13. Chapter 13
Chapter thirteen
Gina
My stomach is full of pancakes, butterflies, and trepidation. The bumpy dirt road isn’t helping, but it’s a beautiful morning. Everything is fresh after yesterday’s rain, and the air is sweet and clean. Avoiding the puddle-filled potholes takes most of my attention, but not all of it.
Benji is sitting in the passenger’s seat in that loose-limbed way of his. His muscled arm is resting on the open window of my truck.
My truck is older than he is, which I’m trying very hard not to think about.
He’s looking out the window, although there’s not much to see besides trees and mailboxes at the end of dirt driveways. He must feel my eyes on him because he’s already smiling when he turns my way.
His eyes flick down to my hand, curled over the stick shift. “That’s hot,” he says.
My face heats—was I fondling the gear stick?
“That you can drive a stick shift,” he adds. The fact that he needed to say that makes me blush harder.
Butterflies now. All butterflies.
I slow down, hyperaware of my movements as I shift down into third, then second as the dirt road terminates at a T-junction.
There’s no traffic in either direction, so I roll through the stop as I turn, then shift back up to third, fourth, and fifth as I reach the speed limit.
The black ribbon of highway curls around lakes and zips over small hills, requiring a constant back and forth between fourth and fifth gear that keeps my hand on the stick.
Trepidation slides back in, taking over from the butterflies.
Last night, Diana’s friend Sue came into the lodge, ostensibly to return a borrowed book. In reality, she was there to get a look at Benji, who was thankfully back at my cabin, lounging around in my clothes.
Deep down, I knew I couldn’t hide him at Happy Lake. Not for the whole summer, anyway. Buzz would only grow, a fertile ground for gossip. It's best to introduce him around town so he’ll quickly become “some cousin of Gina’s,” and that will be that.
“Are you nervous?” Benji asks, nodding toward my fingers tapping away on the gear stick.
“A little,” I admit. “Havenwood is small. Everyone knows everyone else’s business, and we’re all bored to death with each other. But you’re new and exciting. You’re going to get mobbed.”
Benji’s hand rests on mine, warm with a few new calluses from yesterday’s wood chopping. “I’m used to attention. And I’ll have clothes on.”
I can’t help but laugh. “I thought you were clothes-averse.” I’ve told him he has to wear a shirt while working, but that’s the only time he seems to.
“You want me to take my shirt off?” he asks, reaching for the hem.
I reach over, and I mean to grab his hands, I really do. But instead, my palm collides with the hard surface of his abs.
The noise I make is embarrassing—half strangled-whimper, half choking-gasp. I snatch my hand back. “Keep your shirt on.”
“I’ll take it off later,” he says, resting his arm out the open window again, smirking at me. “Just for you.”
Butterflies are back. They remain the dominant force in my stomach until we roll into town, past a green metal road sign that says Havenwood, population 465.
Havenwood has one main street, three blocks long, with an elbow-bend at the far end.
Summer-themed flags hang from the street lamps, and planters full of hardy flowers line the street.
There’s a diner, an outfitter selling bait and ice cream—always a winning combo—a liquor store, a gas station, and a thrift shop.
A few other shops sell things like four-wheelers and boats, and there’s a small pharmacy/gift shop.
The intersecting streets are all residential, one of them leading to the K-12 school.
“This is it?” Benji asks.
He doesn’t sound disappointed, but how can he not be? This is a very different world from Las Vegas. For one thing, the entire town shuts down by nine pm—hardly the kind of place where people in their twenties want to stay.
“Yeah. Pine Point, just down the highway, is bigger. Duluth is only an hour or so away. The cities are about five hours.”
“I like it.”
“There’s not a lot to do here.” I swing into a parking spot in front of the thrift shop, irritated with myself. I love Havenwood—I should be defending it, not putting it down.
Benji gives me a disappointed look. “Going out every night stops being fun eventually.”
I bite my lip and look around. “No twenty-five-year-old has ever looked at Havenwood and thought, ‘This is where I want to be.’”
“Except for you?”
“I wanted to leave once. Almost did, too. I got accepted at a college in the cities.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
“My mom.” I had planned to study environmental science, but then my mother hurt her back after falling off a table trying to change a lightbulb, and I realized I couldn’t leave her.
”Don’t bother rolling your window up,” I add.
“Everyone knows this is my truck, and there’s nothing valuable in it anyway.
