He worked at the prison because he needed the money, it was that simple. Every year he hoped he’d turn a corner with the pizzeria and be able to quit at the prison, but every year there was something that made that guaranteed paycheck indispensable—he needed a decent truck, a new cooler or two, there was always something. On a more metaphysical level, sometimes he thought maybe he worked at the prison because it was full of guys like Manny. Society’s screw-ups. Sad to say, a lot of them were not that bright. They were the ones who’d got caught. Even though a lot of them had never had a chance to do anything but end Up in prison, on a day-to-day basis dealing with them was tedious and annoying.

When he was a kid, he’d loved his older cousin Manny. Always full of energy and bad ideas, Manny had been exciting, a nonstop adventure. As an adult, Manny would have grated on his nerves. In retrospect he’d probably been ADHD and not just the wild kid his parents despaired over. But people hadn’t known about things like that back then, and if Manny’d just been full of youthful high spirits, he’d never had a chance to grow out of it. The motorcycle accident that had given Paul his limp had killed him.

Paul opened his book but couldn’t attend to it. He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. He wished he wasn’t alone. Two summers ago there had been Larissa from Kiev, and three summers before that there was Kate, a seasonal biologist with the Forest Service. With each of them he’d convinced himself it was something more than just a summer romance, but by Labor Day he’d known better, and so had they.

He thought about Madeline Stone. He’d driven past Gladys’s house one day and seen her out in the side yard, swinging an ax, flailing at a chunk of wood, trying to split it. Her efforts had been clumsy and awkward and he’d wanted to jump out of the car and take over for her. But he didn’t, he just watched. She bit her lip and repositioned the chunk of wood over and over, and when it finally split in two the look on her face was something to see. He wasn’t sure he was attracted to her, but he found himself thinking about her sometimes when he didn’t expect to, like now.

Paul sighed, tried to read again, but his thoughts nagged at him. He was nearly thirty-six years old and his life felt stale. He felt stale. He hadn’t even picked Up his guitar in how long, and playing Used to be as indispensable as air. Lately—well, more than lately, for years now—he’d been in a rut that just kept getting deeper. He didn’t know how to fix it, and he wouldn’t have had the time or energy to fix it even if he did know. Why couldn’t he be like Lily Martin at the store in Halfway and accept his life as it came? But he couldn’t. He never had been able to. Or maybe he had, back when he was a kid, before the accident, but that was a long time ago.

The accident had changed everything. Before it, he was a boy who pretty much trusted in life. Afterward he knew how fast things could go wrong. Trouble could smack you down at any instant, so you’d better be on the lookout. And you’d better be careful what you asked for, too, because you just might get it. Paul had asked for—insisted on—a ride on Manny’s motorcycle one summer afternoon. An hour later, Manny was dead.

A knock came on his outside door and Paul sat Up with alacrity, glad of the distraction.

“Hey,” Randi Hopkins said. She was wearing a short sky-blue dress that clung to her breasts but flared out from there, and flip-flops. She looked like summer.

“Hi. What’s Up?”

“Nothing. I saw your light. Wondered what you were doing.”

“Reading.”

Randi nodded, tipped her head a little to see past him into his room. He stepped aside and waved her in. “You want a beer, or a pop?”

She began to shake her head but then said, “Sure.” She settled down into a chair, looked around. “You like to keep it pretty basic, eh?”

Paul smiled. He appreciated Understatement. He’d kept two rooms for himself when he started the pizzeria. Painted them both off-white. Put a bed and a bookcase and a small table with two chairs in one, a couch and a television in the second. “Basic” was the word for it. He pulled a bottle of beer and a cola out of his mini-fridge and held them Up for her consideration. She pointed at the beer. He popped off the top and handed it to her. “It’s easy to take care of,” he said. “Maintenance free.”

Randi raised her eyebrows and gave him a very brief skeptical frown that made him laugh. He opened a beer of his own. “Just getting off work?”

She nodded and yawned hugely, covering her mouth and looking embarrassed.

“Long day?”

She yawned again, nodding. Paul found himself yawning in reaction, and they both started to laugh.

“So what are you reading?” Randi asked, reaching across to his bed and picking Up his book.

“Joseph Campbell.”

