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water. Some were wooden, some were made of very elaborate stonework, and some were just crude steps cut into the hillside. At the base of each stair was a dock. There were simple floating platforms like this one and then there were gargantuan two-story boat garages, floating deck mansions on the water to pull your boat into and tuck it in for the night. Those deck mansions were topped with covered decks and outfitted with teak seating groups and custom bars. One of them had a hot tub on one side of the top deck and a diving board off the other.
    I said, “This is beautiful.” Well, the hot tub was a little tacky, but the lake and trees and rocky outcroppings were lovely. A slight breeze was coming off the water, cooling us considerably, and with it came the faintest sound of a song from a distant radio. I couldn’t quite make it out.
    The sun had risen high enough in the sky to peek over the opposite ridge and bathe us in light. We both sat with our eyes closed and our heads back, soaking it in.
    I said, “You know those houses we walked past are probably from the nineteen thirties or forties originally. They would’ve been here when my mom was here.” I was trying to picture my mother as a young girl walking around the town.
    â€œWhere do you think her house was?” Logan asked without opening her eyes.
    I shrugged. “Maybe we can find out when we hit the library.”
    There had been a fire in my mother’s childhood home when she was in her twenties. The house and all of its contents burned to the ground one night. This event explained the lack of physical mementos from her childhood, but the lack of stories from her was something we had just had to get used to. Mom never talked about her childhood and after a while we stopped asking.
    Logan was putting sunscreen on her face. “In a town this small there must have been a bunch of stories about the fire.”
    â€œYou’re right.” She looked pleased. “We’ll try that,” I said. “And old property deeds. I’m not really sure. Hopefully the librarian will be good at research and willing to help us out.”
    â€œIt’s weird being here, you know?” Logan shielded her eyes and stared out at the lake. “Grandma hated the water.”
    â€œWhat? I never thought she hated it. She just never, I don’t know, had an interest in it.”
    â€œShe told me she hated it.”
    Sometimes I forgot how close Logan and Mom were. “Really? What did she say?”
    Logan remembered a story of the two of them having lunch discussing her summer plans. Logan was trying to choose between a landlocked summer camp and one on a lake in Upstate New York. My mother gave Logan a glimpse, as she did on occasion, of someone we never knew, of the person she had been before she became our mother. She said that there was nothing quite like being on the water. The way it made the dirt smell in the evenings, the way the fog drifted over it on fall mornings, the way the dragonflies hovered over it at sunset in the summer. There was a time, she said, when she didn’t feel alive if she didn’t dip her toes in every day. “But then Grandma said I should always stay landlocked because nothing can break your heart the way water can.”
    â€œWhat’s that supposed to mean? That doesn’t even make sense. How can water break your heart? And then why would she want to be buried in the lake?”
    Logan threw her hands up, exasperated with my ignorance. “That’s what I’m saying. It’s totally weird.”
    We sat there for a long time with our eyes closed, telling each other stories about my mom. Awful things she used to cook. Funny things she used to say. I felt like I needed to tell Logan everything I knew about Mom so that the spirit of Jane Rutledge Hughes could go on living. And there were a lot of stories to tell.
    When someone did or said something particularly stupid,