Phil and Maris, had sold the sawmill and moved down to Orchard Beach, into an apartment complex that pretended it wasn’t an old folks’ home but of course was: no kids allowed, not a single resident under sixty, ramps on all the stairways and handholds in the johns. Phil’s arthritis had gotten pretty bad by this point—all that standing around on the hard ground through too many Maine winters—and he was deaf as a fence besides, from listening to the saws; like those old-time hockey players who skate without a helmet, Phil never once used earplugs, though he made everyone else wear them. He and Maris had talked about Arizona or even Las Vegas, someplace warmer and drier for Phil’s knees, though this was just talk; they’d never been to either place that I knew of, even to visit. Phil Hansen and I had been through our rough patches over the years. I think we had far too much in common to be completely comfortable with one another, and I sometimes held it against him, the poor care he took of himself. But in the end we’d let bygones be bygones, and when he’d died of a stroke—actually three strokes spread over as many weeks, bringing him down slowly, like a chopping axe blade—I had served as one of the pallbearers, weeping the whole way from church to gravesite. The funny thing was, it had taken Maris all of six months to pull up stakes and settle in Scottsdale, where she was now keeping company with a widowed dermatologist and had a golf handicap in the low teens. I was pretty sure Phil wouldn’t have minded all that much, though Lucy fumed for days whenever we got a postcard from her mother, always with the picture of some golf course on it and three blandly cheerful sentences saying, more or less, why the hell didn’t I do this before?
I sat beside Lucy on the bed. She was wriggling into a pair of jeans, and when she stood to pull them over her hips, I stayed where I was. My head felt oddly heavy, and for a second I even considered going back to sleep.
Lucy drew a sweater on over her head and looked at her watch. “Five thirty, Joe. You have a party, don’t you?”
I nodded. “The lawyers, cabin five.”
“No rush, then.” Lucy rolled her eyes a little. “I think you’ll find they won’t mind a little extra shut-eye.”
I’d heard them, too, as I was going to bed. They’d arrived the afternoon before, up from Springfield or Worcester or some other midsize New England city down on its luck, and spent most of the day in town ogling the scenery and laying in enough snacks, beer, and ice to feed a frat house. They asked me after dinner if I could take them out the next morning, “someplace special.” A pleasant enough bunch of fellows, I thought, though lately it had seemed to be raining lawyers. They’d said they wanted to get an early start, though everybody does.
“They want to get drunk, it’s their problem.” I heard the grumpiness in my voice and let it ride. “They said early, early’s what they’ll get. I thought I’d take them up to the old Zisko Dam. Not much action anywhere else.”
At the mirror, Lucy pulled her hair back into a ponytail. “The show must go on, I guess. I’ll put together some box lunches for them. Bring the radio with you, too, all right?”
I was watching her face in the mirror. “The radio? Why do I need the radio?”
She turned back to me with a correcting look and slid into her shoes. “For Harry, Joe,” she said. “For Harry.”
By the time the pickup was loaded it was just six, the sky already lit from end to end though dawn was still a few minutes off. I thought I’d give the lawyers a few extra minutes of sleep, so I drank a quick cup of coffee with Lucy in the kitchen; we had two girls from the high school helping out that summer, but they wouldn’t come in till six thirty when their shifts started. I helped Lucy with the sandwiches and snacks and pop—if the lawyers wanted anything harder, it was on their nickel—put these in the truck with the rest of the gear, and drove down the trace to their cabin.
By my reckoning, the lawyers were going to be feeling a lot less chipper this morning than they had the night