She shook her head, shrugged.

“Myths.”

“Like Zeus and all that?” She leafed through the pages.

“Sort of. He’s talking about the stories we tell ourselves to give meaning to life.”

“Mmm,” Randi said, nodding. After a little silence she said, “What stories do you tell yourself?” smiling at him as if she really wondered.

Paul felt his entire self lean toward her.

He said the same thing every time she came. There was a small room off the hall that had perhaps once been a sunroom or a breakfast nook. A bay window bulged with houseplants. Otherwise, it held three rocking chairs, a lamp, and an end table. Madeline sat in a rocker and waited. It had been almost three weeks since she’d found out about Walter. The first time she came had been the most awkward.

She’d stood when her Uncle Walter walked in, her hands clasped in front of her, her fingers ice cold. How did you go about meeting your developmentally disabled great-uncle for the very first time?

“Walter, this is a friend of yours,” Ted had said.

“Oh, yes,” Walter answered, turning a worried smile on Ted.

“It’s your niece. Your brother Joe’s granddaughter. Do you remember her?”

“Oh yes. Madeline. She was a pretty little baby.”

Madeline felt a bewildered, dizzying sense of displacement.

“All right,” Ted said. “Well, she’s come for a visit.”

Walter wore leather house slippers, gabardine slacks, a white T-shirt with a plaid flannel shirt over top of it. His face was grizzled, with a trace of beard, and his skin was a healthy pink. He looked like a pleasant old man, and there was nothing to tell you he was different except perhaps for some lack of Urgency in the tone of his waiting. She wondered if he looked like his brother, her grandfather.

“Hello, Walter. I’m Madeline,” she said faintly.

“Hello.” He turned to Ted with a questioning expression and Ted patted his shoulder. “Sit down, go on.”

Walter perched on the edge of a rocker, both feet planted flat on the floor and his hands on his knees. Madeline pulled a rocker around and sat down across from him, then glanced at Ted for guidance.

“You’ll be fine. I’ll be in through the back, in the kitchen, if you need me. My wife and I are fixing lunch.”

Walter and Madeline looked at each other, both she thought with diffident, puzzled expressions. “So I’m Madeline, your niece,” she said finally. “Great-niece.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Do you remember me?”

“Oh, yes. You were Jackie’s baby.”

Madeline nodded very slowly and focused on breathing. In, out. In, out. You were Jackie’s baby. Here it was. Her past. Her time on earth before Emmy, remembered by this old man who was, as Gladys had explained, “simple.”

“I don’t—remember you,” she apologized after a moment.

“No,” Walter said. “You were a little baby. Jackie took you away.” He looked off across the room, toward the plant-filled window.

Madeline got Up and moved over to the window, touched the petals of a pink geranium. “It’s pretty, huh?”

“Oh yes. Mama always loved posies. Animals too. We had a skunk, she called it Jim. I never was afraid of him, she got his sprayer took out.” He beamed at Madeline with this remembrance.

She stroked one of the geranium’s petals, inhaling its particular bitter fragrance, which she admired for its bold air of unapology. After a moment she sat down again. She rocked, and Walter did too. A clock ticked Up on the wall and the rocker blades grunted on the wooden floor. She didn’t want to alarm Walter (or was it herself?), and so she did not rush into questions. Plus there was something peaceful in their quiet.

She’d left when lunch was served. Walter gave her a hesitant smile and flapped one hand in a small wave, like a child. “I’ll come see you again soon,” she promised.

“Okay.” He had hurried off to his lunch.

Now this was their routine. They visited a little, and were quiet more. Then when lunch was served, Madeline drove off to see Arbutus in the hospital.

Gladys hadn’t come with her today, Madeline often traveled alone. It had been a long three weeks already, weeks in which Gladys’s small house was cavernously empty and the two of them were stiff and formal with each other, polite but constrained. It was true that Madeline’s fury at Gladys’s keeping Walter a secret from her had faded at the instant of seeing Arbutus prone on the floor, but the hurt lingered. A trust that had been building was gone. It would take some time—some doing—to heal the wound. Madeline wasn’t sure she really cared to. Gladys was very distant still. Madeline was sure she blamed her for Arbutus’s fall, and wished she would just come right out and say so. Gladys wouldn’t, though. She said very little. For now they were maintaining a civil relationship. Arbutus needed both of them, and so there was no option. Nowhere to go, nothing to change. But no future to it either, exactly.

