One afternoon shortly after arriving back home, I rummaged the closets until I found the shoeboxes containing Jo’s old photographs. I sorted them, then studied my way through the ones of Dark Score Lake. There were a staggering number of these, but because Johanna was the shutterbug, there weren’t many with her in them. I found one, though, that I remembered taking in 1990 or ’91. Sometimes even an untalented photographer can take a good picture—if seven hundred monkeys spent seven hundred years bashing away at seven hundred typewriters, and all that—and this was good. In it Jo was standing on the float with the sun going down red-gold behind her.
She was just out of the water, dripping wet, wearing a two-piece swimming suit, gray with red piping. I had caught her laughing and brushing her soaked hair back from her forehead and temples. Her nipples were very prominent against the cups of her halter. She looked like an actress on a movie poster for one of those guilty-pleasure B-pictures about monsters at Party Beach or a serial killer stalking the campus. I was sucker-punched by a sudden powerful lust for her. I wanted her upstairs just as she was in that photograph, with strands of her hair pasted to her cheeks and that wet bathing suit clinging to her. I wanted to suck her nipples through the halter top, taste the cloth and feel their hardness through it. I wanted to suck water out of the cotton like milk, then yank the bottom of her suit off and fuck her until we both exploded. Hands shaking a little, I put the photograph aside, with some others I liked (although there were no others I liked in quite that same way). I had a huge hard-on, one of those ones that feel like stone covered with skin. Get one of those and until it goes away you are good for nothing. The quickest way to solve a problem like that when there’s no woman around willing to help you solve it is to masturbate, but that time the idea never even crossed my mind. Instead I walked restlessly through the upstairs rooms of my house with my fists opening and closing and what looked like a hood ornament stuffed down the front of my jeans.
Anger may be a normal stage of the grieving process—I’ve read that it is—but I was never angry at Johanna in the wake of her death until the day I found that picture. Then, wow. There I was, walking around with a boner that just wouldn’t quit, furious with her. Stupid bitch, why had she been running on one of the hottest days of the year? Stupid, inconsiderate bitch to leave me alone like this, not even able to work.
I sat down on the stairs and wondered what I should do. A drink was what I should do, I decided, and then maybe another drink to scratch the first one’s back. I actually got up before deciding that wasn’t a very good idea at all. I went into my office instead, turned on the computer, and did a crossword puzzle. That night when I went to bed, I thought of looking at the picture of Jo in her bathing suit again. I decided that was almost as bad an idea as a few drinks when I was feeling angry and depressed. But I’ll have the dream tonight, I thought as I turned off the light. I’ll have the dreamier sure. I didn’t, though. My dreams of Sara Laughs seemed to be finished.
A week’s thought made the idea of at least summering at the lake seem better than ever. So, on a Saturday afternoon in early May when I calculated that any self-respecting Maine caretaker would be home watching the Red Sox, I called Bill Dean and told him I’d be at my lake place from the Fourth of July or so. . and that if things went as I hoped, I’d be spending the fall and winter there as well. “Well, that’s good,” he said. “That’s real good news. A lot of folks down here’ve missed you, Mike. Quite a few that want to condole with you about your wife, don’t you know.” Was there the faintest note of reproach in his voice, or was that just my imagination? Certainly Jo and I had cast a shadow in the area; we had made significant contributions to the little library which served the Motton-Kashwakamak-Castle View area, and Jo had headed the successful fund drive to get an area bookmobile up and running. In addition to that, she had been part of a ladies’ sewing circle (afghans were her specialty), and a member in good standing of the Castle County Crafts Co-op. Visits to the sick… helping out with the annual volunteer fire department blood drive… womaning a booth during Summerfest in Castle Rock… and stuff like that was only where she had started. She didn’t do it in any ostentatious Lady Bountiful way, either, but unobtrusively and humbly, with her head lowered (often to hide a rather sharp smile, I should add—my Jo had a Biercean sense of humor). Christ, I thought, maybe old Bill had a right to sound reproachful. “People miss her,” I said. “Ayuh, they do.”
“I still miss her a lot myself. I think that’s why I’ve stayed away from the lake.
That’s where a lot of our good times were.”
“I s’pose so. But it’ll be damned good to see you down this way. I’ll get busy. The place is all right—you could move into it this afternoon, if you was a mind—but when a house has stood empty the way Sara has, it gets stale.”
“I know.”
“TII get Brenda Meserve to clean the whole shebang from top to bottom. Same gal you always had, don’t you know.”
“Brenda’s a little old for comprehensive spring cleaning, isn’t she?”
The lady in question was about sixty-five, stout, kind, and gleefully vulgar. She was especially fond of jokes about the travelling salesman who spent the night like a rabbit, jumping from hole to hole. No Mrs. Dan-vets she. “Ladies like Brenda Meserve never get too old to oversee the festivities,” Bill said. “She’ll get two or three girls to do the vacuuming and heavy lifting. Set you back maybe three hundred dollars.
Sound all right?”
“Like a bargain.”
“The well needs to be tested, and the gennie, too, although I’m sure both ofem’s okay. I seen a hornet’s nest by Jo’s old studio that I want to smoke before the woods get dry.
Oh, and the roof of the old house—you know, the middle piece—needs to be reshingled. I shoulda talked to you about that last year, but with you not using the place, I let her slide. You stand good for that, too?”
“Yes, up to ten grand. Beyond that, call me.”
“If we have to go over ten, I’ll smile and kiss a pig.”
“Try to have it all done before I get down there, okay?”
“Coss. You’ll want your privacy, I know that. . just so long’s you know you won’t get any right away. We was shocked when she went so young; all of us were. Shocked and sad. She was a dear.” From a Yankee mouth, that word rhymes with Leah. “Thank you, Bill.” I felt tears prickle my eyes. Grief is like a drunken house guest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug. “Thanks for saying.”
“You’ll get your share of carrot-cakes, chummy.” He laughed, but a little doubtfully, as if afraid he was committing an impropriety. “I can eat a lot of carrot-cake,” I said, “and if folks overdo it, well, hasn’t Kenny Auster still got that big Irish wolfhound?”
“Yuh, that thing’d eat cake til he busted!” Bill cried in high good humor. He cackled until he was coughing. I waited, smiling a little myself. “Blueberry, he calls that dog, damned if I know why. Ain’t he the gormiest thing!” I assumed he meant the dog and not the dog’s master. Kenny Auster, not much more than five feet tall and neatly made, was the opposite of gormy, that peculiar Maine adjective that means clumsy, awkward, and clay-footed. I suddenly realized that I missed these people—Bill and Brenda and Buddy Jellison and Kenny Auster and all the others who lived year-round at the lake. I even missed Blueberry, the Irish wolfhound, who trotted everywhere with his head up just as if he had half a brain in it and long strands of saliva depending from his jaws. “I’ve also got to get down there and clean up the winter blowdown,” Bill said. He sounded embarrassed. “It ain’t bad this year—that last big storm was all snow over our way, thank God—but there’s still a fair amount of happy crappy I ain’t got to yet. I shoulda put it behind me long before now. You not using the place ain’t an excuse. I been cashing your checks.” There was something amusing about listening to the grizzled old fart beating his breast; Jo would have kicked her feet and giggled, I’m quite sure. “If everything’s right and running by July Fourth, Bill, I’ll be happy.”