welfare of their son was involved, she wouldn’t budge.
“If I’m ever gonna get married again, I’ll find a woman I hate and give her a house and car,” Jeff said more times than he cared to remember. It usually made his friends at the office laugh, but he was half-convinced he meant it.
The difference was, in his case, he had kept the house and car. He wanted to keep them if only to provide Matt some illusion of stability while he was off to college, even if the house was much too big for him, now that he was living alone. The cost of upkeep made it so he had little to no discretionary income, not that having a kid in college allowed much discretionary income.
As the weekend for the reunion drew closer, Jeff began to think how it might not be such a bad idea after all to hook up with some old friends. He could really use a weekend away, drinking and reminiscing with people who had known him long before he married Susan. Evan had finally settled on a weekend—the last weekend of October, a few days before Hallowe’en. Everyone agreed this was a good time for them, and they began to make their plans to rendezvous at the landing dock on Shore Road where Evan would meet them with a boat and take them over to Sheep’s Head Island and Camp Tapiola.
For a while, Jeff had argued that going out so late in the year might be a colossal mistake. The way he remembered it, the temperature had dropped close to freezing on a couple of nights when they were there in the middle of July.
Imagine it in October? … a lake in western Maine? … sleeping in an un-insulated, unheated building? …
That didn’t sound very appealing.
If they were still kids, it might be an exciting adventure, but at their age?
No way.
The other guys—especially Evan—scoffed at him via e-mail for sounding like a pussy and for lacking imagination. The problem was, Jeff could imagine all too easily how things could go wrong. If—and if was still a big if—he even went to the reunion—he would be sure to bring plenty of rum to keep him warm and pleasantly buzzed for the entire weekend. Hell, maybe he’d even see if he could score some weed. That would certainly make for a fun weekend.
The month of September was rainy and much colder than usual. Jeff hoped Evan would finally see reason and call the whole thing off until next spring. But Evan insisted that, as soon as the ice was out of the lake come spring, his construction company was going to bring in bulldozers and other machinery to start tearing apart the old campgrounds. By June of next year, the island would be unrecognizable. If they wanted one last chance to see where they had spent a short but significant time of their lives … if they wanted to recapture some childhood memories, this was their one and only chance.
Do I really need this? Jeff wondered, but—somehow—in the end, he wasn’t really sure why—he made the decision to go.
Jeff offered to meet Tyler at the Portland Jetport when his flight from LA arrived. It might be a good idea not to face this entirely on his own. Besides, it would be nice to drive out to camp with one of his friends and catch up, one on one.
Tyler nixed all that, telling Jeff he planned to come to Maine a few days earlier and spend some time driving around coastal Maine before heading over to the camp. Jeff couldn’t afford to take any extra time off work—not if he wanted any vacation time when Matt was home from college on Christmas break—so that Thursday night he got packed. He made sure he took Matt’s down-filled sleeping bag along with plenty of warm clothing.
As it was, on the Friday of the reunion, Jeff had to go into the office in the morning to take care of some last-minute paperwork, so he was late getting started. The drive out of Portland was pleasant enough, even though the foliage was a few weeks past peak and the “blue-crested leaf peepers” had gone back south to their retirement homes in Florida. When he got to Gorham, he stopped at the local Shop ‘n Save where he picked up his share of the groceries for the weekend. They had all agreed who would bring what, but as he wandered up and down