Wish You Were Here (3 page)

“It won't,” Emily said. “And if it does, we'll find something to do. There's always cards.”

“Justin was big into chess, I remember.”

“And Ella's pretty good about the TV. It's Sam who gets weird.”

“Maybe if we set a time limit. Who's going to get there first?”

“Kenneth.”

“Maybe if you talk with Lisa.”

“I can try,” Emily said.

“The two of you make up yet?”

“We're civil. Let me put it that way.”

“Oh my,” Arlene said, slowing to take in a massive Victorian painted garish shades of mustard and raspberry.
PLUMBUSH BED AND BREAKFAST
, proclaimed a fussy placard hung pub-style out front. The wraparound porch commanded a view of a makeshift hay wagon across the road, and farther down the sloping field, the browned shell of a pickup.

“Plum bushed,” Arlene said. “I get it.”

“I'm sure the neighbors are amused,” Emily said.

Closer to the lake, they saw more new houses, all modular, trailered in from the same factory. One had a satellite dish beside it the size of a small plane, another a Bills flag in its bay window.

“You wonder if they keep that up all year,” Arlene said.

Finally they came to the intersection of 394, just above the Institute. Andriaccio's was still there, its parking lot jammed with the lunchtime rush. The sudden crush of activity—a boy with a pair of canes wobbling across the lot, a tall man in shorts holding the door for an older couple leaving—seemed to invite them to join in. Or was it the Institute itself, that idea of a relaxing, high-minded summer, that appealed to her? Waiting for a break in traffic, Emily peered down the hill and over the spiked iron fence at the tiny practice cabins, plain as outhouses and spaced neatly as graves, imagining some bright teenager's days, the chaste dedication to her instrument and the great dead. As they passed, she thumbed down her window, hoping to catch a lithe phrase of oboe or a cello's deep sigh. There was nothing.

“Emily, look,” Arlene said, incredulous. “The Putt-Putt.”

Its orange-and-white fence was still there, but everything back to the concrete-block restrooms was leveled, a
FOR LEASE
sign out front.

“Kenneth will be so disappointed.”

“You'd think they could make money with the Institute right here.”

“Obviously not,” Emily said.

She knew everything here: the Christmas shop; the hot laundromat where they still did their sheets and towels; the grade school now used for storage. They slowed for the walkway by the brick entrance of the Institute, an empty police car left by the maintenance hut as a decoy, then cruised alongside the lush fairways of the club (apparently they were having no trouble getting water). Henry had enjoyed the course. On six there was a pond, and he would always leave his tee shot right, mucking through the reeds beside the cart path. Once he'd discovered a snake and come running out with his nine-iron. She hadn't swung a club all last year. She and Kenneth would have to get out for their traditional round. It would be the only time they'd have alone.

And there was the Wagon Wheel, with its rusted ladder of signs:

DELI
NEWSPAPERS
ICE
FILM

And the We Wan Chu cottages and campground, now with its own website.

“Now I've seen everything,” Emily said.

“That was up last year.”

Arlene slowed for Manor Drive, and Rufus stood, smearing his nose against the window. The turn convinced him to fold himself down again. He was well off the towel now but Emily let it go.

The drive was entirely in shadow, barely a car wide. The association had put up a 15
MPH
sign. The policeman with the trampoline and the Irish setter was home, but not the people with the ugly aboveground pool. The Nevilles were here in force, their driveway lined with minivans and SUVs, the garage open to show their old Volkswagen convertible. Two little girls she didn't know rode their bicycles across the yard in their bathing suits and tennis shoes.

Between the houses Emily could see the lake, a Laser heeling near shore.

“Looks breezy out there,” she said, but Arlene had slowed for some older children on bikes—Craigs, they looked like, gripping tennis rackets. A blonde girl waved to them, and automatically they waved back, neighbors.

Farther on, a red Cadillac with Florida plates sat in a shaded drive. “The Wisemans are here,” Emily said, happy, because last year Herb Wiseman had had a heart attack and they hadn't come up.

“Both of them or just Marjorie?”

