Everything took longer in Butternut, Cal Cooper reflected, glancing at the patrol car in his rearview mirror. Even getting a speeding ticket. He checked the dashboard clock of his Porsche 911. He was already fifteen minutes late meeting his sister, Allie, at their family’s cabin on Butternut Lake. He reached for his cell phone and started to text her, then changed his mind and called her instead. He needed to hear her voice.
“Cal? Where are you?”
“In town. I’m getting ticketed, I think.”
“For what?”
“For going thirty-five in a twenty-five-mile zone. Figures, right? I’ve speeded through five states since I left Seattle, and it wasn’t until I was on Main Street in Butternut that I got pulled over. It’s the out-of-state plates, isn’t it?” he asked.
“No, Cal. It’s the car,” Allie said. “Seriously, you’re just asking for a ticket when you drive something that expensive.”
“That’s class warfare,” he objected.
“Maybe. But if it is, your class is winning,” Allie teased.
Cal smiled. He missed her. And the events of the last several weeks had only made him miss her more. “I’ll be there soon,” he said, though another glance in the rearview mirror told him that the policeman—Officer Sawyer, according to his name tag—was still checking his license and registration.
“I’ll be waiting,” Allie said.
Cal hung up. It would be good to get to the cabin, he thought, good to get out of this car. The last three days of his life were already a blur best summed up by numbers: nine cups of coffee, seventeen hundred miles of highway, twenty-seven hours of driving, and twenty-six of those hours spent trying not to think about why he’d left Seattle. He wouldn’t think about it now, either. He’d concentrate instead on Butternut’s Main Street, which on this June afternoon looked like a movie set of small-town America. Children with ice cream cones, a black Lab lazing on the sidewalk outside the hardware store, a woman pulling a little boy in a red wagon, some teenage girls clumped on a bench in front of Pearl’s coffee shop, and an older couple stopping to look at a display in the window of the variety store. But Cal saw Butternut’s charm without really feeling it. Feeling wasn’t something he was that eager to do right now.
“Mr. Cooper?” Officer Sawyer said, appearing at his car window. He handed Cal his license, registration, and a $145 speeding ticket. “Are you just passing through Butternut?”
“No,” Cal said. “I’ll be here for a couple weeks, maybe more.”
“Well, slow down, then,” the officer said gruffly. “This is a small town.”
I know, Cal thought. He’d spent the first eighteen summers of his life at his family’s cabin on nearby Butternut Lake. But to Officer Sawyer he said, “I’ll drive at the speed limit, Officer.” And he would. After all, he’d sped halfway across the country, and he still hadn’t outrun his life.
The rest of Cal’s drive was uneventful. A half hour later, he and Allie were sitting on the front porch steps of the cabin their grandparents had built in the 1950s. The cabin itself was modest. The view from it was not. It overlooked Otter Bay, one of the largest bays on Butternut Lake, a twelve-mile-long spring-fed lake that was over a hundred feet deep in places and that, on a sunny day like today, was apt to be a dazzling blue. The water was made to seem even bluer, of course, by its contrast to the green of the pine, balsam, and spruce trees that bordered the lake, the granite boulders that dotted its shores, and the occasional crescents of golden beach etched into its sides. The term pretty as a postcard didn’t apply here, Cal thought. He’d seen the postcards of Butternut Lake on sale at the drugstore in town. The real thing was prettier by far.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” Allie asked finally.
“What do you mean?” Cal said, turning to her.
“Well, for one thing, you look . . .”
“Like hell?” he suggested.
“I was going to say ‘tired.’”
He shrugged. “I didn’t have the best luck with motels.” He’d checked into the first one, outside Gold Creek, Montana, late at night. After he was asked to pay up front for his room—never a good sign—he’d discovered the door to it had already been kicked in. The surly management hadn’t seemed overly concerned by this. Neither, for that matter, had the Hells Angels drinking in the motel’s parking lot. Cal had a fitful night’s sleep and left early the next morning. The second night of his drive, he’d found a motel outside Bismarck, North Dakota, that had seemed promising, but that was before he’d realized it was hosting the Dakota conference of Seventh-day Adventists. They’d been nice people, but after he’d found himself on the receiving end of their proselytizing, he’d again cut his stay short and gotten back on the road.
“Now that you’re here, you’ll sleep well,” Allie said confidently. “I swear this air is like . . . breathable Ambien or something. So I won’t worry about your being tired. I’d be lying, though, if I said I wasn’t worried about the other stuff.”
“What other stuff?”
