Feels like Home (Lake Fisher 2)

1

Aaron

Sometimes life kicks you in the teeth. The rest of the time it goes for the balls. In my case it went for everything.

“Are we there yet?” Kerry-Anne scrubs her eyes as she looks out the side window of the van. She stares into the darkness, and I am pretty sure she can’t see anything beyond the road that is illuminated by my headlights.

“You’ve asked that no less than fifty times in the past hour,” Sam grouses from the other side of the van. I watch in the rearview mirror as she scrubs her face into the pillow that rests against the window and settles back down with a scowl on her face.

“Are we there yet, Daddy?” Kerry-Anne asks again quietly, her voice soft as a kitten’s purr in the back seat.

Kerry-Anne isn’t the baby of the family. At six years of age, she is squarely in the middle of the other two. Yet Kerry-Anne has the softest soul of anyone I’ve ever met. She’s gentle and kind and…well, the opposite of Sam. Sam is abrasive and rude and combative. She’s pretty much everything that makes those big spiders you see on nature shows want to eat their young. She has just turned twelve, and next week she’ll be twenty-one. Or so it feels.

Just then, I see the sign for Lake Fisher, and I take the exit, one step closer to the only place I want to be right now. “Just a few more miles, Kerr Bear,” I say. “We’re almost there.”

“Yay,” Sam says, her voice droll and lifeless.

“Sam,” I scold. “Cut it out.”

“Yes, sir,” she snarks back at me.

Sam hadn’t wanted to leave home. She doesn’t want anything to change. But change is inevitable. It comes for you, even when you try to keep it away. I don’t want change, either. But it’s coming, and there is nothing I can do to stop it.

I see the sign for the campground first. Lake Fisher. Home of the biggest bass and the clearest lake water you ever will find. It’s also home to my childhood, or at least the summers. Every year from the time I can remember, my parents brought me here to spend the summer.

One side of the complex houses a campground, and you will see anything from the smallest of tents and pop-up campers to great big pull-behind monstrosities of decadence with satellite TVs and hot tubs on top. Right now, it’s early June, so the campground is populated with little tents and pop-up campers. The camper lots that aren’t occupied, since it’s a weekday, show their emptiness with the power poles and septic hookups exposed in my headlights.

The road we drive in on is not much more than a path, and I have to take it slow and straddle the ruts in the road at times. Kerry-Anne giggles as she jostles from side to side, and Sam kicks the back of my seat.

“Sam,” I warn, my voice harsh.

A grunt is her only response.

We’ve been driving for eight hours and I am just as ready to be done as she is.

After we pass the campground, my heart eases a little when I see the tiny cottages all neatly lined up in rows. They are the original tiny houses, but without the glam that you see on TV. They’re made of wood with aluminum roofs, and when I see them standing there like sentries on a battlefield, I feel like I’ve come home. Finally. I am home. And I have the most important people in my life with me. I have Sam. I have Kerry-Anne. And I have Miles. Miles is tucked into his car seat, still sleeping, which means he will be up all night. But I don’t care. I am here. I am back at Lake Fisher, at the only place I want to be.

I turn at the fourth row of houses and drive to number eighty-two. It’s a tiny little cottage with two bedrooms and a kitchen that isn’t more than a sink and a stove. But it’s mine. It had belonged to my parents before me. And now it’s mine. I haven’t been here in years, and it shows. No one has been here. The paint is peeling, and the porch looks a little crooked. The wood is warped, and it isn’t the vibrant redwood color I remember. But like everything in life, it can all be fixed.

Well, almost everything can be fixed. Except me. That’s one thing that can’t be fixed.

“Can I get out?” Kerry-Anne asks, her voice full of excitement.

“Yeah, just don’t go far. It’s dark. And we need to unload.”

I cut the engine and the porch goes dark. The little cottage glares at me, limned by the light of the moon behind it. I take a deep breath and get out.

Sam sits there, her face still stuffed against her pillow.

“Let’s go, Sam,” I say.

She lifts her head, glares at me, and then bundles her pillow in her arms and throws the door open. “So, this is it?” she asks, looking toward the little cottage with a snarl to her lip.

“This is it,” I reply.

I reach in and lift the handle of Miles’s car seat. He still sleeps soundly. I hope he might sleep long enough for me to finish unloading. I lift his seat from the car and start for the front door.

The crunch of gravel behind me forces me to turn and look toward the little path I’d just rode in on. I smile when I see the red golf cart, another relic of my youth, which is just as well known to me as the man who sits on it.

“Welcome to Lake Fisher,” Mr. Jacobson says as he cuts the motor on the golf cart, then switches off the headlights.

I walk over and stick out my hand, my other hand clutching tightly to the handle of Miles’s car seat. When I was a young boy, this man scared the shit out of me. He was surly and nasty, and he had a way of making you like him anyway. Several times, he’d caught me doing things I shouldn’t have done and he’d made me clean the bathhouses. With my toothbrush. Yet I still have the utmost respect for the man, and I suspect I always will.

“It’s good to be here, Mr. Jacobson,” I say, as I take his weathered old hand in mine. He gives me a squeeze and lets my hand go.

“What do you have there?” he asks, pointing toward the car seat.

I shrug my shoulders. “It’s a kid. There are two more around here somewhere.”

He chuckles. “Set it right here so I can have a good look. My eyes aren’t what they used to be.” He motions to the seat next to him.

r /> Mr. Jacobson has been saying that since I was a boy. His eyes are sharp as tacks. They always have been. I set the seat on the bench next to him and he looks down into Miles’s sleeping face. “They’re cute when they’re asleep,” he says.

They can be cute when they are awake, too, but not all the time. Sam is proof of that.