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1 On a hot afternoon in August of 1955, Mary Ashton Leader stepped up onto the wooden porch of Howie’s Marine and Bait, consumed with many errands besides the shopping list in her skirt pocket. On the shaded porch, next to the drinks cooler, a teenage girl in a bathing suit bent to smooth white, smelly suntan lotion on her legs. Two boys leaning against the porch rail grew wide-eyed as she twisted to reach behind her knees. Mary caught the whiff of Sea & Ski. She would afterward associate that smell with this day, this moment . She would never buy that brand again. These loa‹ng teenagers were summer people, just like Mary’s family , but Mary’s family didn’t have time to decorate the porch of Howie’s all afternoon, or pose for each other on the deck of a Chris Craft. Mary’s family came up from Chicago to Northern Michigan to run a small resort, and the chores of maintaining their half-mile of lakeshore with ‹ve small rental cabins made their summers on Achill Lake possible and kept them busy at the same time. When she saw kids loa‹ng like these three she thought, I’d rather do it our way. It can’t be healthy growing up with everything done for you. Without a care in the world, as though the people living here just exist to make your leisure possible . Huh! It’s not going to be this way for my children! The screen door whomped behind her as she walked into the store, and she went straight to the rope. Two coils of nylon rope, one package of salmon eggs, and one tall yellow can of powdered pyrethium ›owers to burn at night when the gnats and ›ies were at their worst. She set these on the counter, greeted Howie’s son at the cash register, and pulled out her shopping list to see what she might be forgetting. The teenagers on the porch stopped ogling each other to stare at the deputy sheriff who drew up a few minutes after Mary, left his patrol car right there in the road, and came up the steps two at a time. He didn’t look at the kids as he crossed the porch. They moved to the door after him, curious. He walked up the aisle toward the cash register, touched Mary on the shoulder, and told her that her husband, Dr. Jim Leader, had just been taken to Miltonia Hospital. To make sure she understood, he said, “I mean as a patient this time. You probably want to head on over.” Mary took three steps toward the door, and then her legs buckled. She put a hand on the counter and saw herself trying to drive the station wagon over ten miles of farming country toward Miltonia and turned back toward the deputy sheriff. “You’ll have to drive me,” she told him, and shook her head. She felt surprised, even puzzled, to ask such a favor from a man not her husband. “I don’t think I can drive.” But her arms and legs were not working right. Something about the way he talked. She recognized that guarded speech. Mary was a nurse; she’d heard that tone plenty. The teenagers backed away from the door as Mary and the deputy came out, fast, and he opened the door of the car for her. Miltonia Hospital, a ‹ve-story oblong that angled away from the back of the Catholic elementary school, was thirty years old, and the linoleum ›oor in the main hallway rippled under her feet, seemed to throw her forward as she ran toward the emergency room. Jim had privileges here; they knew her. The doctor’s face, the nurses’ faces had that awful void look, telling her nothing. “Where is he!” Dr. Jim had passed away ‹ve minutes earlier. A blood clot, the doctor told her, trotting alongside her because Mary started to run as soon as he spoke. She bent over her husband and put her hands on the sides of his head and stared at him in disbelief. Without life in his face his features were sharp, craggy. “Jim,” she said. “Oh, Jim.” Wanting to add, stop this. Stop it! We have things to do, she thought, tonight even. Melina’s birthday party. The youngest of their ‹ve children, Melina turned two years old today . Who’s going to tell the kids you won...
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