He sat on the porch of the new cabin looking out at the same view of the lake he had known since early childhood. The cabin was different, the location the same, and the blue water of Ontario spread out from the familiar dock to a slender row of weeds and out beyond to the other shore where the green woods blended behind the sands of the beach. He sipped his coffee, debating whether to go for a swim. Slipping on a pair of cutoffs, he could be off the porch and into the water in a minute. Instead, he decided to savor the summer afternoon, the warmth of the sun easing through the overhanging branches of the trees next to the new cottage. The old cabin had been standing for over seventy years, its existence tottering on stacks of cement blocks propping up the foundation on the corners.

One morning, and he knew it would come soon, everyone in the cabin would wake up surrounded by the collapsed roof in their rooms. So the decision had been made over the winter, the historic old, with its rough green shingles patched over the outside walls, came down and a new one was up by late June.

The new cottage was modern, a Day’s Inn motel replacing something out of Tobacco Road, and he had adjusted easily, the transition immediate, though he was aware of a vague sense of loss that something was missing. It wasn’t the mice, he laughed to himself. The bathroom in the old cottage had shifted over the years, creating a one foot gap between the door and the main body of the structure, an opening where field mice scooted in and out.

No, the bathroom was definitely an improvement, motel atmosphere or not. There was a door which closed flush and even locked, unlike the old days of a little latch and a sandy red brick placed at the bottom of the door to serve as notice that the bathroom was occupied if someone tried to gain entry. And there was a bathtub, one you could stretch out in instead of having to take hurried showers in a white metal stall with rust crawling up the sides as if one was bottled up on a Coast Guard rig.

He looked over at the next cottage and saw her slowly wading into the lake. Her two children, maybe ten and seven, were already out past the end of their dock, splashing and carrying on. He liked the way the woman carried herself, confident and solid, as the water creeped further up her tan legs with each step. He wanted to call out to her, to cry, “Wait for me, I’m coming,” but realized that was ridiculous, and inappropriate.

She was all woman, her taut feminine body just modestly concealed by a black bikini. A young mother, yet a woman in whom he detected loneliness, from her movements, for he could not see the specifics of her face from where he sat. But also from where he sat, as he watched her lean forward and plunge out, swimming toward her children, where they waited and then all grabbed hands and circled before plopping down and laughing in the water, there seemed to be no evidence of a husband. He had been a husband, but now, at the age of thirty-three, he was losing his wife. They had met up at the lake while he was staying at the old cottage and she was working as the snack bar waitress at the lodge up the road. She was twenty and he was twenty-one, and he remembered her in a bathing suit and couldn’t believe at the time that life could be so good. She was Canadian, a nursing student from up in North Bay, the gateway to the Northwest Territories, and he was American, but that posed no great problem. Now he was back in Canada for a two week vacation at the lake and she was an American citizen living outside of Chicago and suing for a divorce.

When he looked back up, the woman and her children were gone, back inside, no doubt, preparing for supper at the lodge. His mother appeared at the screen door behind him, holding hands with his three-year-old niece, whom his sister had dropped off to spend the day and sleep over.

He walked with his mother. His niece, his younger sister’s daughter, circled back toward them in her run. Her eyes were wide, absorbing all with wonder and possibility.

“We are going to the store,” she laughed. “We can buy many things at the store.” He smiled. His niece had not yet mastered all the letters of the alphabet so her words came out, “We are going to the whore.” The lodge’s dining room was divided into two sections, large and small. It, too, had undergone renovations since he was a child. The most striking change was knocking the wall down between the two rooms and replacing it with a counter, which, of necessity, meant the disappearance of the portrait of Queen Elizabeth sternly watching over diners, the majority of whom were from the States and could have cared less.

The young hostess, a local girl, in shorts with powerful, attractive legs, led them through the large dining room, which was empty now, and over to a table in front of the exit door of the kitchen in the small room.

“Have a great dinner,” the hostess said, a little too loud, a little too enthusiastically. Her name tag, pinned on her sweater above her left breast, said Jennifer and Mississauga, which was where the airport was located outside of Metro Toronto, but she seemed more like a nervous small town girl. Jennifer hovered over the table, her smile at once goofy and attractive, and he thought of his first summer with his wife, before they were married, and it didn’t seem so long ago, and, yet, he wondered if it had ever happened. The memories were so good, but future developments, ones young love could never foresee, and the dulling acceptance of the present, tainted the pureness of all that he remembered.

There were six other tables in the room; an empty one next to theirs, and one across from it, next to the screen door, and then four tables for five pushed up against the wall with a picture window facing the road heading up to the lodge. The woman who had been wearing the black bikini was sitting at the second table from the left by the window, diagonally across from him. The other three tables were filled with families from Cleveland, who either knew each other before, or blended together as a tribe from the same home base once up at the lodge.

The Cleveland folks were loud and obnoxious, too stupid to be self-conscious, or on vacation and too arrogant and crude to care, as they carried on their cross table conversations in raised voices. The young mother was in the middle of it but not included, as she demurely ate in silence, probably not wanting to be part of the crowd, but at the same time, hoping to break out of the isolated world with her children at the lodge.

Her eyes were glancing in his direction, as she took another bite of roast beef. For a brief instant, there was contact, and her eyes silently smiled. Her fork lingered, resting on her bottom lip, as her eyes reached out. Then her eyes were gone, focused on her daughter, who was straight and slender, still in that ambiguous stage before the onset of adolescence. The daughter was speaking in a subdued tone, or maybe she was just drowned out by the Cleveland crowd, and the mother was smiling, content, happy in her child’s happiness.