“The truth is,” Hal said, “I think my father just wanted to give it to somebody it already belonged to.” He looked at his hands a moment. “It’s the best kind of present. I’m only telling you in case you were, you know, wondering.”
“We all adore Jordan. Everybody’s happy for him. Joe too.”
Hal stood and lifted the basket from the floor. “Well, I guess I should look in on the patient. Scares me when he’s this quiet.” He moved around his chair, then stopped, suddenly gone into deeper thought.
“He loves this place, Lucy. That’s what it’s really all about. When my mother died, I know it saved him, somehow. He told me that once. The summer after she died, he came up here, and that’s what got him through it. I’ll never forget it. ‘It has the pure beauty of having been forgotten.’ That’s what he said about this place. He said it again this morning.”
My eyes were suddenly swimming again. I didn’t want Hal to see, so I stepped back from the railing, away from the light.
“Luce?”
“I’m all right,” I said. My voice caught a little, and I breathed to settle it, letting the air in my lungs push the tears away. But I knew I was only buying a moment, if that. In another minute I would be crying for real, the kind of tears you’ve kept inside so long you don’t know what they mean anymore, whether they’re happy or sad or both, only that they have to come out; as long as they’re coming, they own you, body and soul, these tears, and I didn’t want this to happen in front of Hal, or Joe, or anybody. I wanted to cry in a dark room somewhere, nobody around for miles to hear me, and cry until I was all cried out.
“It’s late,” I managed. “I should go. Good night, Hal.”
Twenty steps from porch to path, a hundred more down the shore toward the lodge, through the tangled shadows of the trees, the veil of laughter and cigar smoke. The pure beauty of having been forgotten, I thought, and that was the end for me.
At least I made it past the lawyers before the tears came.
SIX
Jordan
Y ou might think that the news your name had just appeared in a rich man’s will would blow you clean over like a March wind, but that wasn’t what happened to me. I was surprised, sure, dumbfounded really, and happy as hell, but I didn’t spend a second mooning over my good fortune, or wondering what I’d done to deserve it. (Since I’d done nothing.) What I did instead was this: After Hal had gone off to check on his family, and Joe and Kate had left to close down the kitchen for the night with Lucy, I headed down to the lake, sat myself on the dock with my back against the rail, opened a can of beer I’d filched from the fridge—I hadn’t touched the Scotch—and set my gear turning. I had run the books with Lucy long enough to know what the cash flow situation was. Kate had won a scholarship, but Bowdoin wasn’t cheap; her parents were forty grand in hock for it, and the meter was still running. Without anybody’s college degree to pay for, or a condo in the Keys, I figured I could turn a profit pretty quickly. A year from now I’d be running solidly in the black—not printing money, but doing well enough to buy a few ads in the Sunday travel sections of the Times and the Globe, and maybe a couple of well-timed notices in one of the glossy outdoor travel mags, to get in on the so-called adventure travel boom. The staff, of course, would have to grow. I’d need a couple of extra guides at least and maybe a full-time instructor, and then of course there were the cabins to consider, some modest renovation being the next, obvious step; I was thinking maybe something a bit upscale, with skylights over the bedrooms, good Danish woodwork and jets in the tub, just the sort of thing to attract the cross-country ski crowd, and while I was at it, why not keep the place running all year? (Never mind that I didn’t know anything about running a ski resort.) My thinking was all purely hypothetical, the way people will talk about what they’d buy if they won the pick-six, but the more I spun ideas around, the more the whole