At the end-of-season supper I cook every year, my son’s wife lifted the plate right out of my hands, tipped it into the dish by the store steps where Pepper eats, and announced to the whole table that STAFF EAT LAST.
I didn’t argue with her.
I reached back and pulled the apron string loose.
Then I said maybe everybody out here should know whose name is on the ground their trucks sit on.
Dennis’s face went flat.
I had been up since four for four days straight, running the smoker, mixing potato salad in a tub with a cracked lid I keep meaning to replace.
Twenty-six people came down the hill by six.
Renters, mostly.
Two neighbors.
And a couple from the city Bethany kept walking toward the water like she was showing a listing.
All afternoon she said the same thing about me.
“This is Patricia,” she told them. “She keeps our cabins turned over.”
OURS.
I heard it four times before I quit counting.
Dennis heard it too.
He looked at the lake.
When Harlan died I put the two of them in cabin four so Dennis could get his flooring business back on its feet.
Eight months, NO RENT.
That was the deal.
Nineteen months later Bethany had a different version of it in her head.
She said our camp out loud, to people who rent from me.
She talked about pulling the shower house out and tiling a new one.
She told the city couple the ramp lot and the back pines were doing nothing, and that a builder had walked them.
I kept my mouth shut all summer.
Until supper.
Everybody had eaten. I fixed a plate at the end of the line and turned to find a chair.
Bethany got in front of me.
“You can wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“People are still going back for seconds.”
“There’s most of a pan left on the table.”
She smiled at me the way you smile at somebody slow.
“Patricia. You’re working tonight. Staff eat last.”
A fork stopped moving somewhere behind me.
I looked at Dennis.
He set his can down on the arm of his chair.
“Mom. Don’t turn this into a thing.”
There it was, in front of people who pay me by the week.
Bethany took the plate out of my hands, walked it down the steps, and raked it into Pepper’s dish with the side of her thumb.
Then she handed me back the empty one.
“Nothing goes to waste.”
Alma from cabin two laughed and turned it into a cough.
Dennis smiled at his own knee.
I hung the apron on the back of a chair.
“All right,” I said.
Bethany looked satisfied with how that had gone.
I took my barn coat off the rail and put it on, one arm and then the other.
“Before anybody gets into the pie, I think this table has earned some information.”
Her smile went thin.
“What now?”
I looked past her, down the slope, at the boat shed.
Harlan’s desk is still in there.
So is a gray steel cabinet, and its key rides on my ring.
In it are the trust papers, the deed, and one agreement with Dennis’s name at the bottom.
“Give me two minutes.”
“Bring ice up while you’re down there.”
I didn’t answer that.
Here is the part Bethany never once asked about.
The cabin she calls hers belongs to the Faircloth trust.
So does the store.
The ramp.
The shower house.
The nine cabins, the pines, and the ninety-four acres out to the county road.
Dennis and Bethany own none of it.
They live down there because I said they could.
And the only person on this lake who can sign a foot of it away is ME.
I let myself into the shed, opened the cabinet, and lifted out a folder so fat I used both hands on the stairs.
The agreement he put his name to was clipped on top, dated the March they moved in.
No share of anything. No money in the place. No right to sell so much as a fence post.
I brought it back up the hill.
Halfway up I could hear Bethany selling the city couple on the frontage, how it was all just sitting there.
Dennis stood next to her with his hands in his pockets and let her talk.
I set the folder in the middle of the table, next to the citronella candle.
The talking quit.
Bethany looked down at it.
“What is that?”
I opened it and turned the first page around to face her.
“The deed.”
Dennis went the color of the paper cloth.
Bethany laughed.
“The deed to WHAT?”
I looked around at everyone she had worked on all afternoon.
Then back at her.
“To the ground you’ve had these people believing is YOURS.”
Her mouth closed.
Dennis’s eyes went past the deed to the page under it.
That page doesn’t say who owns this place.
It says how many days a person gets to be off it.
Paragraph nine
I slid the deed aside and put my thumb on the line so nobody’s hand could move the paper.
Paragraph nine. Fourteen days written notice, delivered by hand, and the right to occupy cabin four ends. No cause has to be given. Under it, Dennis’s signature in the fat blue pen we keep on the store counter, and the date, March the eleventh, in his own printing.
He didn’t read it out. He read it the way a man reads a bill he already knows the number on.
Bethany leaned over his shoulder.
“That’s not enforceable. You can’t just hand somebody a piece of paper.”
“You can if he signed one.”
Ray Pruitt from cabin six had his boy on his knee and he set the boy down on the grass.
I moved the candle tin off the corner of the folder. There was still a plate of bars nobody was going to touch now and a green pitcher sweating onto the cloth, and twenty-six people deciding whether to look at me or at their forks.
