Ten Years of Public Breakups, Then He Ran After My Bus novel · Chapter 7 of 40

Chapter 7: Megunticook

Gordie's family camp on Lake Megunticook had been in his mother's family for ninety years.

It still had the original ceiling in the main room, brown from woodsmoke.

Twelve of us came up on the Friday of Labor Day weekend, in four cars, with four coolers and a dog.

The Friday table, minus the bar.

There was the Coast Guard petty officer and her husband, Paulie's cousin from Lewiston, the Hannaford manager, a pair of nurses from my floor and a couple who ran the hardware store.

They all knew.

They had known since the Galley, and they were being so careful not to look at us that they looked at the lake.

"Cabins," said Paulie, on the porch, with a clipboard.

She read out names in twos.

The petty officer and her husband got Cabin One, the hardware couple got Cabin Two, and my nurses got a bunk room.

"Bernie and Eben," said Paulie. "Cabin Four."

"There's one bed in Cabin Four," I said.

"I know."

"Paulie."

"Strike one was a warning," she said, kindly, and wrote something on the clipboard. "This is the test. If you can be civil in one room for two nights, I'll take it off the Board."

Eben said, from behind me, "I'll take the floor."

"Of course you will," said Paulie, delighted.

Cabin Four was twelve feet by twelve, with a double bed, a woodstove and a screen door that banged.

He put his bag down by the stove.

I put mine on the bed, and for a minute we stood looking at the pillows.

"I brought a sleeping bag," he said.

"I assumed."

"So that's settled," he said.

"That's settled."

We walked out of the cabin in opposite directions as fast as we could.

On Saturday there was a cliff.

It was a granite ledge fifteen feet over the deep end of the lake, with a rope swing someone had tied to a pine in 1987, and every Labor Day somebody jumped.

Gordie went first and made the whole dock rock.

The petty officer went, and the hardware man, and a nurse who screamed the whole way down.

"You're next, Cyr," said the Hannaford manager.

"I'm not jumping off a cliff."

"You jumped off a stage," Paulie said, from the water.

That was fair.

I stood on the ledge in my bathing suit with my toes over the edge and the water green and black below me.

I jumped.

The air went by, and the cold hit like a slap, and I went down deep and came up spitting.

A big arm caught me around the ribs.

Eben had come up the shore and into the water without a splash.

He held me upright for a moment while I got my breath back.

His hand was on my bare waist, wet and warm.

"You're all right," he said.

"I know I'm all right. Let go."

He let go.

The water between us moved.

That night there was a fire on the shore and a bag of marshmallows and a game of Truth or Dare, because Gordie was thirty-four and had never grown out of it.

The petty officer's husband told the story of how he proposed in the commissary.

The Hannaford manager got dared to eat a raw onion.

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