“I can't imagine her driving that car, can you?”

“We'll have to go over,” Arlene said.

The Lerners' place was for sale, also listed with Mrs. Klinginsmith, and seeing the sign disappointed Emily. She wondered what they were asking.

Rufus was up again, turning around to look at everything.

“He knows,” Arlene said.

Emily could see part of the cottage, obscured by the big chestnut next to the garage. “Well,” she said, “it hasn't burned down.”

Closer, she could see the orange daylilies nestled around the mailbox. Something hung from it—a flyer in a plastic wrapper—and she thought there ought to be a law against delivering them when people weren't home. It was an open invitation.

They turned onto the grass, running over fallen branches. The cottage was fine, even bright. She hadn't seen the new paint job, gray with red shutters and white trim. No wonder the buyers paid their price. A pair of new steel bands held the chimney together, and the old TV antenna was gone. They'd even painted the garage, scraped the moss off the shingles. It looked better than it ever had, almost false. She wondered what Henry would have said.

Rufus scratched at the window.

“Down,” Emily said, but he was too excited.

Arlene stopped the car and Emily let him out. He shot around the side of the cottage and squatted, looking back over his shoulder. Another thing to clean up. The towel was covered with hair, one tuft caught in a blotch of drool; the seat was fine, though Arlene went through a pantomime of wiping it with a hand.

“
I
will wash the towel,” Emily said, and balled it up.

When Rufus was done, he came back, looped around the two as if calling them to follow, then raced straight for the dock. Arlene ignored him and laid down the tailgate.

“Let's just get the food in for now,” Emily said. She found the keys and crunched the brightest one in the kitchen door, propped the
greased arm of the screen so it would stay open. The place smelled musty as a well house. Emily leafed among the keys (each taped and labeled in Henry's neat hand) and went out back to turn the water on.

The spiders had been busy, fat as puffballs, their webs festooned with gnats, dotted with cottony eggs. Above the controls, tacked to the wall and bleeding with humidity, was a set of directions Henry had written out for Kenneth. She flipped the switch and the pump complained. The water here was soft and stunk of sulphur. It made her remember swimming in the lake and hanging their suits on the back line, thirty, almost forty years ago, when the children were little. All those summers were gone, but how sharply—just now—she could recall them. She wanted to inhabit them again, those long August days, the croquet and wiffle-ball games and campfires, skiing behind the boat. It was why they came here every year, she supposed, this feeling of eternity and shelter.

She locked the pump house behind her. On her way to the garage, she slipped on a mossy flagstone and barely kept her feet. “Stupid,” she said. Every year she forgot how treacherous they were. Think just once she'd remember.

No one had bothered to clean the garage. Henry's junk was everywhere: beer cartons and bushel baskets, coolers and buckets, fishing gear, gas cans for the boat, cases piled with dusty Iron City and Genesee bottles, a steel trash can spiky with kindling. Suspended from the back wall were a saggy life raft and a trio of bare-breasted-mermaid boat bumpers that had embarrassed Kenneth as a teenager. Through the dulled rear window she could see Rufus out at the end of the dock. She wanted to go and sit with him, but Henry's workbench drew her to it.

His tool apron lay at one end as if waiting for him. The rest was a clutter of gnarled work gloves and plastic cups full of screws, coils of yellow nylon rope, a handheld sander, aerosol cans of spray paint and WD-40, nails in wrinkly paper bags, wood putty, a crusted caulking gun, a wasp bomb, old screw-in fuses, ripped sandpaper disks, paint stirrers from the True Value in Mayville, a bent cleat, a can of 3 IN 1 oil, a scarred Maxfli, a dark lightbulb. She resisted the urge to touch any of it, stood there breathing in the smell, enjoying the mess. She'd ask Kenneth if he wanted the tools. He'd probably take them all just so none of them got thrown away. He really was her son.

Inside, Arlene was going through the cupboards. “Where's that bowl we always put the fruit in?”

“The green one.”

“Is that the one?”

Emily checked above the dishwasher and to the left of the stove, then the lazy Susan under the counter. “This one.”