Dennis put two fingers on the date like he was checking the year.
“You had this drawn up before we ever came up the hill.”
“I did.”
Harlan’s desk
Everybody who sleeps on this camp signs something.
That was my husband’s rule and he never once bent it, not for his brother, not for the man who put in our septic in trade.
Renters signed the week card. The kid we hired in the summers signed a page about the boat motors. When Harlan’s sister spent a winter in cabin one after her divorce, she signed the same occupancy agreement Dennis signed, and she was so mad about it she didn’t come to Thanksgiving.
“Paper is how you stay family,” Harlan said. “Talk is how you quit being one.”
He had Bud Ketterman in Hayward write all of it, the trust and the deed and the agreement, in nineteen ninety-eight, and Bud has done our paper ever since.
Two weeks after the funeral I went down to the boat shed to find the propane account and I sat in Harlan’s chair instead, for about an hour, with the door open and the lake going gray.
The cabin ledger was on the desk. He wrote in it every Sunday with a carpenter’s pencil, cabin by cabin, weeks booked, weeks open. Cabin four goes for six twenty-five a week in July.
I have written in it every Sunday since. It is the only thing in this place I do the way he did it.
That March, when Dennis called and said the flooring outfit was three payrolls behind and Bethany’s mother’s place was sold, I said yes before he finished the sentence.
Then I drove to Bud’s and had him print the agreement, and I put it on the store counter with the blue pen on top of it, and I felt like a woman with a stone in her shoe the whole time.
Dennis signed it standing up. He didn’t read it either.
“Dad would’ve made me do it twice,” he said.
Eight months. Nineteen months later I was up at four cooking for people his wife was calling clients.
The water heater in cabin six
Ray Pruitt caught me on the ramp in the middle of August with his flip-flops in his hand.
The water heater in six had been giving them lukewarm for two days, he said, and he was sorry to bother me with it, but nobody had called him back.
I had not heard one word about a water heater.
“I left it on the number on the website,” he said.
The number on the website had been the store phone since Harlan put the site up. It was not the store phone anymore. It was Bethany’s cell, and it had been since June, and when I asked her about it she said the store phone rings in an empty building half the day, which is true.
Then she said the other part.
“And honestly, Patricia, they were getting frustrated. The propane thing with the Pruitts. It’s just easier if it comes to me first.”
The propane thing with the Pruitts was in April. I called the wrong week for a delivery and they had cold showers one morning and I gave them the night back off the rate.
Everybody who has ever run nine cabins has done worse than that in a season. Harlan double-booked cabin seven over the Fourth in two thousand four and put a family of five up in our own living room for three nights.
I went back to the store and looked at the site on the computer that takes a minute to wake up. The number was hers on every page of it, the rates page, the contact page, the little box down the side that says call Patricia.
It didn’t say call Patricia anymore.
I went down to find Dennis. He was under his truck with a drop light, doing something to the exhaust, and he slid out on the cardboard and squinted up at me.
I said his wife had the camp’s phone.
“She’s answering it. You want to be up at eleven at night with a guy who can’t work a thermostat?”
“It’s my number.”
He wiped his hands on his jeans and looked at the shed instead of at me.
“Mom, you did forget the Pruitts’ propane.”
The August appraisal
At the table I kept turning pages because I wanted the third one, the schedule with the parcel numbers, so the city couple could see the ramp lot listed with everything else.
I did not get to it.
Under the agreement there was a manila envelope, folded once, that I did not put in that cabinet.
I opened it standing up.
An appraisal firm out of Rice Lake. Ninety-four acres, lake frontage, existing structures, prepared for Dennis Faircloth, cabin four, Faircloth’s Camp, dated the fourteenth of August. Behind it, a photocopy of page four of the trust, crooked on the glass, with a yellow line drawn across one paragraph.
That paragraph names who runs this place if I ever can’t.
It names my son.
Bethany was talking to the woman from the city about the shower house tile.
I put the appraisal down on top of the deed where the light was.
August the fourteenth was a Thursday. I was in Rice Lake myself that day for the restaurant supply, and I remember it because I bought the wrong size steam pans and never took them back.
Nobody has been in that cabinet but me since the funeral.
The brass fob
The Pruitts had the small kids and they were parked in behind Dennis, and I wanted his truck off the grass before the dew came, so I did what I do forty times a summer.
I held my hand out for his keys.
He gave them over without thinking about it. He was watching the appraisal on the table.
There were four keys on his ring and a brass fob with a 3 scratched into it. Harlan scratched that 3 with a nail in the milk house, the summer Dennis turned seventeen and got the boat shed to himself for the motors, and I had not seen it since we cleaned out his apartment in Superior in two thousand nine.
