The Lake of Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page B

vines cascaded over the fence and tangled in the overgrown roses. The peonies were in full bloom, extravagant and beautiful, and the lavender and lamb’s ears had spread everywhere, straggly in the center, ragged at the edges.
    Our mother was sitting on the side steps in the sun, her legs extended and crossed at the ankles, her right arm in a bright green cast cradled across her ribs. I’d come back to visit many times in the decade since I’d left for college, and she’d been to see me in Seattle and Florida. Each time I was struck by how familiar she looked, and how young. Her face was almost unlined, but her hair had turned a silvery gray when she was still in her twenties. She wore it pulled back, silver at her temples and running in a thick rope down her spine. She stood up when we pulled in and came right over to meet the truck.
    “Lucy!” She hugged me with her good arm as I got out, her cheek soft against mine, smelling faintly of oregano and mint. I hugged her lightly in return, remembering her broken ribs. She kept her good hand on my arm as we walked. “I’m so glad to see you, honey. Oh, you look so good, so beautiful. Did you get taller? That’s not possible, is it, but you seem taller. Come in—are you starving? Thirsty? You must be just exhausted.”
    We went through the screened-in porch to the kitchen; I dropped my bag near the door. Everything seemed just the same, the wide windows overlooking the garden, the table pressed against the wall, the turquoise-and-white-checked curtains I’d made in middle school still hanging in the window of the door. My mother filled tall glasses with ice while Blake cut wedges of lemon and poured sun tea from the big glass jar she always kept on the sunny counter in the summer.
    “To Lucy,” she said, lifting a glass with her good hand. “Welcome home.”
    “Is that Lucy already?” a voice from the dining room called.
    Art, my father’s brother, older by a less than a year, came to stand in the doorway. Even as I realized who it was, I was shocked. He had aged, his broad face slackening, and his hair, gone gray at the temples, cut short and bristling. Somehow in this aging he had come to resemble my father so closely it might have been his ghost standing in the doorway. I couldn’t speak. Art didn’t seem to notice, though. “Here’s the wanderer,” he said, stepping into the kitchen to give me a quick, tense hug. “Home at last. How long are you staying?”
    “A couple of weeks,” I said.
    “Good. You’ll have to come see us—lots of changes afoot.”
    “I was telling her.” Blake was leaning against the counter. “There’s a big brouhaha over at the depot today, did you see it?”
    Art nodded. “I did. They wanted me to sign a petition. Wetlands—well, damn. I told them that’s prime real estate, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to build.”
    Blake laughed and agreed, and I glanced at my mother, who was standing with her injured arm across her waist. She caught my eye.
    “Art was kind enough to replace the bathroom faucet today,” she said.
    This meant: Don’t make a scene, Lucy, please .
    Undeterred, I was about to tell Art exactly what I thought about losing the wetlands, but then the ancient freezer on the porch shuddered on, forcing me to consider the muttering old house, its demands and complaints, and the kitchen renovation, which had been less than half-finished when my father died, walls torn out, appliances in boxes, dust from the Sheetrock gathered in the corners. Art and my father had never gotten along, but Art had come to finish the kitchen job. Twice in those numb weeks after the funeral I’d walked in and seen my uncle’s legs sprawled out from beneath the sink, tools spread out around him as he struggled with the couplings, and thought it was my father.
    “Dad loved those marshes,” was what I finally said.
    Art was a big man, with long arms and hands thickened from years of work. He drummed his fingers on the counter,