“…Chautauqua Lake,” I told the empty car as I turned onto Route 20 with my hands tight on the wheel and the heater roaring. It was a gray Tuesday in late October, and the maples along the highway had already dropped most of their leaves. I had not been to the lake in three years. Stan and I used to drive down every August, with a cooler and a bag of corn, and sit on his mother dock until the fireflies came out. Seventy miles is a long way to think. By Dunkirk I had decided I would not shout. By Westfield I had decided I might.
Eighteen Lakeview Lane sat at the end of a country road, behind a wall of tall pines. I parked on the shoulder and stared. The cottage was no longer the shabby little place I remembered. It had a new standing seam roof, new white windows, a long cedar dock, and beside it, newly built, a two car garage with a cozy apartment above, its windows lit. Two cars sat in the drive. One was Carol silver Lexus. The other was Diane blue SUV. A smell of woodsmoke drifted over the water. Somebody was having a very pleasant Tuesday.
I climbed the porch steps and rang the bell. I could hear laughter inside, and the clatter of dishes. Diane opened the door in a fleece vest, with a dish towel on her shoulder, a plump, cheerful woman of sixty six, and her face went through three expressions in two seconds. Surprise. Fear. Then a smile like a door slamming shut. “Donna,” she said brightly. “What a lovely surprise. We were just starting a little fire.” Behind her, in the great room, Carol rose from the couch with a glass of white wine in her hand and said nothing at all.
A country road to Lakeview Lane, a loan statement with one name on it, and a Thanksgiving table that Donna did not cook.
I did not wait to be invited. I walked past Diane into the room I had once helped paint, and I looked around. There was a leather sofa where our old wicker couch had been. A flat television. A kitchen with granite counters. On the mantel, in a silver frame, stood a photograph of Stan, grinning on the dock with a fish in his hand. I turned to his sisters and said, evenly, “You told me this house was sold in 2019. I checked the county records this week. It was transferred to the two of you for one dollar. Would one of you like to explain?”
Carol set her glass down. She is sixty nine, silver haired, a retired bank vice president who has never been wrong in her own opinion. She said, in her smooth voice, that the transfer had been Mother idea, for tax reasons, and that it had been perfectly legal. She said that Stan had known. She said Stan would have wanted the lake kept in the family. I took the folded loan statement from my purse and laid it on the granite counter. “Then perhaps,” I said, “he would also have wanted you to know that he co signed this.”
Diane read it first. The color drained from her cheeks. She said she had never seen the document before in her life, that Carol had taken care of all the paperwork, and that she had only signed where she was told. Carol said sharply that Diane was being foolish. Within a minute they were arguing, in the quick, hot, practiced way of sisters who had not said what they meant for decades. I stood and listened. At one point Diane, with tears in her eyes, said, “I told you we should pay Donna back, Carol. I told you.”
I let them finish. Then I told them what I wanted. Not revenge. Not a lawsuit, though I had already spoken to an attorney in Buffalo, a calm man named Mr. Kessler, who had said that Stan ninety five thousand dollars gave him a real claim on the property. I wanted the thirty thousand dollar loan refinanced into their own names within sixty days, so that Stan estate was no longer on the hook. And I wanted the ninety five thousand returned, over time, by a written agreement. Carol listened with her mouth tight. Diane nodded before I was done.
The next afternoon I drove to the senior apartments in Hamburg to see Helen. She was ninety one, tiny, in a pink cardigan, doing a crossword in her armchair. I sat on the footstool and told her everything. She was quiet for so long that I thought she had not understood. Then she took off her glasses and said, in a thin clear voice, that the girls had told her Stan agreed to the transfer. She had trusted them. She said, “Donna, I am so ashamed. I loved that boy more than my own life, and I let them take his dock.”
The agreement was signed on the sixth of November. Carol and Diane refinanced the loan, sold the garage apartment to cover the first payment, and promised to repay Stan money in monthly installments over seven years. Helen insisted on adding a clause that the lake cottage would never be sold outside the family. I did not argue. At the lawyer office, Diane hugged me hard and whispered an apology into my hair. Carol did not hug me, but she did, for the first time in twenty five years, look me straight in the eye and say, “Thank you for not being crueler.”
That Thursday, for the first time since 2003, I did not cook Thanksgiving dinner. I drove to the lake instead, in a pair of good slacks, carrying nothing but a store bought pie. Thirty people crowded the cottage. Carol carved the turkey. Diane managed the stuffing. Somebody brought paper plates, and nobody complained. At the head of the long table sat Helen, with her hands folded, and when everyone was seated, she asked me to say grace. I looked down the table, past the candles and the steaming bowls, and I whispered, “Thank you, Stan, for the lake.”