dinner table and in the car. He faced front. His father sat behind him. Neither of them could see the other’s face.

The paddle hit the gunwale.

The sun got higher and the warmth came up in it and the water turned from black to a shade of deep blue. Things were moving on it now. A pair of mergansers ran along the surface off to the left and got up and flew. Out past them a fish rolled and went back down and left a ring. Camp came on slow, the tents firming up, the fire ring going clear. Soon there’d be coffee and the egg-and-bacon smell and the whole rest of the day out in front of them.

The boy paddled. His stroke went into his father’s stroke and the canoe went on and the water closed behind it and the rings ran out and out and flattened.

The last time I made love. The last time I truly made love. It was 1947. Jane. I had taken the train down to the capital from Yorkshire. I saw her as soon as I got off at King’s Cross. Our eyes locked and we walked out together. She had a rented one-room flat in Kensington, just west of the park. I was in town for business and wired my office to reschedule my meetings. We were ravenous for each other, coming up for air only when needed. We made love through the day into the next, and for the next two days after. It was a thirst that could not be quenched. Yet famished from the endeavour, we took pause. We walked across the park to a nearby cafe and ate breakfast. She saw an acquaintance and went to say hello. I quietly took my leave; I did have business to attend, and a family back home to return to.

The Greyhound station in Champaign was next to a bar. The bar opened at ten in the morning and stayed open who knows how long. Inside the station the chairs were plastic, bolted to the floor in rows, and the floor was tile that used to be white. There were posters on the walls for places I’m pretty sure the buses didn’t actually go to. One was for Las Vegas. A television was on in the corner with the noise of news of some sort.

I bought my ticket three days before Christmas, 1990. The woman behind the ticket window was behind thick glass and didn’t look up when she told me the fare. Champaign to Chicago, Chicago to Minneapolis, Minneapolis to Duluth. Forty-six dollars for twenty-three hours, which seemed about right at the time and it’s one of those numbers that’s stuck in my head forever now.

The bus loaded at nine. Still grey, the December morning of central Illinois hadn’t quite settled in. The empty cornfields around town were stubble and frozen mud. A few snowflakes were coming down through the parking lot lights but not enough to do anything. I loaded my overstuffed and oversized army surplus bag in the luggage compartment and found a seat halfway back on the driver’s side and put my backpack on the seat next to me. Other passengers came on. A woman with two kids who were too tired to fight yet. A guy in an Army jacket who took the back seat and shut his eyes. Two college boys talking too loud about a party from the night before. They’d be asleep before the county line. An older woman with a Bible and a paper bag that I found out later had fried chicken and biscuits in it for her whole trip. She’d done this before and knew what the food at the stations was going to be like. I should have brought fried chicken.

The driver was a thick man. He counted heads, checked his mirrors, and pulled out.

---

I’d been in Champaign three semesters. Long enough to know it though not long enough to like it the way I eventually would. It was a fine town. Flat, the university running through it. I was nineteen and didn’t know about fine towns yet.

The bus took I-57 north. We stopped in Rantoul. A woman got on with a shopping bag and a child’s car seat but no child. We stopped in Kankakee, idling behind a gas station while three men got on, none of them speaking to each other, all of them taking the last few rows by themselves. We stopped in places I don’t remember the names of. The door opened and the cold came in each time.

The two college boys fell asleep against each other’s shoulders and the argument about the party girl was over. The woman with the car seat held it in her lap and looked out the window. There are probably a hundred reasons a person might be carrying an empty car seat.

I watched the farms and towns go by and wondered what life was like for the people in them. Maybe the woman in the yellow house has three grown kids. The man in the brick ranch was in Korea.

---

Chicago came up slow and then all at once. Suburbs first, then the warehouses and the rail yards where the freight cars sit in long lines waiting. Then the skyline. Gray on gray. I’d seen it before from driving through but not up close like this.

The Harrison Street station was loud and crowded and smelled like diesel and hot dogs and people who had been in their clothes too long. Cops walked in pairs. A guy was asleep on a bench with his arm hooked through the strap of his bag so nobody could take it without waking him up. The PA was going constantly. Milwaukee. St. Louis. Indianapolis. Detroit.

I had four hours. I put my bag in a locker that was luckily large enough to fit it. Then I got a CTA map off a rack near the ticket counter and went outside.

Chicago wind in winter comes off the lake and finds whatever you didn’t button up. People walk fast because they’re cold. I walked fast too but because I wanted to see how far I could go. I went north through the Loop. Past the theaters, the department stores, the office buildings letting out for lunch. I walked through River North when it was still mostly nothing. I kept checking my watch and folding and unfolding the map in my pocket until it got soft.

Lincoln Park in December isn’t anything like the postcards. The trees were bare. The grass was brown. The lagoon was covered in ice. There were joggers and people walking dogs that were sniffing at the frozen ground. But there was space. Open space in the middle of all those buildings, and past the park there was the drive and the lake. The waves were small and steady and they made a sound against the rocks. Some gulls were standing on the ice near the shore. I stood there longer than I had time for, and somewhere in there I figured out I was going to live in this city.

I checked my watch. I’d been standing there twenty minutes. I walked to the Fullerton station and took the red line back south. I watched the city out the windows of the train. The three-flats and the corner stores and the church steeples sticking up over neighborhoods I didn’t know the names of. I arrived downtown and got back to the station and got my bag out of the locker and found the gate for Minneapolis with twelve minutes to spare. My feet were cold and I was breathing hard.

---

The passengers were different on the overnight bus, or maybe just more tired. A guy got on in Milwaukee who smelled like whiskey and kept trying to talk to the woman across the aisle. Eventually the driver had to come back and tell him to knock it off. He knocked it off but kept looking at her. She kept her face turned to the window.

There was a young guy near the back I watched for a while. He had a duffel bag and kept looking around like he was waiting for something. When we stopped in Madison he got off fast and didn’t get back on. About an hour later a woman three rows up started looking for her purse and couldn’t find it. She made a fuss about it. The driver pulled over at a rest stop to help her look. The purse was gone. She cried, not loud, and the woman with the Bible and the chicken got up and went and sat with her.

