Chapter 17: The Lake Cabin

The lawyer my mother found took one look at Dane's motion and called it a bluff.

She was a small gray woman from my mother's church, and she did not raise her voice once.

"Be rested," she told us. "Be boring. Don't be seen doing anything a judge could read two ways."

"Then you two sleep," my mother said.

She was already packing Archie's bag.

"I'm taking him to my sister's for the weekend, and the lawyer knows. Here's the key to the cabin."

Willa opened her mouth.

"Don't argue with me," said Agnes. "I'm sixty-three and I've buried a husband."

The cabin sat at the end of a gravel road, with the lake behind it gone black and flat.

It was my father's, and then my mother's, and it smelled of cedar and cold ashes.

I lit the stove while Willa stood in the doorway in her coat.

"It's very quiet," she said.

"There's a loon out there somewhere."

"I don't hear it."

"He's off duty."

She laughed and came in and shut the door.

I knelt at the stove with my back to her.

The kindling caught, and the room went gold.

Her coat fell on the floor behind me.

"Cal."

I turned around.

She stood in her gray cardigan, with the firelight on one side of her face and her braid already coming loose.

"You said clothes stay on," I said. "You said terms."

"I said a lot of things."

"You're married."

"Careful, Penrose," she said, in the exact voice she had used on the library stool. "You're the one who's married."

"I'm on my way out of it."

"Then so am I."

She crossed the floor and took my face in both her hands.

"My husband offered you a hundred and twenty thousand dollars to stay stupid," she said. "I'm done being polite to him."

"Willa."

"Tell me to stop."

"No," I said.

It came out rough, and I felt her smile against my mouth.

This time there was no dish to fall.

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