Six Rooms at the Lake, But None for My Parents novel · Chapter 24 of 24

Chapter 24: Six Rooms

On Labor Day weekend I stood at the lake house gate at four o'clock and counted.

Nine people were coming, with a limit of ten.

I had written the list myself, and I said each name aloud to the hydrangeas.

My parents. Nate. Brooke's husband and their two girls. Aunt Carol and her husband.

And me.

The gate was open, and it stayed open.

My father had been up since five.

He was out in the aluminum skiff with Brooke's older girl, both of them in canvas hats, and she had brought her own pole.

She had caught a bluegill and had refused to throw it back until he held it up and told her it was a fine one.

The younger girl was on the dock, eating a peach and telling Nate how deep the lake was.

"Forty feet," Nate said.

"That's not deep."

"Out past the point it's three hundred."

She gave him a long look and decided to believe him.

I stood on the porch with my hand on the rail, and I did not hold any part of myself in.

Aunt Carol and her husband had arrived at noon with a cooler and a tin of her lemon bars.

She had taken my hands in the yard.

"I owe you the worst apology of my life," she said. "I squeezed your hand in July and told you we were pulling for you. I thought you'd lost your job."

"You didn't know."

"I should have asked you one question." She shook her head. "I'm sixty-four and I just learned that one."

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