We stopped in Tomah. Everyone off, fifteen minutes, the driver said. The station was attached to a restaurant that serves the same food at every hour of the day. Red vinyl booths. Stools at the counter. The waitress had to be sixty-five if she was a day. She was wearing a name tag that said Marlene or Darlene, one of those. She was carrying a coffee pot in her right hand and she’d refill your cup whether you’d asked her to or not, and she had a way of not really looking at you when she did it. People don’t want to be looked at when they’re sitting alone in a bus station restaurant at ten at night. I had a sandwich I didn’t want. I think it was turkey. It came with a pickle spear and potato chips on the side.

I went outside for a few minutes just to feel something other than the air on the bus. The other passengers were doing the same thing. Standing around in small groups not really talking. A guy smoked a cigarette down to the filter. A woman was pacing back and forth, talking to herself or maybe praying. Then the driver called us back on.

Wisconsin in December is dark. The farms from Illinois were replaced by rolling hills and forest that comes right up to the road. The only lights are the gas stations every so often. I slept in pieces and woke up every time the bus slowed down.

---

The Minneapolis Greyhound station around two in the morning is not somewhere you want to be. The station was bright with that fluorescent light that makes everyone look sick. My layover was ninety minutes. Not enough time to go anywhere. I got a coffee out of a vending machine into a paper cup that burned my fingers, and I found a seat by the windows.

It was the usual for a bus station at that hour. An old man asleep across three seats with a newspaper on his face. A woman in a winter coat that was too heavy for indoors, reading a paperback with her lips moving. Two teenagers playing cards on the floor by an outlet where one of them had plugged in a radio. A janitor with a mop going slow back and forth, not really cleaning anything.

The man came over and sat down next to me without asking. He was maybe thirty-five. His coat was thin and he had a backpack that looked like it had everything he owned in it.

“Do you believe in hope?” he said.

I didn’t answer right away because I wasn’t sure what kind of answer he was looking for.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Sometimes.”

He nodded. Then he told me his story. He needed to get to Seattle. His sister was there, last he heard, and she was the only family he had. He’d had a job in Minneapolis and the job was over and the rent had come due. He needed thirty dollars for a ticket. Or twenty. Whatever I could spare.

I gave him five. It was what I could give and still eat for the rest of the trip. He thanked me and asked my name and I told him, and then he got up and walked over to somebody else sitting alone and started in again. I watched him go around the station for the next hour or so. Some people gave him money. Some waved him off. Some pretended they couldn’t hear him.

---

The last bus was smaller. Almost more like a van than a coach. Maybe fifteen of us. The driver this time was a woman, older, with gray hair pulled back. She drove the dark roads like she’d done it a thousand times.

We took I-35 north. The forest got thicker and the towns got smaller. Hinckley, Sandstone, Moose Lake. Hinckley I’d find out more about later, the fire of 1894, whole town burned down in an afternoon, four hundred people died they think but nobody knows for sure.

The bus stopped at each town and let off a person or two. The people getting off walked out into the dark and either got into cars that were waiting for them or walked off toward houses I couldn’t see. Once I saw the eyes of an animal in the headlights and then they were gone. Probably a deer.

I was past tired. My eyes were gritty and my back hurt from twenty hours in seats and I couldn’t sleep anyway. We were close.

Duluth, and the lights of Superior across the water came into view. Refineries and grain elevators lit up. Then the climb into the city itself, the streets going up from the harbor in terraces. The old brick buildings. The ore docks. The lift bridge way off in the distance with its red lights blinking. The lake was out there in the dark somewhere.

The station was just a building on a corner downtown. The driver pulled in and said end of the line and the rest of us got off.

It wasn’t quite eight. The sky was just barely starting to go gray on the east side. The streets were empty and the storefronts were dark. I’d been on buses for most of a day. I needed a shower and a bed and a meal in whatever order they came.

A car was at the curb already with the engine running. They’d called ahead to find out when the bus was coming in.

I stood there for a second before I went over to it. I’d been sitting for so long that I just needed to stand for a minute. I was filthy and exhausted and my feet hurt and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt clean. The cold was working on me through my coat.

The car door opened and the warm air came out into the cold.

“You look terrible,” the voice said.

“I feel terrible.”

I put my bag in the back seat and got in. The heater was going and the radio was on low and I didn’t recognize the song. I watched Duluth go by the window for a minute, and then I closed my eyes.

I saw you at the hardware store on Saturday You were buying picture hooks And I was buying something I’ve already forgotten Because I saw you there buying picture hooks

We talked for ten minutes about nothing Your sister’s new dog and the construction on Maple And I drove home and sat in the driveway for a while With the car running

You said you painted your living room And I almost asked what color But I didn’t ask what color I just said oh nice And you said yeah And the construction on Maple is really something They’ve been at it since September

I went back to the hardware store on Tuesday Not because I needed anything I just wanted to stand where our conversation was The aisle with the picture hooks I looked at the picture hooks for a long time Probably too long

You talked about the dog for too long You talked about your sister’s new dog For way too long Nobody does that

Unless they are also sitting in a driveway somewhere With the car running

The cabins at Birchwood were numbered one through nine but there was no cabin four. There had been, once. Earl Lindgren, who built the place in 1948, had put up ten cabins in the first two years, but number four burned in the winter of 1961 when a guest left the space heater running and went to town for dinner. Nobody was hurt. Earl cleared the foundation and planted grass over it and never rebuilt, and after a while people stopped asking about the gap in the numbers. The grass grew in thick and somebody put a picnic table there and that was that.

Karen had worked the front desk since May. Before that she’d been at the Red Owl in Walker, stocking shelves and running the register, which paid better but involved standing on concrete for eight hours and listening to Donna Krepke talk about her gallbladder. The resort job was seasonal, Memorial Day through Labor Day, and the pay was nothing special, but Karen got a room in the back of the lodge and she could see the lake from the window above the sink where she washed her coffee cup every morning.

She was thirty-four. She had been married for three years to a man named Dale who sold insurance in Brainerd, and then she had not been married, and then two years had passed and she was living in Walker and working at the Red Owl and then at the resort. That was the whole story, or at least all of it she told people. Minnesotans don’t press. You say you used to live in Brainerd and now you live in Walker and people nod and say oh sure, as if the distance between those two things is just geography.

