In late spring, Cody asked which dates I wanted for my own use.
“Don’t rent the whole summer and then tell me you couldn’t find a week,” he said.
I opened the school calendar.
The third week of June was clear.
“Those days,” I told him.
He blocked them before we hung up.
Delaney packed three days before we left.
She put shorts, pajamas, and her swimsuit in a duffel bag, then added the cards.
“Do we need to ask anyone?”
“For what?”
“To use the cabin.”
I looked up from the laundry basket.
“No, baby.”
“Because it’s yours.”
“Yes.”
She zipped the bag.
“Okay.”
We drove up on a Monday morning with the windows down for part of the way and a cooler on the back seat.
Delaney kept asking how much farther, although she knew the road.
At the turn toward the cove, she sat forward.
“I remember that mailbox.”
“So do I.”
The cabin looked smaller than it had in the rental photographs.
That relieved me.
In pictures, my father had made it sound like a place anyone could buy a weekend in. From the driveway, I could see the porch screen Grandma had patched, the cedar siding darkened by weather, and the steps where I had once sat with wet hair wrapped in a towel.
Cody had replaced a loose board.
The old screen door still needed a firm pull.
I unlocked the front door.
Inside, the cabin smelled of wood, lemon cleaner, and the faint dampness that came with being near the lake.
My father’s hat was gone.
Grandma’s quilt was folded at the foot of the bed.
The refrigerator was bare.
Cody had returned Delaney’s old drawings in a flat envelope. She kept them in a shoebox under her bed now.
When I asked whether she wanted to bring them back, she shook her head.
“I’m keeping those.”
So we left them at home.
I carried groceries inside while Delaney checked the rooms.
Then she stood beside the kitchen drawer and pulled.
It stuck.
“Lift it a little,” I said.
She did.
“Oh.”
“Your great-grandma used to forget to warn people.”
“On purpose?”
“Sometimes.”
Delaney grinned.
I put the milk away and listened to her opening cupboards, rediscovering the chipped mugs and the fish-shaped magnets.
For years, I had thought preserving the cabin meant leaving everything available to everyone who claimed a connection to it.
Standing there, I realized how much of Grandma’s actual life I had nearly handed over in the process.
She had wanted me there. She had put my name in the documents because she knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to be fair to people who never wondered whether they were being fair to me.
I ran a hand over the kitchen counter.
There was still a small burn mark near the stove from a pan I had set down when I was sixteen.
Nobody had polished it away.
That evening, Delaney worked at the table while I made dinner.
She bent over a sheet of paper with her tongue caught between her teeth. Markers rolled toward the edge every time she moved her elbow.
“Can I look?”
“Not yet.”
I sliced tomatoes and put them on a plate.
“Now?”
“No.”
A few minutes later, she got up and searched through the magnets.
She chose the fish.
Then she put her drawing on the refrigerator.
There was the cabin, with a roof too steep and a dock that leaned much more than the real one. Two people stood at the end of it, one tall and one short.
Above them, she had written:
Mom’s cabin.
Below the dock, in smaller letters:
Mom always comes.
I stood beside the open refrigerator longer than I needed to.
“Is it okay?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Because I can fix your hair.”
“My hair’s fine.”
She had given me a purple ponytail and enormous hands.
I put an arm around her shoulders.
“Leave it exactly like that.”
After dinner, we carried the cards down to the dock.
I checked the boards before we sat. Delaney took off her sandals and set them side by side, far enough from the edge that I didn’t have to remind her.
Across the cove, somebody started a boat. A dog barked once from another porch.
A heron stood near the point.
Delaney dealt the cards on a towel between us so none would slip through the gaps.
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
She beat me the first game.
Then the second.
By the fourth, she was laughing before I had even realized I’d lost.
I accused her of taking advantage of an exhausted nurse.
“You’re on vacation,” she said.
She was right.
I put my phone in the bag behind me and reached for the cards.
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Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction created for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.