He’s actually a lot of company. If anyone had told me I’d one day be raising a duck, of all things, I’d have called them crazy. The day after I arrived at Lake Fisher and pitched my tent, I’d woken up when the sun rose and walked down to the water. Out of the corner of my eye, I’d seen a red fox streak by me with a dead duck in its mouth. Or at least I’d assumed it was dead. The duck hung limply from between the fox’s jaws.
The fox had run into the woods, and I’d looked around, trying to figure out where it had come from. I’d walked around the water’s edge, in the tall weeds where the ducks like to roost. I’d found the nest and taken a deep breath. It had been filled with eggs, but by the time I’d arrived, they were all mashed and broken and empty, and the parent duck was obviously going to be breakfast.
I’ve always loved nature, but I really hate it when nature doesn’t love me back. I don’t care who you are—it’s hard to look into a nest of broken eggs and know that the ducklings are dead. But I’d seen that one egg was resting off to the side of the nest. It had been pushed to the side and was just lying abandoned in the weeds.
I picked it up and lifted it to my ear. It made a little cheeping sound, and I’d held it gently in my hand to stare at it. There was a tiny little pinprick where the shell had been broken, but it was otherwise intact. Something had obviously been moving and was still alive in there, so I’d stuck the egg in my shirt pocket and walked back toward camp.
The next day, the duck had hatched. For a couple of days, I’d carried the duckling around in my shirt pocket to keep it warm, but then it had started to want to walk around and toddle all over the place, chasing after me.
The little fella is pretty protective, too. Hence the honking he does in Jake’s direction. I very gently bump him with the toe of my work boot so he’ll move along, and he walks around behind me to sit in the grass.
“When you finish up here,” Jake tells me, “I want you to go over to cabin number twenty-four and turn the water and the electricity back on.”
I think back, counting the cabins in the second row in my head. “The old Marshall cabin?” The fourth one on the left, on the second row, the Marshall place is a cabin I know really well, or at least I used to. I walk over and get a drink of water from a plastic jug that Katie, Jake’s wife, brought me a few hours ago when she saw me standing in the hot sun cutting up the fallen tree.
He nods. “Maimi Marshall called Pop and said she needed someone to open it up.”
I’d just closed it a couple of weeks ago, draining the water from the pipes and winterizing everything.
“Are they going to be using it?”
Jake shrugs. “Apparently. Pop was being really cryptic about it.”
Pop, Jake’s dad, is a cantankerous old man on a good day. If you catch him on a bad day, he’s even worse. If he’s being cryptic, there’s probably a reason.
“You remember the Marshalls?” Jake asks. He goes and starts to stand the logs I’ve already cut up on their ends, because I’m still going to have to split them. The duck watches him warily.
I nod. “I do.”
“Didn’t you have a thing with her granddaughter?” Jake chuckles to himself.
That’s the problem with going back to a place where you grew up. You know everyone, every story, and every scandal that ever graced or disgraced the place. “I wouldn’t call it a thing,” I mutter more to myself than to him. “We were, what? Twelve? Thirteen?”
“She was always so quiet,” Jake says. “I never could get her to say a word to me.”
I glare at him. “That’s because Abigail had good sense. Not like the rest of them.”
He laughs. “It all worked out in the end.”
Jake has led a charmed life for the past few years. He left his job with the New York City police department after a scandal, when his partner got his wife pregnant, and he came home with his tail between his legs, claiming that he was only there to take care of his aging father, Mr. Jacobson. But he’d never left. He’d never left because Katie, his own blast from the past, had shown up that summer, too.
Now they have a house full of children, both hers and theirs, and they take care of the upkeep of the vacation compound. Pop Jacobson, the older Jacobson, likes to pretend he’s still in charge, but he really just rides around on his little red golf cart and chases his grandkids from place to place. Occasionally, he dispenses some wisdom but mostly he just does whatever he wants.
To tell the truth, Mr. Jacobson has always scared the pants off me. He has a way of making you feel about an inch tall, and if you cross him, you know it immediately. So I’ve steered as clear of him as I can ever since I arrived to start working.
I lift my noise-cancelling headphones like I’m going to put them back on. “You need anything else?”
Jake shakes his head and turns to leave, but then turns back. “Katie doesn’t like that you’re living in the campground,” he says. He fidgets a little, jamming his hands in his pockets.
“Is that so?” I stand with the headphones pulled open wide over my ears, but I haven’t let them go.
“She wants you to move into one of the cabins, since the nights are getting colder.”
I shake my head. “I’m not cold.”
“Well, you will be soon. It’s supposed to drop into the forties next week.”
I shake my head again. “I’m fine where I’m at,” I reply. Then I let the headphones fall, signaling that I think this conversation is over. He opens his mouth to say something else, but he closes it again and then walks away. He looks back at me over his shoulder once, but he keeps going, thank God.