The resort was small. Nine cabins, the lodge, a dock, a fish cleaning house, space for boat trailers after the boat was launched at the public landing, and a stretch of sandy beach that was mostly rocks. The beach had a sign that said SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK that Earl had put up in 1967 after a kid from Iowa cut his foot on a shell and the parents threatened to sue. They didn’t sue. Nobody ever sued. But the sign stayed up and the paint faded and nobody repainted it and now you could barely read it, which seemed about right for a warning that had been unnecessary in the first place.

Shirley Lindgren ran the place now. Earl had died in 1979, a stroke, out on the dock one July afternoon. He’d been tying off a boat and just went down. Shirley found him twenty minutes later. She told people he looked peaceful, which Karen doubted, but Shirley was from that generation and you let people have their version.

Shirley was seventy-one and did the books and the ordering and the things that required a phone call. Karen did the rest. Check-ins, check-outs, the morning coffee in the lodge, cabin turnovers on Saturdays, the small complaints that guests brought to the desk. The hot water takes too long. There’s a wasp nest under the eave. The people in cabin seven are loud. Karen handled these with a manner she had developed over the summer, which was to nod and write something down on a pad and say she’d take care of it. Sometimes she did. Sometimes the problem took care of itself. The wasps left on their own. The loud people in seven checked out.

---

He checked in on a Saturday in the middle of July. It had been hot all week, ninety and humid, and the cabins were full except for two and six. He took six. It was on the end, closest to the water, with a screened porch that looked out at the lake through a stand of birch trees. The porch had a metal glider that squeaked when you sat in it and a small table with a glass ashtray that nobody had used in years.

His name was Tom Ericson. She wrote it on the card along with his license plate number, a blue Ford pickup with Minnesota plates, and his home address, which was in Rochester. He paid for the week in advance, cash, which was unusual. Most people wrote checks. He counted out the bills carefully and she gave him the key and told him about the dock and the fish cleaning house and the café in Walker, and he thanked her and carried his bag to the cabin and she didn’t hear from him again until Monday.

That first day, Sunday, she noticed his boat was gone by six in the morning. It came back around noon. She saw him walk from the dock carrying a stringer of walleyes and go into the fish cleaning house, and she heard the water running in there for a while, and then he walked back to his cabin with a plate of fillets wrapped in newspaper. She didn’t go out to talk to him. There was no reason to.

She knew the type. Leech Lake got them every summer, men who came up alone to fish. Some of them were loud about it, the ones who’d been coming for years and knew every bar in Walker and wanted you to know they knew. They’d stand at the desk and tell you about the muskie they almost landed in ‘74 and ask if Al’s bait shop was still open and had you ever been to the Goose or just the Chase. Those men came in groups, usually. They wore caps with lures pinned to them and they smelled like beer by noon and they were harmless enough.

Then there were the quiet ones. They came alone, fished alone, cleaned their fish alone, ate alone. They weren’t unfriendly, exactly. Just contained. You’d see them on the dock at first light, rigging their lines in the dark, and you’d see them come back in the early afternoon with their catch, and in between those two events they were somewhere on the lake and you had no idea what they were thinking about. Karen wondered sometimes. You couldn’t help it. A man alone on a lake for ten hours, there had to be something going on in there, but whatever it was stayed on the water.

Tom Ericson was one of the quiet ones. She figured that out by Monday evening.

---

On Monday he came into the lodge around five o’clock. Karen was behind the desk sorting through a box of new keys that Shirley had ordered from a hardware place in Bemidji. Half of them didn’t fit anything. Shirley had ordered the wrong blanks, which was the kind of thing that happened more often now, though nobody said anything about it. You just reordered and didn’t make a fuss.

He asked if she had a map of the lake.

She did. There was a stack of them behind the desk, the kind that the chamber of commerce printed up every year, with the depth contours and the public accesses marked and advertisements for bait shops and cafés nearby. She pulled one out and unfolded it on the desk and he leaned over it and she pointed out the spots she knew about, which were the spots everyone knew about. The sunken island on the south end. The weed beds in Walker Bay. The rock pile off Pine Point.

He asked if she fished.

She said she used to. Her ex-husband had taken her out a few times, trolling for walleye, but she hadn’t kept up with it after the divorce. She said divorce without flinching. She’d said it enough times by now that it was just a word. He nodded.

He said he’d been fishing Walker Bay all day and hadn’t caught much. A couple of small ones he’d thrown back. He thought maybe the heat was putting them deep.

She said that was probably right. The old-timers said the walleye moved to the deep mud when it got like this. Twenty, twenty-five feet. You had to find the thermocline, which was a word she’d learned from a visitor earlier in the summer. Tom thanked her for the map and took it back to his cabin. She watched him go. He walked slowly, not in a hurry. He was maybe forty, maybe a little older. Tall, dark hair cut short. Tanned. He wore jeans and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up even in the heat, and work boots.

She went back to the keys. Most of them were useless. She put them in a bag to send back.

---

Walker had a café on Minnesota Avenue that had been there since the sixties, though it had changed hands three times that Karen knew of and probably more before that. The current owners were a couple from Iowa who’d moved up in ‘78 and who made a decent hot beef sandwich and a walleye basket that was fine if you didn’t think too hard about where the walleye came from. The place used to be called the Pine Cone and before that it was something else, Dorothy’s maybe, or Dot’s, Karen could never remember which and the people who would know were the people who’d been here long enough that they called every restaurant by its oldest name anyway, so it didn’t matter. The booths were orange vinyl and the counter was Formica and there was a pie case by the register that usually had two or three pies in it, the kind with the too-tall meringue that looked impressive but tasted like sweetened air. Karen had tried the coconut cream once. The hot beef was the thing to get. Or the walleye basket on Fridays. Karen ate there once or twice a week, on nights when she didn’t feel like cooking on the hot plate in her room.

On Tuesday she drove in for dinner and saw Tom’s blue truck in the lot. He was sitting at the counter eating a burger and reading the Pilot-Independent. She almost sat at a booth but then didn’t, and took the stool two down from his, and the waitress got her a cup of coffee out of habit.