I stood there with it in my hand.
Bethany got up and put herself between me and the table, smiling for the couple from the city, and she said it in her selling voice, loud enough for the whole slope.
“Patricia’s not really involved in the day-to-day anymore. We’ve got her seeing somebody in October, just a baseline thing, everybody her age does it. Dennis handles the property end.”
Alma from cabin two set her glass down on the table without any noise at all.
And I understood what the dog dish had been for.
She had been saying it all summer, to renters, to my neighbors, on my own telephone number. Patricia keeps our cabins turned over. Patricia forgets the propane. Patricia’s the help.
Then she took a plate out of my hands in front of twenty-six people, so they would see it once with their own eyes.
I set the keys down on the deed.
“You made a copy of my husband’s key.”
Dennis said nothing.
Bethany looked at the folder, and then at all the faces, and her voice dropped down out of the selling range.
“You went down there and got a folder. In front of everybody. That is exactly what I’ve been telling people.”
Alma’s line at the bottom
Alma has rented cabin two for nineteen summers and does the jar flowers on the tables every July because she says I have no eye for it.
She went to her cabin and came back with her handbag and took out a sheet of paper, folded in three, and put it in front of me with the palm of her hand.
Typed. A paragraph about a woman who repeats herself, misses deliveries, leaves the store unlocked, was found confused on the ramp in June. A line at the bottom with my name printed under it and a blank for a signature and a date.
The blank was empty.
“She gave me that at the Fourth,” Alma said. “I’ve had it in my bag since. I didn’t know how to hand it to you.”
Bethany did not go pale. That is the thing I want people to understand about her. She picked the paper up and looked at it and put it back down like a woman correcting a bill.
“That is a family document and it is none of your business, Alma. It’s for the doctor. It’s a list of examples, that’s all it is, they ask you for examples. You people don’t understand what it is to watch somebody.” She turned around to the table, to the renters, to the couple from the city who were already looking at their car. “She was up at four in the morning for four days. Four days. For twenty-six people. She can’t do this place anymore and everybody standing here knows it, and I’m the only one willing to say it out loud, so go ahead and make me the villain of the supper.”
“Beth,” Dennis said.
“No. She’s seventy-one years old and she’s out here at four in the morning with a smoker. What am I supposed to do, wait?”
“Wait for what,” I said.
Nobody laughed. The bulbs came on over the tables on their timer, the way they do at eight, and lit all of it up.
Ray Pruitt took his two down to the water so they wouldn’t have to stand in it.
I went into the store and tore the last page out of the back of the cabin ledger, the blank one Harlan left for the year after, and I wrote on it at the counter with the fat blue pen. The date. The cabin. Fourteen days from tonight. My name.
I came back out and put it in my son’s hand, folded once, the way you hand a man his change.
“That’s your notice. It’s the eighteenth.”
Dennis held it and didn’t open it.
“Mom.”
“Bud has the other copy. Delivered by hand, in front of everybody, like your father would’ve wanted.”
Bethany got her purse off the chair back and told the woman from the city they would be in touch about the frontage, and the woman said nothing at all to her, which was the worst thing that happened to her that night.
The screen door on cabin four hit the frame twice.
The second week of October
The smoker has been cold since the twentieth. Pepper still sits by the store steps at six because that is when the dish used to happen, and I have started fixing him something at six so he isn’t wrong.
I drove down to Bud Ketterman on the second of October and paid him three hundred and forty dollars to take my son’s name off page four and put his firm’s name there instead, and I sat in his parking lot afterward for a while before I turned the key.
There is nobody’s name after mine now. That is what it cost, and I knew what I was doing when I signed it.
Cabin four went out empty for the last three weeks of the season. Six twenty-five a week.
The brass fob is in the drawer of Harlan’s desk. Dennis has not called. Bethany sent one message about a table saw in the shed and I told her it was Harlan’s and she can have it, and she has not come for it.
Alma stayed through Labor Day and closed her cabin up herself and stopped at the store on her way out with a coffee she’d made in her own pot.
I was at the counter with the ledger and the carpenter’s pencil, putting the season to bed.
“Two weeks in July,” she said. “Same cabin. Write me in before you close that book.”
If this one sat wrong in your chest, pass it to somebody who has spent a whole summer being talked about in their own yard.
If you’re still in the mood for more family drama, you might want to check out My Name Was Notarized On Page Four And I Have Never Met The Notary, or perhaps I Gave My Sister That Cardigan The Year She Turned Forty and My Father Told His Lawyer Not To Call Me Until I Asked for more tales of intricate family dynamics.