“You’ve been impossible to reach.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“You’ve always been busy, Cal. But you’ve always stayed in touch.”
“I’m here now,” he pointed out.
“And that’s another thing. Since when do you come up here?”
“I can’t take a vacation?” he chided her.
“You can. I just don’t remember you ever taking one before.”
He couldn’t argue this point. He hadn’t built a successful architectural firm by taking vacations. But Cal, who’d already found plenty of excuses to stall, found another one now. “Oh, I forgot,” he said, turning to the suitcase he’d set down on the porch and unzipping one of its compartments. He took out a plastic bag from a souvenir shop he’d stopped at in Big Horn County, Montana. “I got some presents for the kids.” He reached into the bag. “This is for Wyatt,” he said, extracting a fur hat with side flaps. “It’s coyote fur, apparently. Made in Canada, I noticed, but still, I think it’s supposed to evoke the American Frontier.” He handed the hat to Allie and reached back into the bag. “This is for Brooke. It’s a bobcat tail keychain.”
Allie chuckled. “Cal, she’s two. She doesn’t have any keys yet.”
“Oh, right. Maybe I can get her a set, then. You know, just for show.”
Allie smiled. “But this,” she said, holding up the hat with its furry top and fluffy side flaps. “This could definitely come in handy in the depths of a Northern Minnesota winter.”
“Oh, God, it’s hideous,” Cal said, reaching for it. He wondered now what had possessed him to buy it for his nephew, Wyatt, when no self-respecting eleven-year-old would ever be caught dead in it. “I’ll burn it later,” he told Allie. “Or maybe I should just . . .” He pantomimed throwing it, Frisbee style, into the nearby woods.
“Are you kidding?” Allie said, taking it away from him. “Wyatt will love it. Anything from his cool uncle,” she added, twirling it around on one finger. “And who knows? I may even wear it myself.” She tried it on, and Cal had to smile. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and the owner of a successful gallery in town, but she looked like a kid. Or at least a teenager, with her long honey-colored hair streaming out from under the hat and her complexion already sporting an early summer tan. She wore a uniform he remembered well from their family’s summers at the lake: a faded T-shirt, cutoff blue jeans, and a pair of flip-flops.
“Do you ever get older?” Cal asked, tugging affectionately on one of the hat’s earflaps. Allie brushed this question aside, though. She pulled the offending hat off and stuffed it back into the bag.
“Do you want some lemonade?” she asked. “I made a pitcher before you got here.”
“I’d love some. Thank you,” he said. As Allie went into the cabin, he was grateful for another reprieve from the conversation he knew they were going to have. He rubbed his bleary eyes. He felt jittery and weary at the same time. Too much coffee, too little sleep. How to talk about this thing, though? he wondered. How to talk about it when he still didn’t even want to think it? So he tried not to think about it and tried instead to take comfort in the familiarity of this place, the scent of sun-warmed pine needles, and the play of light on the water.
“This is my favorite time of day here,” Allie said when she came back with two glasses of lemonade. She handed Cal one, and, sitting down again, sipped from the other one, looking thoughtful. “When was the last time you were here?” she asked.
“Ten years ago, maybe?” Cal said. “I brought Adam and Danny and Josh”—friends from college—“up for some fishing.”
“Some fishing or some drinking?” Allie asked.
“I don’t think the two were ever mutually exclusive,” Cal said.
“No, I guess not,” Allie said, amused. “Did you ever think it would take you this long to come back, though?”
“Never,” Cal said honestly. When he was growing up, he didn’t even consider summer to have begun until his family had loaded up their station wagon, and, with him and Allie squabbling in the backseat before they’d even pulled out of the driveway, made the five-hour drive from suburban Minneapolis to Butternut. “I never thought I’d be away this long,” he said now. “But I never stopped thinking about it, either. The thing is, though, I can’t really tell any of those summers apart now. At a certain point, they all just started to . . . run together.”
“That’s because they were all the same. Or they felt that way, anyway. That’s called boredom, Cal. That’s what children used to feel before they had Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat.”
“No, it wasn’t boredom, exactly,” Cal said. “It was more like . . .”
“More like we did the same things over and over again?” Allie said. “Like catching those little crayfish—God, those used to pinch—or taking the motorboat over to Birch Tree Bait for ice cream, or building those blanket forts in the bunkroom? But you know, Cal,” she added mischievously, “not every summer was the same. There was the summer of your first kiss, remember? What was her name? That girl whose parents owned the campground?”
“Shannon.”
