Up at Butternut Lake: A Novel (43 page)
For a long moment, Walker looked at her thoughtfully, considering what she’d said. But when he spoke, he seemed to choose the exact words Allie needed to hear. “There’s no reason you can’t do both,” he said. “Remember Gregg. And be happy. Especially since when you were with Gregg, you were happy. And while I didn’t know Gregg, I’ll help you and Wyatt in any way I can to keep his memory a part of your lives. I mean, it’s no more, and no less, than any of us deserves. To be remembered, with love, by the people we loved. The people who loved us.”
Allie nodded, close to tears. But she felt a sense of relief, too. She took a deep breath, and as she exhaled she felt the tension drain out of her body.
“Thank you,” she said, inching closer to him.
“There’s nothing to thank me for,” he said, reaching out and taking her hand. “But now, I have something I want to say, too.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“As I said, I never knew Gregg,” he began. “But I feel like I owe him a debt, just the same. Because the two people he left behind are both very special people. And I feel like taking good care of them is the least I can do for him. So I’m going to love you two, and protect you, and never, ever hurt you. And while making promises is still pretty new to me, Allie, this is one promise I intend to keep.”
Allie swallowed past a lump in her throat. “Walker, can I ask you a favor?”
“Anything,” he said. And she knew he meant it. There was nothing this man wouldn’t do for her now.
“Could you . . . could you just hold me?” she asked.
“I think so,” Walker said, taking her in his arms. “I mean, I’ll try,” he amended, nuzzling her neck again. “I’ll try like hell to
just
hold you. But, Allie, I have to warn you. I’ve spent so much time thinking about you—thinking about us, together—that I don’t know if I can
just
hold you.”
“Well, try, anyway,” Allie said, snuggling deeper into his arms.
And Walker did try, for a little while. But inevitably, it seemed, they started kissing again, and, in short order, Walker had eased her down beside him on the couch and was unbuttoning her blouse.
“Oh, my knees were so right,” Allie murmured, watching him.
“What did you say?” he asked, looking up from the button he’d just undone.
“I said ‘we can’t do this here,’ ” she amended quickly. “Wyatt’s sleeping in the next room.”
“You mean I can’t kiss you?”
“It’s not the kissing I’m worried about.”
“So you’re afraid we’ll wake up Wyatt?” he clarified.
She nodded.
“The same Wyatt who slept through several hours of violent thunderstorms at my cabin and slept through a baby being born at yours? I think he can sleep through a little lovemaking, don’t you?”
“A little?” she asked, only half joking.
“Okay,
a lot,
” he admitted.
She laughed, but relented. “All right, but you have to leave before he wakes up in the morning. I don’t want to spring this on him. We have to find the right way to tell him.”
“Absolutely,” Walker agreed. But he didn’t go back to the buttons on her blouse. Instead, he picked her up, carried her into her bedroom, closed the door, and laid her down on her bed. There, they undressed each other, slowly, savoring every moment, and made love to each other with so much tenderness that it brought tears to Allie’s eyes.
Later, as they lay in each other’s arms, Walker saw one of those tears glistening on her cheek. “You’re crying,” he said in surprise, propping himself up on one elbow and brushing the tear gently away with his fingers. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, honestly. She touched his face, clouded as it was by concern for her. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m just so happy. I don’t think I could be any happier.”
“Not even a little?” he asked, kissing her playfully.
“I don’t think so,” she said, kissing him back.
“You sure about that?” he asked again, running a tantalizing finger down her bare stomach.
“Okay. Maybe I could be a
little
happier,” she conceded, pulling him back down beside her.
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photographs: boat © by Alistair Scott /Shutterstock;
cabin © by Terry Wild/Terry Wild Stock
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Meet Mary McNear
M
ARY
M
C
N
EAR
is a writer living in San Francisco with her husband, two teenage children, and a high-strung minuscule white dog named Macaroon. She writes her novels in a local doughnut shop, where she sips Diet Pepsi, observes the hubbub of neighborhood life, and tries to resist the constant temptation of freshly made doughnuts. She bases her novels on a lifetime of summers spent in a small town on a lake in the northern Midwest.
Author Essay
T
HE
STORY
OF
A
LLIE
AND
W
YATT
started to take shape in my mind a few years ago when I was watching a TV news story about a local National Guard unit that had been deployed to Afghanistan. In the piece they interviewed the young widow of one of its members, who also had a young son, and she looked absolutely stunned by what had happened to her husband. And I remembered thinking that when her husband joined the National Guard it had probably never occurred to either of them that one day he would be fighting a war half a world away.