There were only a few bright spots in her days, now: these visits with Walter, her times alone Up in the hotel (which Gladys hadn’t gotten around to selling to the Bensons yet, thank God, even though the need must be greater than ever, with Arbutus in the hospital), and the time she spent with Greyson. Randi dropped him off quite often, and with Arbutus in the hospital and Gladys in a long gray funk, it fell to Madeline to entertain him and watch over him. It turned out she didn’t mind this at all. Taking care of Greyson helped her keep her mind off herself. Plus she loved him.

He was full of energy for odd projects and enthusiasms, like building his own telescope, learning the names of all the snakes that lived in Michigan, digging a squirrel tunnel in Gladys’s back yard. He was convinced that if he dug it, they’d Use it instead of tree branches to get around, especially if it was rainy. He was great. She was ashamed she’d resented bringing him home from Garceau’s that day—a day that seemed both very long ago, and not any time at all.

Madeline pulled into the hospital parking lot and headed inside. She’d brought a map, which she Unfolded onto Butte’s bedside table after Butte’s lunch was cleared away. She pinpointed Stone Lake. “Right there,” she said, the tip of her pencil all but obscuring the spot that said “Cranberry L.”

Arbutus squinted and nodded, probably not seeing but always anxious to be agreeable. “You won’t get back in there with a car, I don’t think. It’s back off behind Crosscut Plains. Down along Wildcat Creek, beyond the old fire lookout and past Simmon’s Camp. It’s on Firelane Trail, and that’s always been rough. You’re better off to find a truck somewhere.”

Madeline forced herself not to say, Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me about Walter and this lake and a hundred other things I probably don’t know? I thought you liked me. Loved me even. She had to fight this impulse every time she was alone with Arbutus, because she couldn’t help it, she loved Arbutus and the betrayal hurt. It was as if Emmy had kept something huge from her, Unthinkable. But she had her pride. She wouldn’t ask.

“Where would I get a truck?” she asked instead. The Buick was tough, it would make it. She’d waited long enough to see this lake. Going there would be her Fourth of July celebration, her declaration of independence. She was going to take better care of herself from now on. No one else was going to think, What’s best for Madeline? That was her job, hers alone. The Fourth was perfect. She’d make a ceremony, an event, of this. She had a bad habit of never giving ceremony its due. But sometimes life demanded ceremony. Sometimes you owed that to yourself.

“Paul Garceau has a big truck. High off the ground, I’ve seen it.”

Paul did have a truck as well as the Fairlane. It was big, almost new, and a sore spot with him she thought. She suspected it was a burden he wished he hadn’t Undertaken, one payment too many. He drove it as little as possible, preferring the Fairlane. He told her that the car went into storage once the snow flew, though. “I don’t know if I should ask to borrow his truck. That seems like too much.”

“He’s a nice man. A hard worker. And nice-looking, too. You ask him.” Arbutus’s smile was dimply. “I’ll bet he says okay.”

Madeline frowned, wanting to put out the matchmaking glint in Arbutus’s eye, but in the end she didn’t try. Let her have this harmless, wrong idea. Maybe she was right about the truck anyway.

“There’s a place I want to go, way back in the woods. It’s kind of a—quest.”

“Do you think you’d be okay driving it?”

“Definitely, yes. If it’s an automatic transmission. I’m a very careful driver.”

He studied her somberly.

“Don’t worry about it. Bad idea, forget I asked.”

His face was full of misgiving. “Well—when would you want it?”

“I was thinking the Fourth of July.”

“No way. You have to work. It’s going to be crazy.”

“I’d go in the morning, be back in plenty of time.”

“If it was any other day—”

“I hear you. But it’s the best day for me.” She wasn’t going to be swayed on this, she just wasn’t. How often did she ask for anything much from the world at large? Not often, but that was going to change a little bit. She would have her day. Her morning anyway. “I’ll take the Buick, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

“God, no, you can’t take that old heap, you’d never make it. Take the truck.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, and Madeline didn’t give him another chance to change his mind.

