“And they expect me out by Friday.”
Frank gave a humorless laugh. “Then Thursday should be educational.”
When we hung up, I walked outside.
The cold hit me hard enough to clear the last of the shock. I crossed the frosted grass toward the dock, robe flapping around my legs, coffee forgotten inside. The lake was still except for a heron standing at the end of the dock, motionless as carved wood. Eleanor loved herons. She said they had the patience of judges and the posture of saints.
I stood twenty feet away and watched it watch the water.
The cabin sat on forty acres of northern Minnesota lakeshore, tucked between pine, birch, and black spruce, with a narrow private road that wound down from the county highway. It had been in Eleanor’s family first. Her parents bought the original hunting cabin in the 1960s, back before wealthy men from Chicago and Minneapolis discovered that wilderness looked good in marketing brochures. Eleanor grew up two miles away and spent summers swimming off this dock long before I knew her. When we married, her father sold us the cabin for a dollar and a handshake because he said he wanted the lake to remain in the family and knew I was too stubborn to sell anything my wife loved.
He was right.
Over forty years, we repaired, expanded, winterized, and loved that place into being. We added the stone fireplace. We replaced the old tin roof. We turned a screened porch into a sunroom after Kyle was born so Eleanor could watch him play even when mosquitoes rose thick from the water. We planted the garden. We built the bunk room for future grandchildren long before Kyle had any children. We buried dogs near the tree line. We celebrated anniversaries on the dock with cheap champagne and wool blankets. We argued in the kitchen. We made up in the hallway. We grew older one repair, one storm, one ordinary morning at a time.
Then Eleanor got ovarian cancer, and the cabin became less a home than a witness.
She insisted on spending her last year there. Not in the city, not near the best hospital, not in a condo with elevators and easy parking. Here. Beside the lake. She wanted to wake to fog and sleep to loons. She wanted to sit in the garden when pain allowed. She wanted to watch winter come because she said she had always trusted snow to tell the truth about a landscape.
The morning before she died, she asked me to open the bedroom window even though it was March and the air was brutally cold.
“Just for a minute,” she whispered.
I opened it.
