does in Jake’s direction. I very gently bump him with the toe of my work boot so he’ll move along, and he walks around behind me to sit in the grass.
“When you finish up here,” Jake tells me, “I want you to go over to cabin number twenty-four and turn the water and the electricity back on.”
I think back, counting the cabins in the second row in my head. “The old Marshall cabin?” The fourth one on the left, on the second row, the Marshall place is a cabin I know really well, or at least I used to. I walk over and get a drink of water from a plastic jug that Katie, Jake’s wife, brought me a few hours ago when she saw me standing in the hot sun cutting up the fallen tree.
He nods. “Maimi Marshall called Pop and said she needed someone to open it up.”
I’d just closed it a couple of weeks ago, draining the water from the pipes and winterizing everything.
“Are they going to be using it?”
Jake shrugs. “Apparently. Pop was being really cryptic about it.”
Pop, Jake’s dad, is a cantankerous old man on a good day. If you catch him on a bad day, he’s even worse. If he’s being cryptic, there’s probably a reason.
“You remember the Marshalls?” Jake asks. He goes and starts to stand the logs I’ve already cut up on their ends, because I’m still going to have to split them. The duck watches him warily.
I nod. “I do.”
“Didn’t you have a thing with her granddaughter?” Jake chuckles to himself.
That’s the problem with going back to a place where you grew up. You know everyone, every story, and every scandal that ever graced or disgraced the place. “I wouldn’t call it a thing,” I mutter more to myself than to him. “We were, what? Twelve? Thirteen?”
“She was always so quiet,” Jake says. “I never could get her to say a word to me.”
I glare at him. “That’s because Abigail had good sense. Not like the rest of them.”
He laughs. “It all worked out in the end.”
Jake has led a charmed life for the past few years. He left his job with the New York City police department after a scandal, when his partner got his wife pregnant, and he came home with his tail between his legs, claiming that he was only there to take care of his aging father, Mr. Jacobson. But he’d never left. He’d never left because Katie, his own blast from the past, had shown up that summer, too.
Now they have a house full of children, both hers and theirs, and they take care of the upkeep of the vacation compound. Pop Jacobson, the older Jacobson, likes to pretend he’s still in charge, but he really just rides around on his little red golf cart and chases his grandkids from place to place. Occasionally, he dispenses some wisdom but mostly he just does whatever he wants.
To tell the truth, Mr. Jacobson has always scared the pants off me. He has a way of making you feel about an inch tall, and if you cross him, you know it immediately. So I’ve steered as clear of him as I can ever since I arrived to start working.
I lift my noise-cancelling headphones like I’m going to put them back on. “You need anything else?”
Jake shakes his head and turns to leave, but then turns back. “Katie doesn’t like that you’re living in the campground,” he says. He fidgets a little, jamming his hands in his pockets.
“Is that so?” I stand with the headphones pulled open wide over my ears, but I haven’t let them go.
“She wants you to move into one of the cabins, since the nights are getting colder.”
I shake my head. “I’m not cold.”
“Well, you will be soon. It’s supposed to drop into the forties next week.”
I shake my head again. “I’m fine where I’m at,” I reply. Then I let the headphones fall, signaling that I think this conversation is over. He opens his mouth to say something else, but he closes it again and then walks away. He looks back at me over his shoulder once, but he keeps going, thank God.
I finish chopping the tree up, and I load it into the back of my old Ford pickup. It’s a relic but I still love it, mainly because I can take it anywhere and do anything with it without having to worry about messing it up. It belonged to my dad, and my