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and the boys get home in late afternoon. They have three big fish that Clint and Grandpère agree are Dolly Varden, landlocked salmon. They caught them in the river, so I have my doubts, but I keep my doubts to myself.
    We cook up the fish and visit around the table for a few hours. Grandpère keeps nodding off. He won’t go to bed yet, since he doesn’t want to miss anything. Clint surprises me when he says they’re going partway back to the city tonight. The boys have a soccer tournament the next day, and they have to be there for the team.
    “We’ll be out again in a few weeks,” Clint says. “Make sure you keep this old man busy. He was trying to sleep at the river, and now at the table.”
    “I wasn’t sleeping, I was just making sure the back seat of the car was comfortable,” says Grandpère, grinning at Clint. “Just the same, who was it caught all three of them fish? I might be old and sleepy, but somebody’s got to teach you guys to fish.”
    Ryan breaks in. “You should have seen it, Grandma. Dad was holding the rod for a long time, then he gave Grandpère a turn, and just like that he had a fish. He let me reel it in. And he caught the other two, but Dad and Jayden got to reel them in.”
    Grandpère smiles as though he’s won the lottery. He tells them, “Goodbye. Come again when you want a fishing lesson.” When they drive out, Grandpère and I are both tired and head to bed before the sun has even gone down. It’s nice to see the kids and their families, but we are not used to the noise and confusion that accompanies small children and are never all that sorry to see them go.
    The next day I go to put the picture of the boys into the album. I stop at the page with the family tree. I take a pencil and draw a branch bent like a question mark above my mother’s name and write Sven on it. Then I feel disloyal to the rest of those names and slip the album to the bottom of the pile.

    We get a lot of company in the summer. Close family, extended family and friends all drop by for a visit, some for a few hours and some for a few days. We like to have visitors and make coffee and entertain them. Most everyone leaves with fresh produce, because we always plant way more than we can possibly use. I think all gardeners who have space to plant do the same thing. It’s little effort to plant; tending and harvesting consume the gardening hours.
    One of my friends drops by one morning. I have known Bella since high school. She married right after graduation. Her son and two daughters are the same ages as some of my children. Bella was always heavy, and now she can hardly get in and out of her car. It seems as though her younger self is peering out at me from the centre of a balloon.
    “Did you know that Carrie went into long-term care?” she asks.
    “No, I never knew. Last I heard was that she had a stroke and was getting rehabilitated.”
    “Well,” she says, and I know she’s going to tell me a story that’s going around. Bella knows all the stories that go around. “You see, she just had that stroke because she was so mad about her husband leaving the business and the boat to the kids. I guess she thought she was going to sell everything that guy worked so hard for and live in luxury the rest of her life. It wasn’t like he left her penniless, you know. He left her two grand a month to live on, but that place she’s in is going to cost forty-five hundred. Those kids will have to cough up the rest.”
    There is a note of righteous indignation in her voice as she relates this story, and I wonder what she objects to: Charlie not giving all of his fortune to Carrie, Carrie not recovering from the stroke or the children having to pay.
    Bella loves to talk about her children’s successes, so I change the subject by asking how her John is doing.
    “He got a raise this year. He makes three hundred and sixty thousand every year now. They bought a cottage down at the lake and a new boat, so of course