by the end of May, but, being Richard, he was still working on the deck in mid-June when Patty went up to enjoy some weeks in the country. Walter went along for the first four days, on his way to a money-tree-shaking V.I.P. fishing trip that a major Nature Conservancy donor was hosting at his deluxe “camp” in Saskatchewan. To make up for her poor showing in the winter, Patty was a whirlwind of hospitality at the lake house, cooking up splendid meals for Walter and Richard while they hammered and sawed in the back yard. She was proudly sober the whole time. In the evening, without Joey in the house, she had no interest in TV. She sat in Dorothy’s favorite armchair, reading War and Peace at Walter’s long-standing recommendation, while the men played chess. Thankfully for all concerned, Walter was better than Richard at chess and usually won, but Richard was dogged and kept asking for another game, and Patty knew that this was hard on Walter—that he was straining very hard to win, getting himself wound up, and would need hours to fall asleep afterward.
“More of this clotting-of-the-middle shit,” Richard said. “You’re always tying up the middle. I hate that.”
“I’m a clotter of the middle,” Walter affirmed in a voice breathless with the suppression of competitive glee.
“It drives me crazy.”
“Well, because it’s effective,” Walter said.
“It’s only effective because I don’t have enough discipline to make you pay for it.”
“You play a very entertaining game. I never know what’s coming.”
“Yeah, and I keep losing.”
The days were bright and long, the nights startlingly cool. Patty loved early summer in the north, it took her back to her first days in Hibbing with Walter. The crisp air and moist earth, the conifer smells, the morning of her life. She felt she’d never been younger than she’d been at twenty-one. It was as if her Westchester childhood, though chronologically prior, had somehow taken place in a later and more fallen time. Inside the house was a faint pleasant musty smell reminiscent of Dorothy. Outside was the lake that Joey and Patty had decided to call Nameless, newly melted, dark with bark and needles, reflecting bright fair-weather clouds. In summer, deciduous trees hid the only other nearby house, which a family named Lundner used on weekends and in August. Between the Berglunds’ house and the lake was a grassy hillock with a few mature birch trees, and when the sun or a breeze discouraged mosquitoes Patty could lie on the grass with a book for hours and feel completely apart from the world, except for the rare airplane overhead and the even rarer car passing on the unpaved county road.
The day before Walter left for Saskatchewan, her heart began to race. It was just a thing her heart was doing, this racing. The next morning, after she drove Walter to the airstrip in Grand Rapids and returned to the house, it was racing so much that an egg slipped out of her hand and fell on the floor while she was making pancake batter. She put her hands on the counter and took deep breaths before kneeling down to clean it up. The finish work in the kitchen had been left for Walter to do at some later date, but grouting the new tile floor ought to have been within Richard’s capabilities, and he hadn’t gotten to it yet. On the plus side, as he’d told them, he’d taught himself to play the banjo.
Though the sun had been up for four hours, it was still fairly early morning when he emerged from his bedroom in jeans and a T-shirt advertising his support for Subcomandante Marcos and the liberation of Chiapas.
“Buckwheat pancakes?” Patty said brightly.
“Sounds great.”
“I could fry you some eggs if you’d rather.”
“I like a good pancake.”
“Easy enough to do some bacon, too.”
“I wouldn’t say no to bacon.”
“OK! Pancakes and bacon it will be.”
If Richard’s heart was racing also, he gave no sign of it. She stood and watched him put away two stacks of pancakes, holding his fork in the civilized grip that she happened to know Walter had taught him as a freshman at college.
“What are your plans for the day?” he asked her with low to moderate interest.
“Gosh. I hadn’t thought about it. Nothing! I’m on vacation. I think I’m going to do nothing this morning, and then make you some lunch.”
He nodded and ate, and it occurred to her that she was a person who dwelt in fantasies