The story was heartbreaking to me, especially since my own children were still young at the time, and I couldn’t imagine my husband not being a part of our lives. I wondered how this family would go on, how they could even begin to rebuild their lives. Hopefully, everyone would rally around them, relatives would come stay with them, neighbors would bring them casseroles, and the son’s school would have a fund-raiser. But then what? What about when all the others had gone back to their own lives? They’d be on their own again, wouldn’t they?
And then I remembered something a friend of mine who’d lost her husband suddenly had once told me. She’d said that in some ways the beginning was easier. This period was scary and shocking and incredibly lonely, but everyone knew, or could at least imagine, how difficult it was for her. Later on was when it got harder. Not because all of them went back to their own lives, but because everyone seemed to be saying to her, in so many words, “So when are you going to get back to
your
own life?”
This was especially true of my friend because she was still young, as were her children. Several people—well-meaning, obviously, but misguided—actually said to her: “You’re lucky you’re still young. You can get married again and give your children another father. You can even have more children if you want to.” And when she pointed out that she wasn’t ready to move on yet, some of these same people seemed impatient with her.
Maybe, I thought as I considered that mother on television, the hardest part would come later for her, as it had for my friend. Or maybe the situation would just be hard in a different way. A new way. And that was when I started thinking about a mother and son who had been through a similar experience. How would they move on? And what if they weren’t ready to do so when everyone else wanted them to? How might they handle this in their own time and in their own way? What would it take them, what does it take anyone, really, to start over again?
I chose to explore that question through the eyes of Allie, a young widow whose National Guardsman husband has died in Afghanistan, and Wyatt, her five-year-old son. I decided that at the beginning of the novel they would relocate from suburban Minneapolis to a fishing cabin in northern Minnesota that has been in their family for several generations. That cabin and the lake it is on are both intimately familiar to me; I spent my childhood summers in and on their real-life counterparts. My great-grandfather built my family’s cabin in the Upper Midwest during the Depression, and while it has since been divided among countless aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and cousins, I still spend a couple of weeks there every summer with my mom, my sisters, and our children. Because no single family owns the cabin and maintenance and upkeep are dealt with by “committee,” the place can sometimes look a little neglected. But the torn rug that people have been tripping over for years and the sliding screen door on the back porch that hasn’t worked properly since the Eisenhower administration have also become part of the place’s charm. In a world of granite kitchen countertops and megapixel flat-screen TVs, our cabin looks exactly like what it is: an uncomplicated, quiet place to spend a few weeks every summer remembering what it is we loved about these woods and this lake when we were children.
Once I had the idea of setting the novel on this lake, which I renamed Butternut Lake, the look and feel of the town of Butternut began to take shape in my mind. I didn’t model this town on the town nearest to our summer cabin, though, because that town is too small! At about five hundred people, that town is less than half the size of the fictional Butternut. So instead I drew inspiration from the many other small towns in that area, an area where northern Michigan, northern Minnesota, and northern Wisconsin converge. We’re often told that the American small town is in decline, but these communities would seem to counter this statement. And so, too, I decided, would Butternut, with its thriving businesses, shops, and restaurants. Well,
restaurant
. Because when you have a coffee shop as good as Pearl’s, you don’t need any other place to eat!
As the town of Butternut came into focus for me, its residents did, too. And here again I looked to models in the real world. The people who live in the Upper Midwest are different in many ways from their neighbors farther to the south and west. Maybe it’s their proximity to Canada, a stone’s throw away, or maybe it’s the long winters or the short growing season, but the people who live in this part of the country tend to be reserved, especially with outsiders. This reserve shouldn’t be confused with unfriendliness, though, because once it gives way you discover that they have a real warmth and generosity of spirit that informs almost everything they do. I knew the characters in Butternut would have those same qualities, but like Allie would also have their own challenges to overcome, their own mistakes to grapple with, and their own complicated relationships to sort out.
Once I got to this point in the process I was ready to take Allie and Wyatt, plunk them down into their family’s old cabin, and stand back and let the lake, the town, and the people work their magic on a mother and son desperately in need of some. At the same time, though, I tried to keep one thought front and center in my mind: starting over after any kind of tragedy is one of the hardest, loneliest, and scariest things any of us will ever have to do. And those who’ve had to do it in the past or are doing it right now are the real heroes among us.