He looked up from the paper and nodded and she nodded back. For a while neither of them said anything. The café was half full. A family with kids in a booth by the window. Two men in seed caps at a table arguing about something, maybe baseball, maybe politics, it was hard to tell from the tone because up here both subjects got the same level of measured disagreement. The jukebox was playing something by Loretta Lynn.

“How’d you do today,” she said.

He’d done better. He took her advice about going deep and picked up four walleyes off the sunken island, trolling with a crawler harness right along the break. Kept two, released two. He said the big ones were in eighteen feet, right where the hard bottom turned to mud, and he smiled. It was a good smile. She looked down at her coffee.

He asked how long she’d been at the resort.

Since May, she said. But she’d been in Walker for two years. She left it at that and he didn’t push.

He told her he was from Rochester. He worked at the clinic there, not as a doctor, he said quickly, in maintenance. The buildings, the equipment, that kind of thing. He’d been doing it for fifteen years.

He came up to Leech Lake once a year, usually in July. He’d been doing it for five or six years. Always alone.

They talked for another twenty minutes. He asked about the lake, the town, whether the swimming was any good at the resort, though Karen never saw him swim. She told him about the beach, which was more rocks than sand, and about the better beach at the county park on the other end of town, and about the muskie that somebody had caught off the city dock in Walker the previous summer that was big enough to make the paper.

The waitress refilled her coffee. He paid his check and stood up and said he’d see her around, and she said sure, and he left. She sat and drank her coffee and watched his headlights pull out of the lot and turn right toward the resort.

She paid for her dinner and drove back in the dark. The lake was black except for one light on the far shore that could have been anything. She couldn’t tell.

Wednesday was hot again. She did laundry in the morning and hung the sheets on the line behind the lodge where they dried stiff in the sun.

Around eleven Tom came to the desk and asked if she had a Phillips-head screwdriver. The screen door on his porch was loose, the bottom hinge. She said she’d send someone to fix it and he said don’t bother, he could do it himself if she had the screwdriver. She found one in the drawer behind the desk, an old one with a wooden handle that had belonged to Earl. She gave it to him and he brought it back an hour later and said the hinge was tight now and he’d also tightened the one on the front door while he was at it, it had been wobbling.

She thanked him. He stood at the desk for a minute. He was looking at the mounted walleye on the wall behind her, a big one, ten or eleven pounds, with a brass plate underneath that said LEECH LAKE 1971 E. LINDGREN.

“Earl?” he said.

“Earl,” she said.

“Nice fish.”

“He talked about that fish for the rest of his life. Shirley said she heard about it more than she heard about their wedding.”

He smiled again. “Where’d he catch it?”

“He’d never say exactly. Somewhere in Kabekona Bay is all anyone could get out of him. He had a spot he wouldn’t share. Took it to the grave.”

“Good for him.”

He left. The whole exchange had taken maybe five minutes. It was the easiest conversation she’d had in months.

She thought about this for a while and then the phone rang and it was a woman asking about rates for August and Karen talked to her for ten minutes and then Shirley came in with a box of dish soap for the cabins and needed help carrying it and the morning went on. The guests in cabin eight wanted extra towels. The toilet in cabin nine was running. Karen jiggled the handle and it stopped. She made a note to replace the flapper valve when she had a chance, which probably meant October, after everyone had gone home.

---

Thursday morning was overcast and cooler. A front had come through in the night and the lake was choppy, with whitecaps out past the point. Karen stood on the dock in the early light and watched the waves come in. The dock was old, built by Earl and his brother-in-law in 1961, and it moved with the water in a way that was probably not safe. Shirley talked about replacing it every spring and never did. The boards were gray and splintery and one of them, the third from the end, had a soft spot you had to step around.

She didn’t see Tom that morning. His truck was in the lot but he hadn’t gone out on the lake. She noticed that she had noticed this and went back inside.

She went back to the lodge and did the things she did every morning. Started the coffee. Wiped down the counter. Checked the calendar for any arrivals or departures. There were none. The resort was full and everyone was staying through Saturday. She straightened the rack of brochures by the door, the ones for Paul Bunyan Land and the Heartland Trail and the casino that was newly built south of town. The Paul Bunyan Land brochure had a photo of the big talking Paul Bunyan statue in Brainerd on the front, the one that said hello to children by name, and Karen had been to it once as a kid and it had scared her. She told people this and they always laughed but she’d been five and the statue was huge and it knew her name, which at five years old is not funny, it is terrifying. She didn’t gamble and she’d never been to the casino. But the brochures needed straightening and so she straightened them.

Around ten o’clock the sky cleared and the wind dropped and the lake went flat. Tom came into the lodge. He was wearing the same flannel shirt, or one just like it. He poured himself a cup of coffee and stood by the window looking out at the water.

“Thought it was going to blow all day,” he said.

“It does that. Comes in fast, goes out fast.”

“I was going to go out early but it looked rough.”

“You could go now. It’ll be calm till evening probably.”

He nodded and drank his coffee. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get on the water. He walked over to the bookshelf by the fireplace, the one that had been there since Earl’s time, filled with paperbacks that guests had left behind over thirty years. Tom pulled one out and looked at the cover and put it back. He pulled out another one.

“You read any of these?” he asked.

“Some. There’s a Louis L’Amour in there that’s not bad. The Michener is about eight hundred pages and I got to page forty.”

He laughed. It was quiet, just a huff of air, but it was a real laugh. “I tried to read a Michener once. Hawaii. I think I’m still reading it technically.”

“I keep meaning to go back to it.”

“You won’t.”

“I know.”

He put the book back and stood there. The light from the window was behind him and she couldn’t see his face clearly. She realized she didn’t know much about him. She didn’t know if he had kids or what he did on weekends in Rochester or whether his house was messy or clean. She knew he fished walleye and could fix a screen door.

He took his coffee and went to the door.

“Good luck out there,” she said.

“Thanks.”

He was gone for six hours. She didn’t count. She just noticed when his boat pulled back in and he walked up from the dock with his rod and his tackle box and a stringer with fish on it.

---

Thursday night she went to the café again and he was there again. This time she sat at the counter next to him without thinking about it, or without thinking about it as much as she had a couple nights before.

