“Charlie?” I interrupt. My voice is high-pitched and tight, one part spritz and two parts shock. Or maybe all parts total disappointment. Because this voice does not belong to Sam.
But of course it doesn’t.
“I know, I know. It’s been a long time. God, I don’t even know how long,” he says, and it sounds like an apology.
But I do. I know exactly how long. I keep count.
It’s been twelve years since I’ve seen Charlie. Twelve years since that catastrophic Thanksgiving weekend when everything between Sam and me fell apart. When I tore everything apart.
I used to count the number of days until my family would head up to the cottage so I could see Sam again. Now he’s a painful memory I keep hidden deep beneath my ribs.
I also know I’ve gone more years without Sam than I spent with him. The Thanksgiving that marked seven years since I’d spoken to him, I had a panic attack, my first in ages, then drank my way through a bottle and a half of rosé. It felt monumental: I’d officially been without him for more years than we’d had together at the lake. I’d cried in ugly, heaving sobs on the bathroom tiles until I passed out. Chantal came over the next day with greasy takeout and held my hair back as I puked, tears streaming down my face, and I told her everything.
“It’s been forever,” I tell Charlie.
“I know. And I’m sorry to call you so late,” he says. He sounds so much like Sam it hurts, as if there’s a lump of dough lodged in my throat. I remember when we were fourteen and it was almost impossible to tell him apart from Charlie on the phone. I remember noticing other things about Sam that summer, too.
“Listen, Pers. I’m calling with some news,” he says, using the name he used to call me but sounding much more serious than the Charlie I once knew. I hear him breathe in through his nose. “Mom passed away a few days ago, and I . . . well, I thought you’d want to know.”
His words slam into me like a tsunami, and I struggle to fully understand them. Sue’s dead? Sue was young.
All I can get out is a ragged-sounding “What?”
Charlie sounds exhausted when he replies. “Cancer. She’d been fighting it for a couple of years. We’re devastated, of course, but she was sick of being sick, you know?”
And not for the first time, it feels like someone stole the script to my life story and wrote it all wrong. It seems impossible that Sue was sick. Sue, with her big smile and her denim cutoffs and her white-blond ponytail. Sue, who made the best pierogies in the universe. Sue, who treated me like a daughter. Sue, who I dreamed one day might be a mother-in-law to me. Sue, who was sick for years without me knowing. I should have known. I should have been there.
“I’m so, so sorry,” I begin. “I . . . I don’t know what to say. Your mom was . . . she was . . .” I sound panicked, I can hear it.
Hold it together, I tell myself. You lost rights to Sue a long time ago. You are not allowed to fall apart right now.
I think about how Sue raised two boys on her own while running the Tavern, and about the first time I met her, when she came over to the cottage to assure my much older parents that Sam was a good kid and that she would keep an eye on us. I remember when she taught me how to hold three plates at once and the time she told me not to take crap from any boy, including her own two sons.
“She was . . . everything,” I say. “She was such a good mom.”
“She was. And I know she meant a lot to you when we were kids. That’s sort of why I’m calling,” says Charlie, tentative. “Her funeral is on Sunday. I know it’s been a long time, but I think you should be there. Will you come?”
A long time? It’s been twelve years. Twelve years since I’ve made the drive north to the place that was more like home to me than anywhere else has been. Twelve years since I dove, headfirst, into the lake. Twelve years since my life crashed spectacularly off course. Twelve years since I’ve seen Sam.
But there’s only one answer.
“Of course I will.”
2
Summer, Seventeen Years Ago
I don’t think my parents knew when they bought the cottage that two adolescent boys lived in the house next door. Mom and Dad wanted to give me an escape from the city, a break from other kids my age, and the Florek boys, who went unsupervised for long stretches of the afternoons and evenings, were probably as big a surprise to them as they were to me.
A few of the kids in my class had summer homes, but they were all in Muskoka, just a short drive north from the city, where the word cottage didn’t seem quite right for the waterfront mansions that lined the area’s rocky shores. Dad flat-out refused to look in Muskoka. He said if we bought a cottage there, we might as well stay in Toronto for the summer—it was too close to the city and too full of Torontonians. So he and Mom focused their search on rural communities further northeast, which Dad declared too developed or too overpriced, and then further still until finally they settled on Barry’s Bay, a sleepy, working-class village that transformed into a bustling tourist town in the summer, sidewalks bursting with cottagers and European sightseers on their way to camp or hike in Algonquin Provincial Park. “You’ll love it there, kiddo,” he promised. “It’s the real cottage country.”