Lake People (19 page)

It was Tasha, Kenneth’s woman, who convinced Simon to write this letter—a
love letter
, she called it. Simon lived with Kenneth and Tasha, and in Tasha’s opinion Simon was her very best friend.

“I bet Simon knows how to love a woman the right way,” she told Kenneth, after the letter was mailed. To this Kenneth smacked her ass and made a show of unhooking his belt.

“I’ll show you the right way,” he said.

Flowers, letters, a birthday cake—these were the things Tasha had meant. “I just might leave you,” she said. Since they were fourteen years old the two of them had been together. “We can’t even have kids.” It was true, she had tried. Yet to this Kenneth winked, told her the problem with that wasn’t in his
little swimmers
. “It’s probably all them things you did to me when I was too young to be doing them,” she said. Kenneth slapped her ass one more time.

Simon had wanted Tasha to read his love letter, but she had insisted that that was a private matter. So she didn’t know what he had written. Winter the island? She would have said that was fast moves. She would have suggested dinner, a movie. Instead she imagined the letter he had mailed and she said, “Simon will make a good man to some woman.” In response Kenneth walked up the stairs, lay down fully clothed upon the bed, and stayed there until morning.

At her cabin, Alice dropped her clothes onto the beach and put her hand to her belly. Slowly she walked into the lake until the water covered her knees. The water was so calm that if she
squinted, she could barely perceive the line where the lake ended and the sky began. Though it was full into summer nothing passed before her, no sailboat or motorboat or canoe, no loon, either, or even a gust of wind. The sun was at her back and she turned into it, faced the island. Her cabin sat low, sunken in the center and a shade browner than the sand. Pale green moss gleamed atop the roof. The birch tree grew dangerously close. She dropped herself backward into the water and floated there, looking only at the sky. She had started a fire on shore, and now smoke came out to drift above her. Alice kicked and turned over, swam with her eyes open. She could see down to the floor of the lake, and every so often the shine of a fish caught her vision and then vanished.
Getting to thinking about you a lot these days in truth
. First Alice pictured those months of snow on the island. They’d find old wooden skis, and together she and Simon would carve trails around the island, down the old stone sheep run, across the lake. How they would return to tea and blankets and love. How they’d keep warm. She saw the water spring, surrounded in snow but still flowing upward. Then those months in between the ice and thaw. Alice and Simon, the only people on the island, no way on and no way off. The bread she’d bake. The walks as the fallen leaves gave over to brown or the naked trees began to sprout. And then the life, the children. A life that people live. Alice swam to shore. Her spot on the island was cast in shadow now, and she shivered naked by the fire.

“Lots of letters to Simie,” Kenneth said. They were on the mail dock, Alice holding one end of the envelope, Kenneth the other. Lately he had taken to breaking his own rule by not lowering the steps for her to walk aboard, but rather holding out his hand for the letters.

“Lots of letters to him,” Kenneth repeated. He slipped the letter from her grip and dropped it into his breast pocket. Then he tucked his thumbs into his belt loops and tipped back on his heels. “You met him?” he asked. Alice didn’t know that Kenneth knew the answer. She didn’t know Kettleborough anymore, couldn’t know that Simon and Kenneth were friends and even that they lived together. Nor did she know that Kenneth’s own damn woman kept saying that Simon knew how to love a woman. Bullshit. Alice’s ignorance pleased Kenneth greatly. “Simie?” he continued. “Suppose you two go way back?” Now he was at the bowline, jerking the boat in closer, thrusting his hips forward with each pull. The movement was obscene.

“Yes,” Alice said sternly. “Way back.” Kenneth was her friend. She liked meeting Kenneth on the mail dock. So perhaps now she misunderstood.

“I bet you do,” Kenneth said with a wink. Quickly he ran his tongue across his upper lip. “Well.” He removed the letter from his pocket, smelled it. “Well then. You can bet this letter will get straightaway where it needs to go.”

This Alice had never doubted. But now. No. Surely her letters
got where they needed to go. “Kenneth,” Alice said. She didn’t know what else to say.

Kenneth winked. “Do I know Simon?” he asked. “That what you mean? Sure as hell I knows Simon.” He tapped the letter against his arm in even intervals. “I knows he ain’t where you sending these letters.”

“Of course,” she said. “People keep PO boxes, that’s all. You ought to know that. They keep the boxes and they don’t live there, they just keep them and gather their mail when they want.” Alice spoke quickly. She had begun to sweat.

“That’s a lot of mail gathering,” Kenneth said. He came in closer to her. The sun was hot upon them and she could smell his stale coffee breath. The dock became narrow and Alice dizzy. Her hand went out to grab hold of the post for balance.