He was eating the walleye basket. She ordered the same. The waitress, whose name was Denise and who had worked at this café for at least as long as Karen had been in Walker and possibly since the Eisenhower administration, brought her a coffee and raised one eyebrow approximately a quarter of an inch, which was the Denise equivalent of a detailed inquiry into Karen’s personal life. Karen ignored it.

“Caught six today,” Tom said. “Kept three. The biggest one was maybe four pounds.”

“Where?”

“Off the sunken island again. Same depth. I think they’re camped down there.”

They ate. The café was quieter tonight. The family with kids was gone. The two men in seed caps were back, same table, same disagreement. Karen had decided it was about baseball. One of them was a Twins fan and the other one was wrong about something, she couldn’t tell what, but the wrong one kept shaking his head and the Twins fan kept pointing at the table with his fork, jabbing at the table really, as if the answer was written there and the other man just refused to read it.

The jukebox was playing something country. She didn’t know what.

Tom asked where she was from. Originally, he meant.

Brainerd, she said. Born and raised. Her parents still lived there, on the south side, near the water tower. Her dad worked at the paper mill until it closed and then drove truck for a concrete company until he retired. Her mom worked at the school. Regular folk. She said “regular folk” and heard how it sounded and added, “I mean that in a good way.” He said he knew what she meant.

He was from Albert Lea. His parents were farmers, dairy, small operation. They’d sold the cows in ‘74 when the prices went bad and his dad took a job at the Wilson plant and then the plant closed too and they moved to Austin and then his dad drove truck. Similar, she said. He agreed.

He asked why she’d come to Walker and she said she’d needed to go somewhere and Walker was somewhere.

She asked if he’d been married and he said yes, a long time ago. Early twenties. It hadn’t lasted. He said “it didn’t work out” and she said “mine either” and that was all they said about it.

Denise refilled their coffees. The jukebox played. One of the old men at the table raised his voice slightly and the other one shook his head. A truck went by on the highway.

Tom paid for both their dinners. Karen let him. He just put the money on the counter and they walked out into the parking lot where the sky was still light because it was July and the days lasted forever.

“See you tomorrow,” he said.

“I’ll be around.”

She drove back to the resort behind him, his taillights in front of her on the highway.

---

Friday he came to the desk in the morning and asked if she wanted to go out on the lake.

She almost said no. She wasn’t sure why. As long as they were talking at the desk or over the counter at the café, it was just talking. A boat was something else.

She said yes.

He had a fourteen-foot Lund that he’d brought on a trailer, aluminum, with a 15-horse Johnson on the back. The morning was cool and the lake was glass, not a ripple, completely flat, and Karen knew that people who lived on the lake would talk about this morning later, that it would become one of those mornings.

They motored out slow. He didn’t say where they were going. The lake opened up around them. Leech Lake is big. A hundred and twelve thousand acres, which is a number that doesn’t mean anything until you’re out in the middle of it in a fourteen-foot boat and the shoreline is a dark line in every direction and you understand that you’re very small. Karen had known this her whole life, had grown up around lakes, but it still got her sometimes. A pelican flew over them, low, heading east. She’d never liked pelicans. They looked wrong for Minnesota, too tropical or something, even though they’d been coming to these lakes forever.

He cut the motor near the sunken island. She could feel it before she could see it, the water going from dark to light as the bottom came up. He rigged two rods with crawler harnesses and handed her one and she took it and they started fishing.

For a while they didn’t talk. The boat drifted. The lines went down. She watched her rod tip and felt the old familiar thing, the patience of it, the boredom. It had been years. She’d forgotten how it felt to just sit on a lake and wait.

He caught the first one. A walleye, maybe two pounds, which he brought in and unhooked carefully and held up for a second and then released. She watched his hands. He handled the fish without squeezing it and he wet his hands first so the slime coat wouldn’t come off. Not everyone bothered with that.

“You let it go,” she said.

“I’ve got enough fillets for the week.”

She nearly caught one twenty minutes later. It pulled hard and she brought it in badly, too fast, and it spit the hook at the boat and was gone. She swore, one word, and then was embarrassed, and he looked at her and said “that was a nice fish” and she could tell he wasn’t teasing.

They fished until noon. She caught two more and he caught three and they kept one between them, a big one, maybe five pounds, that Tom said he’d fillet for her if she wanted. She said she’d cook it if he wanted. Then they were both quiet for a minute.

He started the motor and they went back.

At the dock he tied off the boat and she climbed out and he handed her the rod and the tackle box and the stringer with the one walleye on it. He stepped onto the dock and they walked up toward the cabins and at the point where the path split, one way to the lodge and one way to the cabins, they stopped.

“I’ll clean the fish,” he said.

“I’ll cook it. Six o’clock?”

“Six is good.”

She walked back to the lodge.

---

She cooked the walleye on the hot plate in her room, breaded with flour and salt and pepper and fried in butter, which was the only way she knew how to cook walleye and which was also the best way. She didn’t have a proper kitchen, just the hot plate and a small counter and a mini-fridge, so she cooked the fish in two batches in a cast-iron skillet she’d bought at a yard sale in Hackensack the previous fall. The skillet was the only thing in her room that she cared about keeping. She’d left Brainerd with a car full of stuff and over the two years she’d gotten rid of most of it and the skillet had survived every purge.

She brought the fish and a few beers to his porch and they ate on the metal glider, the one that squeaked. The screen door was tight now, the hinge he’d fixed. The birch trees made shadows on the porch and the lake was visible through them, bright with the evening sun. There was a loon somewhere, far out. You could hear it but not see it.

They talked. It was easier now, after the morning on the lake. He told her about his job at the clinic, the boilers and the HVAC systems and the things that went wrong at three in the morning and how the night security guard, a guy named Phil, always had a thermos of the worst coffee Tom had ever tasted but would be offended if you didn’t take some. She told him about the guests at the resort, the small emergencies, the man from Edina who put his foot through the dock. He laughed at that. She told him about Shirley ordering the wrong keys and about the time a raccoon got into cabin three and the guest, a woman from St. Cloud, had called the front desk at midnight and said there was a burglar in her kitchen and Karen had gone over with a broom. She was talking too much. She knew she was talking too much. She kept talking.

