I reached back into the cabin and doused the light. A moment of absolute confusion: I realized he hadn’t been looking for me at all.

“Shit, I’m sorry, Harry. Pretend you never saw me, okay?”

“Does your father know you’re here?”

“No, and he’d better not. I mean it.” He shuddered and shook his head. “Jesus, what the fuck.”

Another voice reached us from around the corner. “Joe? Joe, is that you?”

Joe stepped off the porch as Lucy appeared and flew into his arms. He picked her up and gave a happy growl. The months away had released something in him, a kind of animal power. He put her down and looked at her, hugged her again.

“God, you smell,” she said. “Where have you been?”

“Long story. Just never ride with chickens, is all I’ll say. What the hell, Luce? Didn’t you tell me cabin nine? I think I permanently scared the shit out of old Harry here.”

She lifted her face and saw me then, standing on the porch; I think she’d forgotten I was there. Old Harry. I understood that she’d been waiting for him, in one of the adjacent cabins, for hours-ever since she’d left the party.

“It’s all right,” I said.

Joe set himself free and stepped up on the porch again. “Sorry again, Harry. Didn’t mean to freak you out like that.” He held out his hand, and we shook. His fingers were rough as pumice. “I guess you know I’m a wanted man, so if it’s all right with you, mum’s the word, okay? If my father knew I was here, he could get in trouble too.”

“You can count on me,” I said. “I won’t breathe a word.”

He descended the porch again and joined Lucy on the path. For a moment, we all three just stood there. A part of me was honestly glad for them, and glad for myself, being there to see it, though I felt a strange ache, too. It was as if I could step forward into the darkness and be utterly consumed by it, obliterated without a trace, remembered by no one. Even to set foot off the porch would set this in motion.

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I mean it. You two should get going.”

“Harry?” Lucy’s voice was a whisper.

I put a finger to my lips. “It’s okay,” I said quietly. “Go on.”

They slipped into the shadows. Their absence was total, as if I’d never seen them at all. How long I stood there I can’t recall. I would pack my bags in the morning, I decided. I would leave and not come back. I stood another moment at the rail, saying good-bye. Then I opened the screen door and went inside to bed.

TEN

I knew Joe would forget all about the radio.

It’s easy to say that now, of course, hindsight being what it is; but even as I watched him drive away that August morning, I knew. He had either forgotten to put it in the truck, or would leave it there when he arrived at the trailhead, miles out of reach; half on purpose, and half not. As he liked to say, “On accident.”

Call it ESP, or marriage, or what you like: I knew.

For the time being, though, I had to set my mind to other things: the end of breakfast, and box lunches for groups going out for the day, and sit-down for the rest; dinner, of course, which was never far off. There were sandwiches to assemble and pies to bake, apples and carrots and cookies to bag, vegetables to be washed and sliced and boiled; there was a standing rib roast to thaw for Monday, and, as I stood in the driveway, a delivery of three dozen lobsters, eight dozen littlenecks, and a small fortune in Glouster swordfish bouncing my direction in the back of a delivery truck from Portland. Never mind that we’re almost 150 miles inland, as far from the ocean as Albany, New York. It’s still Maine; people want their lobsters.

By the time I got back to the kitchen the full breakfast rush was on, tying me up till a little after nine. Jordan and Kate were still off somewhere, shuttling the moose-canoers to the put-in point; Joe was with his lawyers; nearly everyone else was on the lake or river, making good use of the morning. Our summer kitchen staff, Claire and Patty, were cleaning the last of the breakfast dishes and setting up for lunch. Both were rising seniors at Regional, just a few years behind Kate: Patty was one of those local girls you can’t help but worry about, late half the time and totally boy crazy-her current beau, a sullen, slack-eyed specimen who picked her up each afternoon in a rusty old Impala before roaring down the drive in a laughing cloud of dust and Marlboro smoke, seemed like nothing but bad news waiting to break-though Claire was totally the opposite, almost a little too angelic, with her golden curls and high, wispy voice, a girl who liked to read fat Russian novels on her breaks and actually sang when she washed the dishes.

A wedge of calm in the storm of morning: I used it to sit down for the first time that day to drink a cup of coffee and finally eat something myself, taking a spot at a clean table by the windows. The lake was calm under a strong sun, its surface uninterrupted except for a few boats here and there, small specks of human activity marked now and again by the glinting arc of a flyline. I wished one of them could be Harry, but after last night, I doubted this would happen.

“Lucy, fish truck’s here.”

“Thanks, Claire.” I rose, already weary; it was going to be a long day. The van was parked by the kitchen entrance. I signed for the delivery, and the girls and I got it all inside, eight bags of squirming lobsters and the littlenecks and swordfish besides, and wedged it into the big storage fridge.

By eleven everything was in order and humming along-I’d even managed to get a couple of pies, blueberry and apple, into the oven-and I left Patty and Claire in the kitchen and went to the office. For a moment I thought to call Joe on the radio, just in case I wasn’t wrong, but then decided against it: what would I tell him? There was no word from Hal or Harry, the kitchen was in order, nobody needed him for anything as far as I could tell. There was, of course, the simple urge to hear his voice, an impulse that was never far below the surface. But that’s all it was. I gave the transmitter a look or two, as if it might tell me something, then went to the desk to go over a pile of invoices. Even in the best summer, it was always a scrape, moving the money around like poker chips from one pile to another and hoping that I came out square by the end of the season. But not this August. My whole life I had catered to the wealthy: cooked their meals, washed their linens, cleaned their lodgings. Always between us was the understanding that they lived on one side of a line, I on the other. Now I was one of them.

The door swung open as I was writing the last of the checks. Kate’s face was flushed with exertion; her eyes widened with surprise, as if she hadn’t expected to find me there. In her hand was a freshly skinned orange. She took a seat on the sofa and looked around.

“Isn’t it lunchtime? Don’t I smell pies burning?”

“Don’t be funny.” I capped my pen. “Well?”

“Let’s see.” She was pulling the orange into wedges and popped one into her mouth. “All the moose-canoers are in place and floating downstream. The people from Connecticut are spending the morning in town, stocking up on bug repellent and wondering why they didn’t go to Disneyland this year. Cabin two needs towels. Jordan ’s around here somewhere, making himself useful, no doubt. Patty’s crying in the kitchen.”

“God, again? What is it this time?”

She shrugged; this had been going on all summer. “The usual boyfriend troubles, I guess. She sure is a raw nerve. Was I ever like that?”

“You were never like that.”

“Well, that’s a relief.” She looked at me a moment and grinned mischievously. “Okay, what’s missing? Give up? You didn’t ask me about Harry.”

I felt myself squirm. “Okay. How’s Harry?”