Chapter 10 - The Lake on Tremont
The cottage on Tremont Street did not have white pine cupboards.
It had cupboards made of birch veneer that had been stained to look like walnut in nineteen seventy-four, with small, stamped-brass handles that had lost their lacquer around the screw holes. The floor was white linoleum printed with a gray brick pattern, worn down to the black backing in front of the sink where three generations of women had stood with their hands in hot soapy water while looking out at the vegetable patch.
Behind the house was not Harrow Lake.
It was an acre and a half of wet, gravelly ground that sloped down toward a cedar swamp where red-winged blackbirds nested in the cattails every April.
We had moved the furniture on Saturday—two weeks after the wedding, when the snow had finally melted into that gray, foaming slush that fills the roadside ditches along M-37 with red clay and dead oak leaves.
Grandma Marin sat on the back porch in an aluminum glider that Sanford had painted dark green with tractor paint in nineteen eighty-four.
She wore her Sears cardigan, but she had unbuttoned the top two buttons because the afternoon sun had reached sixty degrees, warming the cedar shingles on the south wall until the wood smelled like dry paper and resin.
Across her knees lay a clean white dish towel.
On the towel rested a four-quart ceramic mixing bowl with three hairline cracks running through the glaze from the rim to the base—the bowl she had used to beat eggs when I was six years old and had to stand on a galvanized water pail to reach the counter.
Beside her on the floorboards, sleeping with his chin resting across the welt of my garden boot, was Buster—an eight-year-old black Labrador retriever that Ellis had brought home from a farm outside Wayland three days after the court hearing. Buster had an ear that had been split in a barbed-wire fence and three gray whiskers on his lower lip, and he did not move when the mail carrier’s truck rumbled past the drainage culvert on the gravel road.
Ellis came around the corner of the garage carrying two cedar boards—two-by-sixes from the lumber yard on 28th Street, rough-sawn and wet from the kiln.
He laid them across two wooden sawhorses he had built from scrap hemlock.
“Vaughn’s lawyer called this morning,” Ellis said. He pulled a carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear and laid a steel framing square against the edge of the top board. “The plea agreement has been submitted to Judge Vance. Three years at the state correctional facility in Coldwater. Restitution set at one hundred and twelve thousand dollars, payable through the garnishment of his commercial pension if he ever qualifies for the state retirement pool.”
Grandma Marin did not look up from her bowl. Her hands—crooked, knotty, with the blue veins standing up like mountain ridges—were breaking the shells of four brown eggs against the ceramic rim.
Crack. Plop. Crack. Plop.
“And Cheryl?” she asked.
“Cheryl signed the quitclaim deed on Amberley Drive on Thursday,” Ellis said, his pencil making a dry, sharp line across the cedar grain. “Michael says she’s moving to an apartment behind the strip mall in Holland. Her sister’s girl, the one who works the reception desk at the eye clinic, is paying the security deposit. Bridget is living with her.”
Grandma picked up an old wire whisk with a wooden handle that had been turned on a lathe from a piece of Michigan white ash.
She began to beat the eggs.
The sound was rhythmic, steady, and clean: whick, whick, whick against the cracked porcelain.
“Cheryl was always afraid of the wind,” Grandma Marin said, her voice dry and even as the sound of the saw blade touching the cedar. “When Vaughn bought that boat, she spent three days in the bedroom with the blinds pulled down because she thought the wake from the car ferry would turn them over in the channel. She thought if you had forty-two thousand dollars in an envelope, the water couldn't touch you.”
She stopped beating. She looked across the porch railing toward the cattails, where two blackbirds were swinging on the dry stalks, their red shoulder patches bright as fresh paint in the April light.
“Essie,” Grandma said.
I came out through the screen door.
I was wearing an old flannel shirt of Ellis’s, the sleeves rolled up past my elbows, my forearms dusty with gray drywall paste from the small pantry we had been patching behind the chimney.
My left cheek was clear now.
The bruise had vanished three days ago, leaving only a tiny, faint yellowish shadow near the bone under my eye that looked like a freckle unless you stood two feet away in the morning light.
“Yes, Grandma?”
She reached into her cardigan pocket.
She did not pull out a legal paper. She did not pull out a checkbook.
She pulled out the walnut box.
Ellis had planed the lid down three-sixteenths of an inch so that it no longer stuck in the grooves when the humidity rose. The walnut had dried in our hallway, the boiled linseed oil giving off that sweet, rich scent that smelled like a cabinet-maker’s shop after the heaters have been turned off for the weekend.
Grandma Marin laid her dry, spotted palm flat on the sliding lid.
“Sanford left twelve hundred dollars in the toe of an old rubber work boot in nineteen seventy-two,” she said. “He told me that if the roof blew off the shop, I was to buy three rolls of tar paper and two kegs of galvanized nails before I called the insurance adjuster. He said a woman who waits for an adjuster to tell her if she’s dry is already sleeping in the mud.”
She pushed the box across the small wicker table toward my hip.
“Take it, Essie,” she said.
I looked at the wood. I looked at the date burned into the bottom: March 14, 2026.
I didn't open it. I didn't reach inside to count the checks from Cadillac or the twenty-dollar bills that the dental hygienists had tucked into pink envelopes with handwritten notes about how lucky Ellis was to have found a girl who could keep six schedules straight without dropping a single chart.
I picked up the box.
The walnut was cool in my hands, heavy, solid, and balanced.
“Ellis,” I called out over the railing.
He looked up from the sawhorse, the hand saw resting in the kerf of the cedar board, his hair dusted with white wood flour that blew away in the south wind.
“Yeah, Esther?”
“The kitchen window,” I said, looking through the screen door into the small, bright room where the sun was hitting the white linoleum floor like a sheet of clean paper. “The sash is sticking at the top. It needs three-eighths planed off the meeting rail before the rain starts tonight.”
Ellis smiled—that small, quiet crease at the corners of his eyes that had nothing to do with television or country club dining rooms, the smile of a man who had two sharp chisels, three clean boards, and an entire afternoon of light left before the sun went down behind the swamp.
“I’ll get the jack plane, Essie,” he said.
Grandma Marin picked up her wire whisk again.
May you like
Whick. Whick. Whick.
The sound went out over the wet garden, over the red-winged blackbirds in the cattails, and over the gravel road that led north toward the lake, steady and unbroken as the heartbeat of an old woman who had finally stopped listening for the knock of a thief at her door.