“Kenneth,” she said. He had been her friend. What had come over him? Jealous, she thought suddenly. Federal Agent Kenneth must have developed a little crush on me. “Kenneth,” she said, softly.

“Whoa there,” Kenneth said. He held his arms out to her, a horse he meant to calm. Then he went to the stern line, untied it. “You alls is falling in love is how I take it,” he said as he climbed on board, that letter now sticking out from his back pocket. He started the engine. That sentence, it had come out of his mouth by surprise. Falling in love, he thought as he lowered the throttle. If I could make Tash fall in love with me once more. The bow reared and then planed. The letter was still in his pocket, and Kenneth’s hand went to it. Pulled it out. It was a sunny, warm day. Summer would soon be over. Once out in the middle of the lake, Kenneth slowed the boat again, cut the engine. He sat down in the stern, put his feet up. The letter was now on his lap. A wind could have come through, blown it into the lake. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the letter waited on his lap while he
rested both hands behind his head and then lowered one. Simon knows how to make a woman love him. Bullshit. He lowered his other hand. Carefully he opened the letter, read it quickly, trembling. Of course it couldn’t be mailed now, not after it had been opened. In a rush Kenneth tucked it into his lunch bag. It wasn’t something he meant to do, opening it, reading it, taking it home with him. This thought Kenneth repeated like a prayer in the days to come. Yet after that first letter, Kenneth couldn’t bear to not open the next. Addiction, that’s what he might have called it.

Spread before Alice and Patty Jean were reels of fabric—together they were at work on Alice’s first quilt. Choosing fabric had been the hardest part. Alice would pick one pattern of blues and greens, try to match five more to it, but of course the colors were different and no two patterns ever matched entirely, so she’d put it all back and begin again.

“Just choose any damn thing,” Patty Jean had said after an hour or so. Then she had swept her fingers across the wall of fabric, tapped and pulled different notes until she had a fine collection on the table. That had been weeks ago. Now, at the table, the two were pinning squares. In the time it took Alice to attach one square to another, Patty Jean had already pinned ten squares together. Alice pushed a pin through and pricked her finger. One minuscule drop of blood emerged. The wind picked up, and a mile or so out from shore a sailboat capsized. “I made a quilt for one man,” Patty Jean said as she rocked. They were on the screened-in porch. Loons called back and forth from one cove to another. “Old Mr. Wentworth. Bastard.” She laughed a high, thick laugh, and a loon called as though back to her alone. “I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. Bastard, though, and he knows it.”

“Well,” Alice said.

“You’ll know young Simon,” Patty Jean said now. “You’ve met him already? I told him to go over there and introduce himself.
But then I probably scared him. I keep telling him you’ll make a good woman for him! He didn’t come see you? It was just last week he was out here. He’s a handsome one, too. A bit fat, but handsome. He’ll shape right up. Lonely is all.” Patty Jean had run out of squares, and now she stood. She flipped a reel of fabric as she spoke, laid a fresh yard out across the table. “He should have gone to see you. I looked at him and I said, Simon! Is that you? He’d cleaned himself right up, looked right happy. Course he had that girl with him. Kenneth’s girl. You know, I ought to watch my mouth. I leaned right in, whispered, Simon, you leave this pretty young thing.” Rather than walking to the spring, Patty Jean drank straight from the lake, always had. Now she patted the backs of her legs, reached for her mug of silty water, and sat down. “I don’t like a girl who dyes her hair so blond and pulls out all her eyebrows. I said, Simon, you go get that Alice. Boy did that make him go red. You didn’t see him? He didn’t come down to you?”

This time, when Alice pricked her finger, it bled more. Yet she pretended it hadn’t happened and continued pinning squares, a small dot of blood on each square she touched.

“You were right out there on the beach. I don’t know why they didn’t go meet you.”

“No matter,” Alice said, and undid the square she had just pinned. She would not let herself be made a fool.

Briefly, Alice had thought of going up to Simon’s cabin. She saw herself ransacking the place, finding letters to other women, from other women. His books she would throw to the ground. She could break a bag of flour over them and even break a window. But no, Alice would not do that. Yet she had written a number of drafts of this last letter. The first the cruelest and the rest less and less cruel until she finally sounded like the person she wanted to be. She would not go to his place again. She would not linger or wish. When she finished the kind letter she put it in an envelope and addressed it, sealed it. Alice was sitting on the porch, the early afternoon sun fully upon her, and when she finally squinted across the lake she was shocked to see that barge-like boat anchored not far in front of her property. She recognized the boat, the
Lawrence
, used to deliver building supplies to the islands. Wearing only her swimsuit and not feeling shy for it, Alice stood and waved. Yet quickly she realized that the driver had already rowed his way to shore and tied his rowboat. Now he stood on her rotting dock.