“Just keep in mind you’re following the creek,” Arbutus had told her. “Keep bearing northeast, you’ll be going through a big plain of stumps. Nothing ever grew back much after the first big cut. Too many fires, I guess, and the soil was too thin. Anyway, you ought to see the fire tower about five miles in, the best I can remember. It’s been years. Gladys’s Frank worked on a cut in there once, we took a part for the skidder out to him. Past the fire tower there’s Simmon’s Camp. It’s an old log cabin, someone still Uses it, I think. After that you’re on your own, I’ve never gone beyond there. But you’ll be close by then. Joe and Walter were both born out there as best I know. Maybe the cabin where they lived is still standing.”

“Good luck with your quest,” Paul said as he handed her the keys at the end of her shift on the third. “If you need the four-wheel drive, just punch the button on the dash.”

She looked Up and caught him watching. She winked. “Gonna take me out for a ride tonight, mister?”

Paul was so tired. But he was psyched, too—business was good, the Fourth was tomorrow, he had a girl. Sure he’d go out. “It’s gotta be the Fairlane, Madeline’s got my truck.” Randi loved riding around in his truck. Once in a while he thought she liked it as much as she did him, but that wasn’t fair. Randi was different than he’d always thought. Sweeter, more grown-up.

“I don’t care. As long as it runs.”

“It’s runs great, a classic like that, what are you saying?”

“It just looks old to me,” Randi said, but she was laughing. Paul went back to figuring out the till, smiling.

He’d splurged on the Fairlane two years before. He’d run across the ad in a Hemming’s Motor News and once he called and had the owner send pictures, he couldn’t resist. The car was a good deal, and practically in mint condition. Paul told himself he worked hard, he needed a treat. If he couldn’t have something he wanted now and then, what was the point? It probably would have worked out except that the truck he’d been driving ever since he moved to McAllaster—nursing along, really—died exactly one week after he got the Fairlane. The Fairlane was fun; a truck was essential.

The Chevy Madeline was borrowing was overkill—bigger and newer and nicer than he’d gone out looking for. But it was solid and super-clean and the financing deal on his credit card had been great, four point nine percent for the life of the loan. He’d convinced himself he could make those payments and keep the car.

He did make the payments, no matter what, because if he was ever a minute late the interest rate would jump to twenty-five percent overnight. Bottom line, the car, the truck—they were both consolation prizes for the way his life felt these last few years. Dead end, frustrating, confining. (Like the lives of the prisoners he fixed food for, wasn’t that ironic?) Lately Paul had been staring down some hard facts. He couldn’t go on the way he had been. One thing he really should do was take the truck back to the dealer and switch it off for something more economical, something older and more basic.

“Now what’re you frowning about?” Randi asked, coming to lean against him, twining an arm around his neck and nuzzling his ear.

“Not a thing,” he said, exasperated with himself. Why’d he plague himself this way? He pulled Randi around to kiss her. She tasted good, like mint. “Ready to go?”

“I have to pick Up Grey from Jo Jo’s pretty soon.” Jo Jo was a girlfriend of Randi’s who babysat sometimes.

“So let’s go get him. He can come too.”

“He’ll be asleep.”

“He can sleep in the car.”

Randi kissed his neck—a quick small dart of affection—and acquiesced, smiling. “Okay.”

A wave of tenderness washed over him. Randi was happy, he was happy, his situation probably wasn’t as bad as he told himself sometimes. Probably she was exactly what he needed and life was simpler than he always tried to make it.

Another wave of tenderness swamped him as he carried Greyson out of Jo Jo’s and bundled him onto the backseat of the car. Paul had always liked Greyson, but now that he’d spent more time with him, he was starting to find him irresistible.

Randi had dropped Greyson off late last night, on her way to do a fill-in shift at the Tip Top. Paul had bitten back his hesitation—when the pizza place was busy, there was just no place to put somebody who wasn’t a worker or a customer, especially a five-year-old somebody who needed not to get tripped over, spilt on, or burnt—because Randi said she couldn’t find anyone else at such short notice.

