The Cottage He Let His Sister Keep (When His Family Came First #8)

1. Winterizing

WINTERIZING

MARNIE

Whatever ruts the lake road picked up in November it kept until April, frozen in, which is why the last mile always took longer than the eight before it.

Glenn drove. He hadn't said anything since the feed store turnoff, and by then I was six days into that particular quiet of his, so I let it alone.

"Compressor's in the bed," he said.

"I know. I put it there."

"Right."

His mother had been dead eleven days. I let the silence have the rest of the road.

Then the cottage came up the way it always does — gray shingles first through the birches, then the roofline, then the porch.

Anybody driving past would have called it a plain little house.

I knew what plain had cost. Six new piers under that porch, dug with an auger I rented myself in a September that feels now like it happened to some other woman.

A roof deck I'd had my hand on every inch of, off a ladder, in a July hot enough to stick the tar paper to my forearms.

Glenn parked. The engine ticked itself down, and neither of us moved.

"You want to do the water," he said, "or should I."

"I'll do the water."

"Okay."

"You always overshoot the pressure. Twelve pounds. It's a hundred-year-old house, Glenn, not a truck tire."

"Twelve pounds." He said it like a man agreeing to something else entirely, then got out.

The front door had swelled in its frame with the cold, so I hipped it the way I've been hipping it for twenty years.

Inside was thirty-nine degrees, maybe forty.

The house holds cold the way a person holds a breath.

Stale woodsmoke, linseed oil, that faint mineral smell a lake pushes through a wall in winter.

Water first, whatever else is falling down.

Out to the pit by the birch stump — lid up, shutoff key down into the dark, quarter turn, then the give in my wrist that means the main is closed.

Back in to open every faucet, hot side and cold, upstairs before down.

The low-point drain in the crawl I can find without a light, and have, twice, in Octobers when the dark got there before I did.

Then the compressor on the porch, hose to the boiler drain, twelve pounds, line by line, and that stuttering spit-and-cough of water leaving copper.

Antifreeze in the traps. Pink in the toilet bowl, the tank sponged out, the flapper propped so the seal won't set.

After that the heater drained, the breakers down except the one running the heat tape at the pump house, the fridge unplugged with its door held open on a folded dish towel.

The one year we skipped that, we came back in April to a science project on the third shelf.

Bait blocks in the crawl, bait blocks under the sink. Damper shut.

Then the windows.

Thirty-one of them, and I have never once had to count.

I went room to room locking every sash, a hand on each lift, feeling for a lock gone loose over the season, feeling for softness in a rail.

There wasn't any, and there hadn't been in years.

In the front room I stopped at the one over the sink, because that one had been the first — the one I carried into Dell's shop twenty years ago in the trunk of a Corolla, rotten as a wet cracker.

He turned it over twice, sniffed it, told me the muntins were shot but my stiles were fine.

Then he let a woman he'd never met stand at his bench four Saturdays running while she learned to lay a putty line with the heel of her hand.

I still do it his way. Roll it into a snake. Bed it. Knife it off in one pull, one angle, don't go back and fuss, because fussing shows.

The binder sat where it lives, on the shelf under the window between an almanac from 1998 and a stack of paper placemats.

Three inches thick, green, the spine gone soft in the middle from being opened at the same page too many times.

I didn't take it down. I put two fingers on it going past, the way you'd touch a doorframe on your way through.

In the hall closet, behind coats nobody wears anymore, the wallpaper steamer sat on the floor with its cord coiled the way I coil a cord. Twenty years it had lived out here without once going back to town.

My mother would have had opinions about all of it.

Eleven addresses, seven schools. She kept the security deposit letters in a manila envelope in the kitchen drawer like war medals, every one of them, going back to before I was born.

In every one of those houses the rule was the same rule.

You don't put holes in the walls. You don't paint.

If the faucet drips you call the man, you don't go fixing the man's faucet.