“That’s right. Shannon. Shannon with the buckteeth.”
“She did not have buckteeth.”
“Yes, she did. I don’t know why you’ve always denied it.”
“Because it’s not true. She was perfect,” Cal said. But Allie had already moved on. “And what about the first time you ever got drunk? That was up here, too. You and Matty filched a bottle of Kahlúa from the liquor cabinet. And you drank it straight. I swear, Cal, you looked so ill afterward.”
“That was the last time I had Kahlúa,” he said, shaking his head. “Just the thought of it now—”
“Wait, wasn’t that around the same time you and James ran the motorboat up on the sandbar and Mom and Dad grounded you for two weeks?”
“Same time,” Cal agreed. “But those two incidents—the Kahlúa and the sandbar—were totally unrelated.”
They continued in this nostalgic vein for a little while—Allie remembering things and Cal wondering, again, what had kept him away from here for so long. But he knew. Of course he knew. Life had kept him away. Or he had let it keep him away. And he wasn’t the only one, either. According to Allie, the other “summer people” he’d grown up with here—Matty and James and Tyler—had long since stopped coming. And right around the time he and Allie left for college, his parents, tired of the long Minnesota winters and the constant upkeep of owning two homes, had downsized to a condominium in Florida and deeded the cabin over to their children, who, by some unspoken agreement, had allowed it to fall into a state of gentle decay.
All that had changed six years ago when Allie decided to buy Cal out of his half of the cabin and move up here with Wyatt, who was then five years old. At the time, Allie was recovering from the death of her husband, Gregg, whose National Guard unit had been deployed to Afghanistan. Meeting another man had been the last thing on her mind, but that’s exactly what had happened. She’d fallen in love with Walker Ford, her neighbor across the bay, who owned the boatyard in Butternut. A year later, they’d gotten married, Allie and Wyatt had moved into Walker’s larger and more modern cabin, and Walker had adopted Wyatt. Since then, their daughter, Brooke, had been born. Their family, Allie had told Cal, was just the right size.
Cal had wondered at first why Allie kept this cabin after she and Walker had gotten married. But she’d told him a few years ago that she was simply too attached to sell it, and that she’d find a use for it one day. In the meantime, she’d continued to improve it, and Cal could see that she’d restored the property to its former rustic charm and then some. She’d shored up the dock, replaced the boathouse roof, rebuilt the cabin’s wraparound porch, and even added a few homey touches, painting the window trim and window boxes a balsam green, and paving the dirt trail that led down the mossy, sloping lawn to the lake with hand-cut stone.
“You’ve done a nice job with the place, Allie,” Cal said.
“I think so,” she said, looking genuinely pleased. “I’ve enjoyed it. Really, I have. It’s been a labor of love. And I want to show you what I’ve done inside, too. But before I do, you have to answer one question for me.”
“Which is . . . ?”
“Why aren’t you wearing your wedding ring?” she asked, leveling her hazel eyes at him.
“When did you notice?”
“About ten seconds after you got here. I wasn’t going to say anything about it, but then I realized you weren’t going to say anything about it, either. And I’m guessing you didn’t just accidentally leave it at home.”
“No,” he said, suddenly cheered by a thought. “I left it on the counter of a diner in Fargo, North Dakota, this morning.”
Allie frowned.
“What?” Cal asked defensively. “It was a good tip. That band is platinum. Not that my waitress didn’t deserve it. She was very quick on the coffee refill.”
“So you and Meghan . . . ?” she asked, astonished.
“Are over,” Cal said. In his own way, he was as surprised as she was.
“When did this happen?”
“Six weeks ago.”
“Cal, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I haven’t really talked to anyone about it. Except my lawyer.”
“This is why you’ve been so hard to reach?” She shook her head. “But, I mean, a lawyer? Already? Isn’t is possible you’ll still . . . work things out?”
“No,” he said. And he meant it.
“What happened?”
He looked away. Not yet, he thought. He wasn’t ready to tell anyone yet. Not even Allie.
“There wasn’t . . . anyone else involved, was there?” she asked quietly.
“No, no one else,” he said.
“Well, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t surprised. When we saw you in April, you and Meghan seemed so . . . compatible,” she said. It occurred to Cal that she hadn’t said happy. There was a silence now, longer than it needed to be.
“So . . . where do you go from here?” Allie asked finally.
“I’ve moved out,” he said. “Filed for divorce. The rest of it, though, I don’t know.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “We were married for five years and now . . . I have to rethink everything I knew. The problem is, I don’t want to think about it, much less talk about it.”