He asked her what she was going to do in September when the resort closed. She said she didn’t know. Go back to the Red Owl, probably. Get an apartment in town again. She’d figure it out.

He nodded.

It got dark. The loon called again, closer now. The mosquitoes came out and they moved inside the cabin, to the small table by the window, and she opened another beer and he opened one and they sat across from each other in the yellow light of the cabin lamp. The lamp had a shade with a burn mark on it, a brown spot where someone had put it too close to a lightbulb years ago. Karen had noticed it the first time she cleaned this cabin in May and had meant to replace it and never had.

He told her about Albert Lea, about the farm. The cows, the barn, the particular smell of hay in July. He told her about his father, who had never wanted to sell the cows, who had done it because the numbers said he had to, and who had never been the same after. His father was still alive, living in Austin, but something had gone out of him. Tom said he visited every couple months and they sat in the living room and watched television and didn’t talk about the farm.

She understood that.

They sat and didn’t talk for a while. Outside, the lake made small sounds against the shore. Inside, the cabin smelled like fried fish and beer and the pine walls that had been absorbing things since 1948.

She should go. She knew that. Not because anything bad was happening but because staying wasn’t right. She sat in the chair and held her beer and looked at the burn mark on the lamp shade and didn’t move.

“I should get back,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Early morning.”

“Sure.”

She stood up. He held the door for her and she stepped onto the porch and the cool air hit her and she could smell the lake.

“Thank you for the fish,” he said.

“Sure.”

She walked back to the lodge. The grass between the cabins was wet with dew. She passed the gap where cabin four had been and went inside and brushed her teeth and got into bed.

---

Saturday morning she woke up at five and went to the desk because Saturdays were turnover days and there was work to do. Cabins to clean. Guests checking out, new ones checking in. She started the coffee and got out the cleaning supplies and began the list of things that needed to happen before noon.

Tom’s checkout was at eleven. He’d paid through Saturday. She knew this because she’d written it on the card when he checked in and she’d looked at the card again on Thursday, which she’d told herself was just to confirm the dates, which it was, but it was also something else that she didn’t want to name.

She cleaned cabins one, two, and three. They were the usual Saturday mess. Sheets to strip, floors to sweep, bathrooms to scrub. Cabin one had left the stove on, which happened more than you’d think and which made Karen furious every time even though she never said anything about it because what would be the point, they were already gone. Cabin two had left a full garbage bag on the porch and a note that said “Sorry about the ants” and Karen found the ants, a line of them coming in under the kitchen window, and she sprayed them and wiped up the dead ones and washed the counter and moved on. Cabin three was fine. Cabin three was always fine. The couple in three this week had been coming for eight years and they left the place cleaner than they found it. Karen wished all the cabins were cabin three.

At nine o’clock she looked out the lodge window and saw that Tom’s truck was gone. The trailer was still there, the Lund sitting on it, so he hadn’t left for good. He was probably in town, getting gas or breakfast or picking up something he needed. She went back to cleaning.

At ten she finished cabin five and walked down to six. His cabin. The door was open. The bed was made. The cabin was neat. Neater than any cabin she’d cleaned all morning. The garbage was in the trash. The dishes were washed and stacked on the counter. The bathroom was wiped down. He’d even folded the towels.

On the table by the window, next to the lamp with the burn mark, there was a piece of paper folded once. Her name was written on the outside in blue ink, in handwriting she didn’t recognize because she’d never seen his handwriting. KAREN. Just that. Block letters, careful.

She picked it up and unfolded it and read the one sentence that was written there. She read it again. Then she folded the paper and put it in the pocket of her jeans and stood there for a while, in his cabin, not doing anything.

His key was on the table next to where the note had been. Karen picked it up and held it in her hand, the old key with the wooden fob that had a “6” burned into it, one of Earl’s originals. She held it for a minute. Then she put it in her other pocket and went to strip the bed.

The cabin got cleaned like all the cabins, top to bottom, bathroom first, then the kitchen, then the main room. She swept the floor and mopped it and emptied the trash and put fresh sheets on the bed and fresh towels in the bathroom. Replaced the soap. Checked the screen door and it was tight, the hinge still good.

On the porch she stopped for a moment. The glider was there. The ashtray. The lake through the birch trees. She stood there longer than she needed to.

The note was still in her pocket. She took it out and read it one more time. Put it back.

She locked cabin six and walked to the lodge and put the key on the hook and sat down behind the desk. The next guests were due at two. She straightened the brochures. Wiped down the counter. Made a fresh pot of coffee, even though nobody had asked for one.

He left the Twin Cities at four in the afternoon with the sky already gray and thickening. The Ford’s wipers needed replacing. He’d meant to do it in October, had actually gone to the Fleet Farm and stood in the aisle holding the package and then put it back because they wanted eleven dollars for wipers and that seemed like too much. Linda would have had something to say about that. Linda had something to say about most things. Linda had something to say about the way he loaded the dishwasher and the way he folded towels and the way he drove, which was too slow, she said, though he’d never gotten a ticket and she’d gotten two in the last three years, which he didn’t bring up because bringing it up would mean a conversation and conversations with Linda had become something to get through rather than something to have.

The first flakes came somewhere around Forest Lake, scattered, drifting across the windshield. He turned the wipers on and they stuttered and dragged and left half-moons of wet across the glass. Eleven dollars.

The radio was playing the Eagles. He turned it off. He’d never liked the Eagles. Linda liked the Eagles.

The highway was busy, trucks and station wagons, everyone going somewhere on a Thursday. He stayed in the right lane and let them pass. A brown Chevy went by with one of those bobblehead dogs in the back window. He’d forgotten his gloves. They were on the table by the front door, the thick ones his brother Erik had given him two Christmases ago, or maybe it was three—Erik who hadn’t called since August, Erik who still owed him three hundred dollars from a Vikings bet he kept calling double or nothing. It wasn’t double or nothing. He’d have to tell Erik about this eventually, the leaving, and Erik would say something about how he should have seen it coming and Erik would be right and that would make it worse. Erik was usually right about things that didn’t matter and wrong about things that did. The three hundred dollars, for instance.