You don't caulk a rental, Marnie, because the day you caulk it you start thinking it's yours.

I was thirty when I first put a chisel into that porch. My hands shook. Not from the work.

Out the front window I could see Glenn on the dock in his good coat, the funeral coat, which meant he'd grabbed the wrong one off the hook that morning.

He was standing at the end where the water goes dark, both hands on the rail, not moving, not looking at anything I could see.

The lake was iced out maybe forty feet from shore, then open gray past that with the wind combing it flat.

He and his father built that dock the summer he was twelve.

He's told me about it maybe four times in twenty-two years, always the same four sentences, always at the end of a long day when he's tired enough to say something.

Harmon cut the stringers. Glenn set the deck screws.

Twelve years old, allowed to run the drill.

So I let him have it. Standing in the funeral home parking lot I'd made myself a deal about that: the man's allowed to be somewhere else for a while.

I put up the storm panels on the west side, the four that go up because that wall takes weather like a slap, then did the last walk I do every January.

Kitchen, front room, back bedroom, the little stair, the two rooms upstairs under the knee walls.

In the back bedroom I stopped, the way I always stop, because it's the one room still unfinished — 1970s paper on the north wall, three layers of it, the last unstripped surface in the house.

Good plaster under there. I tested a corner years ago. Lime, the real thing, sand-float finish, worth every bit of the trouble it'll be.

I picked at the seam by the door casing with a thumbnail. Two layers lifted together, dry as a moth wing; the third stayed stuck the way a bottom layer always does.

Spring project, I thought, which is what I'd thought last spring.

Then I hipped the door shut, wedged it, went down the sixty-two flagstones I laid myself in the fall of 2011 — dry-set on stone dust, re-leveled twice since — to tell my husband it was done.

He heard my boots on the boards. He didn't turn around.

"All buttoned," I said.

"Twelve pounds?"

"Twelve pounds."

"Good." He said it to the water. Then, after a while: "She used to make us swim out to the raft before lunch. Every day. Even if it was fifty degrees. Said we'd be in the water eventually, so we might as well get it over with."

"That sounds like Eunice."

"Bridget hated it." He almost laughed. "She'd get out to the raft and lie there yelling about her legs."

I put my hand flat between his shoulder blades. He was cold clear through the coat, but he let me leave it there, which was more than he'd allowed in six days. I stood with him until the wind came around the point to make the decision for us.

"Come on," I said. "We've got an hour of light."

"Yeah."

He went up the dock ahead of me. Halfway along he stopped, crouched, put his thumb on a board where the grain had lifted, pressed it flat like it might stay that way. Then he straightened up and kept going.

We didn't talk much on the way home either, though it was a better quiet than the one going out.

He put the radio on somewhere around the county line.

At the last light before our street he said the town should salt that hill better, which is the sort of thing Glenn says when he's coming back into himself.

The mail was three days deep. I got out to grab it while he backed into the drive.

Bills, a seed catalog for people who are not us, the church newsletter.

And a business envelope, cream, heavier stock than anything else in my hands, the return address printed in the corner in navy type. Ostrander. Attorney at Law.

I turned it over walking up the drive. Glenn had the tailgate down, pulling the compressor out with one hand under the tank.

"Ostrander sent something," I said.

He set it on the gravel. Then he stayed bent over it a beat longer than the compressor needed, one hand still on the handle, his head down.

Half a second. Maybe less. If I hadn't been standing right there I'd have missed it.

"That'll be the reading," he said, straightening. "Thursday, probably. She had it all set up years ago."

"You knew it was coming?"

"There's always a reading, Marn." He got the compressor up under his arm. "It's just paperwork."

He carried it into the garage, and I stayed out in the drive in my work clothes with my thumb under the flap of that envelope.

He's grieving, I thought. That's all that is.

So I slid it into the middle of the stack, under the church newsletter, and took the mail inside. The kitchen was dark. I turned the light on, set everything on the counter, dropped the seed catalog in the recycling.