“Then you don’t have to,” she said, putting an arm around his shoulders. “But when you are ready to talk about it, I’ll be here.”
As she said this, something occurred to him. “There’s at least one positive thing to come out of all this, though,” he said.
“What’s that?”
He smiled bleakly. “You don’t have to work so hard to like Meghan anymore.”
“Cal.” When he met Allie’s protest with a skeptical look, she added, “Do you really think I don’t like her? Because that’s not . . . completely true. I mean, I’ve never disliked her.” This statement made Cal laugh. Even Allie must have realized what faint praise this was for her sister-in-law, because she added, “Okay, look, I think she’s a little intense, a little . . . perfectionistic, maybe. But that’s important in her line of work, isn’t it?” Meghan was an interior designer. That was how Cal had originally met her. They’d both been working with the same client.
Cal didn’t answer her question. He was thinking about last spring, when Allie and her family had visited Seattle. Cal had loved showing them the city, but the time they’d spent at his and Meghan’s apartment had been strained. After all, as Meghan had explained to Cal many times before, their duplex was more than a home to her; it was also a showcase. The entire apartment was white—or, as Cal used to tease her, “fifty shades of white.” Meghan had looked practically ill when Brooke drank grape juice out of a sippy cup on their white couch, and it was all she could do not to follow Wyatt around with a MiniVac when he ate pretzels in their gleaming white-tiled kitchen. He wondered if Allie was remembering this, too, and he thought maybe she was when she said, “Well, if you’re getting divorced, at least there are no children involved. There’s that, anyway.”
There was that, Cal thought bitterly. But he couldn’t meet Allie’s eyes. They were silent again until Cal’s anger at Meghan subsided a little and was replaced by something else: gratitude. Gratitude for Allie. She’d always been there for him before, and she was there for him now. “Thank you,” he said.
“What for?”
“For today,” he said with a tired smile. “For the lemonade. For letting me stay, even though I didn’t give you much notice.”
“Cal, of course you can stay. You know that. Stay as long as you want. What about your firm, though? Can they survive without you?” And here was another thing that Cal couldn’t talk to Allie about. This, too, it seemed, would have to wait.
“I can work from here,” he said. “There is an Internet connection, isn’t there?”
“Yes, Cal. There are plumbing and electricity, too,” she said, nudging him playfully with her knee. “And there are groceries. I went shopping this morning for the basics, but we’re expecting you for dinner tonight. Walker is grilling steaks, and Wyatt is going to make you watch about twelve hours of GoPro video of him waterskiing.”
“I wouldn’t want to miss that,” Cal said, the prospect of an early night slipping away from him.
“And don’t forget, tomorrow is Daisy Keegan’s wedding.”
“Oh, right. I did forget.” When he’d told Allie he was coming three days ago, she’d mentioned he’d be arriving in time for Daisy’s wedding and she could wrangle an invitation for him if he’d like. Daisy was the daughter of Caroline Keegan, Allie’s best friend, and she was marrying Will Hughes after a three-year engagement. Cal wished now he’d told Allie he didn’t want to go. The thought of attending someone else’s wedding when his own marriage had fallen apart depressed him.
Allie seemed to sense this. “I know the timing’s not great, Cal. If you want to sit it out, that’s fine with me.”
“No, Caroline has probably given the caterer a head count already,” Cal said.
“The caterer?” Allie laughed. “Caroline is the caterer, Cal.” Her friend owned Pearl’s, the coffee shop in town that was justifiably famous for, among other things, its excellent blueberry pancakes.
“There’s still the matter of a suit, though,” he pointed out. “I didn’t pack one.”
“That’s all right. You don’t need a suit. This is Butternut. I mean, you have pants that aren’t blue jeans, don’t you?” she asked.
He nodded.
“And a shirt with a collar?”
He nodded again.
“Then you’re good to go. And trust me, you’ll be glad you did. Everyone in Butternut will be there. It’s the social event of the season. No, it’s the social event of the decade, at least in this town.”
He smiled but didn’t say anything. It was quiet, except for the waves from a powerboat slapping rhythmically against the dock’s pilings, and the tinkling of the wind chimes that hung off the porch eaves.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” Allie said suddenly, giving him a hug. “We’ll figure this out, Cal. This whole thing.” And in that moment, she was the older sister of his childhood—the occasionally bossy but always loving older sister. (She was only two years older than him, but it was a role, Cal knew, she took to heart.)
“Thanks,” he said for the second time that day.