“I don't remember it being this one. I thought it was orange for some reason.”

“Is there much more?” Emily asked.

“No, that's it.”

“Do you mind if I go down to the dock for a second before we eat?”

“Go ahead. There's not room in here for both of us anyway.”

The wind was blowing in, raising cat's-paws on the water. Under the chestnut it was cool, but once she stepped onto the dock her face warmed. The lake was down several feet, and weedy. Pearly clam shells winked up at her from the bottom. Rufus was lying down and raised his head to see who was coming. In its slip the Starcraft sloshed and knocked, its lines creaking. The handsome salmon cover Henry had bought was streaked with gull droppings. The buyers had their own boat, so Mrs. Klinginsmith had arranged for Smith Boys down in Ashville to buy it as salvage. At that point Emily didn't argue. It was nearly thirty years old, and the Evinrude regularly stranded them. Funny how much she could part with now—how little, really.

She reached the broad ell of the dock and stepped around Rufus to sit on the bench. He got up and flopped down at her feet. She bent and petted him, absently scratched behind his ears.

“You're glad to be out of the car, I bet. Yes.”

He looked up at her as if she'd said something vitally important. His eyes were misted with cataracts; lately he'd been bumping into doorways. She didn't know what she would do if he became incontinent.

“You're fine,” she said. “You're all right.”

On the next dock a wooden duck caught the wind, its wings slowly spinning in opposite directions like a deranged clock. She leaned back and looked off to the far shore. It had been so dry that some of the trees had already started to turn, not a brilliant red but a muted, diseased shade.
She wondered if they would die or come back next year, then realized she would never know. She remembered a toppled redwood they'd seen out in California, ages ago, on some more ambitious trip when the children were little. The rings were different sizes; the thinnest indicated drought years. Maybe this year would be like that, next year a better one.

She looked out at the waves as if they might provide an answer. Rufus sat up and pushed his wet muzzle under her hand. He'd missed his breakfast, and now that he was out of the car, he was hungry.

“I know,” she said, “you've been very patient.”

Next year had to be better. Practically.

In all her concentration she had stopped petting Rufus. He'd turned away from her to face the lake, so when he tipped his head up to question her, he looked cross-eyed. His tongue flopped out to one side, and she wondered how it was possible to be that open to the world, that willing, still.

“You
are
a doofus,” she said.

She felt his ridged skull under her nails, the grain of his hair. The sun was out but the wind was up, making the duck's wings pinwheel and slice like propellers. Her own hair stabbed at her cheeks.

“Come on,” she said, and got up, and together they walked back toward the cottage. Arlene would need help with lunch.

“There it is!” Lise said for the kids' benefit. As if obeying, Ken glanced away from the road.

Below, a mile away, the water spread wide and silver beside them in the long afternoon light, a boat cutting a black fantailed wake. Trees flashed up to block the view, a wall then a gap, a gap. They caught another opening, a vineyard letting them see all the way across, a fat calendar shot.

“Wake up,” Lise said, “you're missing it!”

Ken checked them in the mirror. They were groggy with sleep. Ella's new braces made her pout. She stretched her arms above her head and groaned. “Yeah, yeah.”

“Yippee Skippy,” Sam deadpanned.

“Start getting your shoes on,” Lise said, though they had another twenty minutes in the car.

Ken marveled at how calm she could be. It wasn't just his mother (his father, the cottage, the whole trip), and it wasn't the job, though he was prepared to hear his mother laugh at the irony of him processing other people's pictures all day, say it served him right for leaving Merck. That would set Lise off, and then forget it.

It was everything. While he knew it was temporary, all the way from Boston he'd been thinking of money. On their way out of town they'd stopped at an ATM and he discovered their checking account had a negative balance. He didn't understand. He'd been keeping a close eye on their bills. He was sure he'd left a good cushion.

“I use the card for food shopping,” Lise told him. “That's probably it.”

“Yeah,” he said, “that would do it.”

“We have to eat.”

“I know,” he said, controlled, “it's fine,” aware of Sam and Ella listening in the backseat, his failures apparent.