By Wyoming the snow had settled in. Steady, not heavy, but the kind that means you need eleven dollar wipers.

He thought about stopping for gas. The needle said three-quarters and he didn’t want to stop. He’d been talking to people all day at work — forty-five minutes with Kendrick about the inventory system, and his throat was tired. That was a thing that happened to him now that didn’t used to happen. His throat getting tired.

The duffel bag sat on the back seat. He’d packed it in ten minutes. Two flannel shirts, one with a hole under the arm. Underwear, socks, shaving kit. A book he’d been reading since September that he wasn’t sure he liked. A bag of beef jerky from the pantry.

Linda was at work. Or wherever she was. He’d stopped asking and she’d stopped telling him.

A sign emerged from the snow. NORTH BRANCH 2 MILES. He was sure he’d already passed North Branch. But here was the sign for it.

He turned the radio back on. Static. He turned it off.

Traffic thinned. The sensible people were pulling off into Perkins lots and Holiday stations. He watched the taillights slide away on the exit ramps. A Winnebago pulled off with its left blinker on though the exit was to the right.

Linda would be home by now. She’d see the toothbrush missing, the razor. She’d probably notice the Old Spice bottle had moved—the bottle she’d given him last Christmas that he never wore but kept because throwing it away felt like the beginning of conversation he didn’t want to have. She would not be surprised. That was what got him, sitting here, the fact that he was almost sure she would not be surprised, and the small stupid part of him that wanted her to be. Even if the surprise was just annoyance. Even annoyance would be something other than indifference.

Or she wouldn’t be home at all. She’d be wherever she went on the days she said she was working late. He never checked. He didn’t want to know.

The snow came harder. He slowed to forty-five, then forty. he couldn’t see the ditches. The wipers were losing.

A semi passed going south, headlights blinding, its wake a wall of white that blotted out the road. He held the wheel and waited. When the road came back the truck’s taillights in the rearview were wrong—not red but a pale amber. He stared at them until they shrank away.

He drove. Snow on the road and snow in the air and the wipers going. He drove for a while without thinking about anything.

Hinckley. He could stop at Tobies for a caramel roll and coffee and call Linda from the pay phone.

And say what? I don’t know where I’m going? I’m at a restaurant in Hinckley and my fingers are numb because I forgot my gloves?

He kept driving. His back hurt. It always hurt. The doctor said disc, the specialist said SI joint.

The dashboard clock said 4:27. It had said 4:27 for a while. He watched the second hand go around and the minutes didn’t change. Something electrical. He’d had a short in the dash light last winter and paid eighty dollars to have it fixed and Linda had said why didn’t you just leave it and he’d said because it bothered me and she’d said that’s the problem with you, everything bothers you. He thought about that conversation more than he should. He kept going back to it. Not because it was important but because it was the shape of every conversation they’d had for the last five years.

The wipers were done. Ice building at the base of the blades, each pass smearing more than it cleared. He hunched forward. His neck ached. He should pull over and clear the blades by hand but he didn’t want to stop. If he stopped he’d have to stand outside the car in the cold and then get back in and then decide to keep going and right now the going was just happening on its own and he didn’t want to interfere with that.

The radio came on by itself. He hadn’t touched it. A woman singing something slow. The voice sounded far off and the static moved around it. Linda used to sing. She had a decent voice, a little flat on the high notes, and she’d sing while she cooked. She stopped sometime around 1980. He couldn’t remember if he’d noticed when it happened.

He turned the radio off.

Past Sandstone the snow changed. The flakes got bigger, softer. More of them. The headlights couldn’t find the end of it.

He thought about the cabin. His father’s place up past Grand Marais. Two years since he’d been there. Maybe three. The pipes would be frozen. Mice in everything. But there was a wood-burning stove and birch stacked under the overhang.

She’d never liked the cabin. Too remote. She couldn’t sleep there, she said. The last time they went, ‘75 or ‘76, she read magazines by the stove, turning the pages fast, and he fished off the dock and caught nothing. It rained the second day. They drove home in silence and stopped at a McDonald’s in Hinckley and sat across from each other with Quarter Pounders and he remembered thinking this is over. And then they went on for another ten years. You do that. People do that.

He had a thought about the cabin that he tried to hold onto—something about what it would be like to get there, to walk in, what it would smell like—but it slipped away. He was tired. He was more tired than he’d realized.

Grand Marais was three hours past Duluth in this weather. Duluth was an hour and a half. The math was bad.

He almost missed Moose Lake. The sign loomed out of the white and was gone. He was alone on the highway. On a Thursday, even in a storm, there should be other cars. He gripped the wheel tighter. His stomach felt hollow and tight.

The gas gauge hadn’t moved. Three-quarters, same as Forest Lake. That was eighty miles back, maybe ninety. The Ford got eighteen on the highway. The needle should have dropped. It sat there.

He drove. The snow wasn’t falling anymore so much as just being. A thing he moved through. The sky and the ground had merged and the road was two faint ruts where other tires had been before. He was driving by feel, by the slight banking of the curves, by the memory of twenty years of this highway in better weather.

He passed a mailbox standing in the middle of the white with its flag up. There was no house near it. There was no driveway leading to it.

He tried to think about when things had gone wrong with Linda. Not the big things—he knew the big things, the miscarriage in ‘73 and then the other one in ‘77 and his father dying and her losing the job at the school. He meant the thing underneath the things. When it actually turned. He thought it might have been a night in 1979 or maybe 1980 when they were watching TV and she said something—he couldn’t remember what—and he didn’t answer, not because he was angry but because he was reading the paper, and she didn’t say it again, and that was it, that was the moment, except it wasn’t, because there were a hundred moments like that and none of them were the moment but all of them collectively were.

Or maybe it was simpler than that. She used to lean back into him when he came up behind her at the kitchen window. Just an inch. And then she stopped. He didn’t know when.

The road curved and the back end broke loose. He turned into it the way his father taught him—sixteen years old, the parking lot of the Lutheran church, his father saying again, again. The tires caught. His heart hammered. His hands were shaking.

A sign. VÄSTERVIK 47 MILES. He’d never heard of it. Old sign, rusted. His father was Swedish on his mother’s side. He passed it.