Fortunately—sort of—there hadn’t been a lot of late orders, and it had worked out all right. Greyson sat on a milk crate in the corner and played with a video game. When the batteries ran low, Paul did a quick search through his rooms for something else to entertain him with, and came Up with a pair of binoculars. Greyson spent the rest of the night padding around gazing at everything through them: the customers, the pizzas, the waitress, Paul, the equipment, the toes of his shoes. Luckily half the customers were locals who knew Grey and didn’t seem to mind being the subject of his scrutiny, and the other half were the nicest kind of tourists, the laid-back ones.

When the place emptied out, Greyson observed the cleanup process, his small face dwarfed by the big glasses, his mouth slightly ajar. He looked like a tiny ornithologist on the trail of some rare species.

It was at moments like those that Paul realized he was coming to love the boy. He hadn’t thought about that when he and Randi hooked Up. But now he was surprised to find himself missing Grey when he wasn’t around, and swamped with a kind of pride when he was—as well as an Urge to protect him from some of the things he knew life would throw at him, though probably that wouldn’t be possible.

Paul drove down to the arm of land that encircled Desolation Bay and parked at the pier. He turned off the engine and lights but left the radio on. The battery would last awhile. The music coming out of WFNM in Crosscut was awful—the worst of the oldies—but Paul felt loyal to the station anyway. It was part of life in the north. Randi scooted over onto the console between the seats and snuggled into him. He pointed out some stars to her. He was feeling good—a smart idea coming out here, a good night—until he heard her softly snoring.

He smiled ruefully. But this was all right too—Randi asleep beside him, Greyson asleep in the back. A little family. He felt the pull of it. What would his mother think? That it was about time, probably.

His mother had a big heart and a no-nonsense approach to life. Both his parents were that way. He knew they wondered when he’d find another wife, have a few kids like his sisters had done. They didn’t harass him about it, though. The closest they came was when his mother would pull him aside for a private talk in the kitchen when he visited. She’d give him an investigative once-over, ask how he was. Fine, great, he always said, and that was her opening to say, Have you met anyone?

He’d tell her a little about his girlfriend if there was one, which there sometimes was. His mother would listen, her intelligent eyes skeptical as he gave her the pertinent details: the girlfriend’s name and age and occupation, the color of her hair. Then she’d jump directly into The Talk. You don’t still blame yourself for the accident, do you? You don’t let that run your life?

No, he always said. Of course not. I was a kid, I didn’t know any better.

His mother would give him a dubious, worried look, but he never had anything else to say about it.

The real answer was, How could I not? I was the one riding on the luggage rack. The bike just had a cop solo for a seat, putting someone on the luggage rack was a great way to throw the balance off, and I was the one who insisted that Manny take me for a ride. I plagued him about it. For once he was the one with some common sense. He took me around the block a few times but that wasn’t good enough. I wanted more, I wanted speed. He didn’t have an extra helmet, remember? So he gave me his. And finally he broke down and put on the speed and we went roaring down East Phillips Road to see how fast we could make the turn and it was great. It really was. But I didn’t lean left because I didn’t know crap about riding, and the rest is history.

So no, I don’t blame myself. I was just a kid, it was an accident. You have to forgive yourself, and life goes on. But also, how could I not?

For a while Paul concentrated on picking out the bits of constellation he could see through the windshield: Cassiopeia, Perseus. Then he stared into M31, thinking about the Andromeda galaxy, wishing he had binoculars. Maybe he’d be able to see it. A whole other galaxy. Eventually he felt his arm begin to go numb. Randi was flat-out asleep, so he carefully maneuvered out from Under her weight. As he did, he felt a light touch on his shoulder. Greyson, pointing Up. “Hey, buddy,” Paul whispered. “You ready to go home?”

Greyson shook his head. “I saw a shooting star. I’m waiting for another one.”

At last, after another half hour of driving at a snail’s pace down the ever-narrowing track, she had traveled just over nine miles in from the main road and the trail petered out. With a great sense of anticipation she climbed out of the truck. Just ahead was a low, sandy hill. The brink of the lake. She hurried Up it to the top.

Stone Lake lay before her, a shallow bowl that spread perhaps a mile off into the distance and half that width to the opposite shores, which were ringed all around with pines. But “shores” wasn’t quite the word for it, not anymore. The lake was dry.