” If anyone wants my faded pine tree air freshener or the cassette deck radio that doesn’t work, they’re welcome to it.
The only thing worth taking is my old guidebook of local lakes, and it’s not like I’ve gotten any use out of it in the last few years.
I can’t remember when I last went out on a lake other than Happy Lake.
I haven’t even managed that this summer.
Benji follows me into the thrift shop, the bell over the door announcing our arrival. The place is thankfully empty of customers, and Martin smiles up at us from the counter where he’s drinking coffee and scrolling on his phone.
I introduce them, and Martin takes Benji on a shopping spree while I browse the women’s section on Briar’s behalf, half-listening to them chatting away about the various pride flags on the wall. When we leave, it’s with two massive bags full of clothes.
“Martin mentioned he’s trans,” Benji says as I fire up the truck. “How is a rural place like Havenwood safe for a trans man like Martin? I thought…”
He trails off, but I know what he means. Small towns aren’t exactly known for welcoming diversity.
“There are bigoted assholes here, same as anywhere,” I say, “but they’re held to account as much as possible by everyone else in town.”
“How does that work?”
“Well, if you want a cake from Anabelle for your special occasion, or if you don’t want Cheryl to squash your tomatoes when she bags your groceries, or if you want to buy bait from Mikey or a new chain for your chainsaw from Elyse, or you want firewood from Milo or a beer at Gallo’s from Lou, or snow removed from your mile-long driveway by Ford or the good weed from Deirdre—that means you don’t spout hateful bullshit and you treat everyone with respect. ”
“And it works?”
“Mostly.” I pull into the grocery store parking lot and kill the engine as I slide into a parking space near the back.
“When things started getting ugly back in 2016, we had a meeting and decided that wasn’t what we wanted our town to be.
We wanted people in our community to feel safe and valued.
Our visitors, too. So we decided to hold each other accountable and make anyone spouting hateful views uncomfortable, no matter how uncomfortable that made us.
There are community classes and programs to help people identify disinformation and to counteract right-wing programming, especially among young men.
It’s continuous work, and it’s not perfect, but Havenwood should be a haven for everyone. Well, everyone except the bigots.”
“I think I’ll really like it here,” Benji says with a smile.
Happiness bubbles inside me. I want Benji to like it here.
“The grocery store is the beating heart of this town—the one place we all have to go at least once a week. Running in to buy milk can take thirty minutes or more, depending on who you run into. This is going to be your trial by fire. Because a town that loves itself and the people in it enough to protect them from the shitty stuff also loves to know everything about everyone. So remember: you’re my second cousin.
We met in Vegas because your mom was doing genealogy research.
You’re here for the summer because you’re between jobs and wanted to spend some time at Happy Lake, where you’re working part-time. ”
“Right. My grandma is—?”
“Margaret. My grandpa Bob’s sister. She never lived here, and no one knew her. Grandpa Bob moved here from Hibbing as an adult. She moved to Wisconsin, but that’s all I know about her. They never spoke, and he passed away before I was born.”
“Okay,” he says with a nod. “I think I’ve got it.”
We exit the relative privacy of my truck, and I spy our first Havenwood resident, an older Black man pushing a cart full of groceries over to his truck.
Carl moved up here with his wife, who has family in the area, after Hurricane Katrina.
When he waves, I call out, “Hey, Carl. Got a date for the potluck yet?” The baton for organizing Havenwood’s largest potluck was passed on to Carl when Dennis Perrault had a minor stroke seven years ago, and the event has grown.
“July twentieth,” he calls back. “The grandkids are up that weekend. Y’all coming?” he glances around, then walks closer, saying in a hushed voice, “I need someone to tell Mrs. Jennings not to bring the potato salad.”
“I’ll tell her Diana’s bringing hers.” There’s a rivalry there, so Diana will gladly do it, but if she can’t, I’ll do it.
He presses his palms together, turning his eyes up to the sky. “Thank you.” When his gaze drops down, it lands on Benji.
“This is Benji. He’s my second cousin, and he’ll be helping out at Happy Lake this summer.”
Benji and Carl shake hands, and we help Carl load the groceries into his truck while we talk about the weather and where the fish are biting.
“One down,” I say when Carl drives off with a wave out the window. I push Carl’s cart to Benji. “Four-hundred sixty-four to go.”