The radio came on again. Same woman. Other voices underneath, murmuring. He reached for the knob to turn it off but his hand stopped halfway there. The song was familiar. The song was something Linda used to sing, when she still sang, when there was still something for her to sing about. He turned it off. The knob was cold under his finger.

The road was gone. He could feel it—the wheels turning on nothing, the white everywhere, above and below. The Ford moving through it.

He should be afraid of this. He wasn’t. He felt empty. Not peaceful—empty. Like the house on a Sunday afternoon when Linda was out and the TV was off and there was nothing to do and nothing to want to do.

He remembered a joke Erik told at Thanksgiving. Something about a bartender and a marriage. Erik had laughed. Linda hadn’t. He couldn’t remember the joke now, just Erik laughing and Linda not laughing and the turkey sitting there getting cold because nobody wanted to be the one to say let’s eat.

His father died in the cabin. February. Heart attack, or that’s what Doc Lindgren said, and nobody argued. The mail carrier found him. Three days. He was sitting in the chair by the stove with a cup of coffee gone cold. The cup had a walleye on it. A gas station cup. He didn’t know why that was the detail that stayed. The funeral he could barely picture. His mother’s face, gone. But the walleye on the cup, sharp as a photograph.

His father built the cabin in ‘62. Hauled lumber up the dirt road alone. Finished in October. He was that kind of man. Erik wanted to be that kind of man. He himself was not.

Something in the headlights. A man, walking, where nobody could be walking, in a canvas coat. He slowed. The man looked up. His father’s face, younger than any photo he’d seen. His father raised a hand.

Then he was past him and the snow had filled in behind and the road went on or whatever it was that was under his tires went on.

His back ached. His hands were numb. He wished he had the gloves.

October ‘69. Linda in a dress her mother made. He’d been so sure. But you’re always sure at twenty-four. The sureness is the whole point of twenty-four.

What happened to them. His father dying and Linda at the funeral not touching him. The miscarriages, the two of them, which they called “the miscarriage” like there was only one because talking about two was worse somehow. The warehouse and Kendrick. Linda on the couch watching The Price Is Right with the sound off for three weeks after the school let her go. The fact that he chewed ice. The fact that she left her shoes in the middle of the hallway. He was building a list again. He always built a list.

The snow fell and he drove on.

The whiteness thinned. He felt it in his eyes first — a change in the pressure, and then the road came back, a gray line, and then the ditches and the pines and the sky.

DULUTH 12 MILES.

The clock said 5. Just the 5.

He drove through Duluth. Plows out. Stoplights swinging in the wind. He stopped at a red light behind a city bus with an ad for a personal injury lawyer, the lawyer’s face huge and beaming, and he sat there looking at it and wondering how long you’d have to hold a smile like that for a photographer. He thought about what the lawyer’s wife thought about the ad. He thought about whether the lawyer had a wife. The light changed.

He stopped at a Holiday station. The kid behind the counter was reading Dune. He remembered reading Dune. He couldn’t remember if he’d liked it. He paid for gas, coffee, and powdered donuts. His hands were stiff making the change and he dropped a nickel and the kid picked it up for him and neither of them said anything about it.

“Headed north?” the kid said.

“Yeah.”

“Storm’s supposed to get worse.”

“That’s what they say.”

“My uncle’s got a place up in Silver Bay. Says the snow up there is something else.”

“I bet.”

“Drive safe.”

He took 61 along the lake. Clouds low, couldn’t see the water. Through Two Harbors. Past Gooseberry. The pines came down to the edge of the highway.

The mile markers counted wrong. 47, 48, 47, 49. He stopped watching.

He pulled into a rest stop past Castle Danger. Empty lot except for a Buick buried in snow. Bathrooms closed. He parked and killed the engine.

He sat there for a while. He didn’t think about much. The quiet pressed in.

There was a pay phone by the bathrooms. He walked to it. The receiver was hanging loose. The dial tone was wrong, too low. He put a quarter in and dialed home. It rang. He counted the rings. At ten he hung up and stood there holding the dead receiver and looking at the snow.

He ate the donuts in the car. The coffee was cold. One of the donuts had no powdered sugar on it, just bare cake, and he ate that one last. Linda ate the worst thing on her plate last too. He’d never noticed that about himself before, that he did the same thing. Or maybe he’d always done it. Or maybe he’d picked it up from her. Twenty-two years of eating meals across from someone—you probably pick up all kinds of things you don’t know about.

When the dark was complete he reclined the seat and closed his eyes.

He dreamed about driving. Linda in the passenger seat. He turned to look at her and she was made of snow, features going soft, and she was saying something but the defroster was too loud. Then she was gone and there was powdered sugar on the seat.

He woke to everything covered. Pale sun behind clouds. The Buick was gone. No tracks.

He started the engine. The dashboard clock was blank. Gas gauge, three-quarters.

He pulled onto 61.

The road was plowed and empty. Black line, white everything else. Grand Marais was ahead of him. The cabin was ahead of him. He thought about his father sitting in the chair and he thought about the stove and the birch and he thought about whether the mice had gotten into the coffee and he thought about nothing.

Linda would be getting up right about now. Making coffee. Standing at the window over the sink. She’d go to work and the house would be quiet. Not the quiet of nobody being there, the quiet of somebody being gone. Different thing.

He didn’t know if he was coming back. He tried to think about what coming back would mean — walking through the front door, putting the duffel bag in the closet, Linda in the kitchen or Linda not in the kitchen, and he couldn’t make the picture hold. It kept going flat, like a photograph of a place you used to live.

The highway followed the shore. Pines against white. Gray sky.

Up ahead a woman was standing by the road. He slowed down. She was young. She was wearing a summer dress, which was wrong, bare arms, bare feet in the snow, which was wrong. He slowed more. She watched him come and there was something about her face—

He didn’t stop. He thought about stopping. He was past her. He looked in the rearview and there was nothing, just the road and the snow.

He drove. He turned the wipers on. They worked.

There was more snow coming, he could see it building in the west, a dark band low on the sky. He still had a long way to go. He didn’t know how far exactly. The mile markers weren’t any help. He adjusted his grip on the wheel and leaned back in the seat, trying to take the pressure off his back, and he drove north into it.