just here to have a good time. Have you read my book?”
“No,” he admitted.
“It’s about losing what we most love. So I do understand how you feel about the trees. I’d be more than happy to talk with you about them, but not tonight. Okay?”
She smiled, reached out, touched his shoulder.
He was silent.
“I think it’s time for refreshments,” Maggie Nelson said. “Thank you, Grace. She’ll be signing up here for all of you who brought books.” She slipped quickly between Grace Fitzgerald and the young man, took his arm, and with gentle force, guided him from the room. He didn’t resist.
Jo and Jenny found themselves near the end of a line that formed for Grace Fitzgerald’s signature. When they reached the author, she smiled at them warmly. “Hi, Jo.”
“Hello, Grace. I’m sorry about the disruption.”
“What disruption?” Her eyes, a brown so light they were nearly golden, fell on Jenny. “This must be the writer I’ve heard so much about.”
Jenny reddened deeply. “Just poems, mostly.”
“That’s exactly how I started.” She took Jenny’s book. “How would you like this inscribed?”
“Whatever you want to put there is fine.”
“Wonderful.” Grace Fitzgerald bent and wrote in a florid script, “From one writer to another, good luck.” She started to close the book, then bent once more and added something Jo couldn’t quite see. She handed the book back to Jenny and laid her hand on the shoulder of the boy next to her. “Scottie, I’d like you to meet Ms. Jo O’Connor. She’s a famous lawyer here. And this is her daughter, Jenny. My son Scott.”
He seemed shy, looking up at her with his head slightly bowed. A smallish boy, with green eyes and a normal nose, he looked very little like his mother. Jo figured he took after his father, the man lost on Lake Superior. “Hi.” He lifted his hand briefly.
“Hello yourself,” Jo replied. She glanced behind her. “We’re holding things up.”
Grace Fitzgerald leaned toward Jo and spoke quietly. “I wonder if I could talk to you-soon.”
“Sure. What about?”
“Professionally.”
“You have my number. Just give me a call and we’ll set something up.”
“Thanks.”
They skipped the refreshments and headed to the car. As they drove home, Jenny said, “I thought she handled that guy pretty well.”
“I thought so, too.”
“He seemed so nice yesterday. If I was Grace Fitzgerald, I would have just told him to bite me.”
“‘Bite me’? What’s that mean?”
“Oh, you know, Mom.”
“No.”
Jenny shrugged. “It means fuck off.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“You wanted to know.”
Jo found that she was smiling, despite herself. “What do you think she wants to talk to you about?” Jenny asked.
“I don’t know.”
Jenny was quiet a moment. “Mom, I thought she looked kind of worried. Maybe even scared.”
“You know, I thought so, too, Jen.”
“I wonder why.”
“I guess when she calls me, I’ll find out. By the way, what did she write in your book?”
Jenny opened the cover and read proudly, “Someday you’ll be signing a book for me.”
12
CORK WOULD HAVE MADE MORE MONEY keeping Sam’s Place open after dark, but he liked his evenings free. At seven-thirty, he finished grilling a couple of Sam’s Big Deluxes and whipped up a couple of chocolate shakes for two teenage boys who’d motored up to the dock. Then he flipped the CLOSED sign outward and began to shut the place down. Stevie had helped a good deal during the day, but after his own dinner-a hot dog, chips, and milk- he’d fallen asleep on the bunk in the Quonset hut.
Cork scraped the grill, emptied and cleaned the ice milk machine, cooled and poured out the fry oil, wiped down the prep areas, and swept the floor. He took the cash from the register and turned out the lights. In the back, he sat at the desk, counted the day’s take, and made entries in his ledger. Finally he prepared a night-deposit slip, bundled the money, and shook Stevie gently awake.
“Come on, buddy. Time to hit the road.”
Stevie was slow in getting up.
“Want a ride?” Cork asked.
Stevie gave a sleepy nod.
Cork turned his back to his son and knelt. Stevie wrapped his arms around Cork’s neck and his legs around Cork’s waist.
“Up we go.”
He carried Stevie piggyback outside and locked the door behind them. By the time he got his son settled in the Bronco, Stevie was wide awake.
“Are we going home?” Stevie asked.
“First we go to the bank. Then to the store for some cigarettes.”
Stevie seemed bewildered. “You don’t smoke anymore.”
“They’re not for me. After that, how about a walk in the woods?”
Stevie looked at the long shadows cast by the setting sun. “Will it be dark?”
“When we’re done. Do you think the woods are scary when it’s dark?”
“Sometimes.”
“Sometimes so do I. But I’ll tell you what-I promise I won’t let anything happen to us, okay?”
Stevie thought it over, his dark Anishinaabe eyes seriously considering his father’s face. “Okay,” he agreed.
And Cork felt, as he often did, the sweet weight of his son’s trust.
Cork drove north of Aurora, following county roads until he came to a place in the Superior National Forest where a split-trunk birch marked the opening to a foot trail through a thick stand of red pines. He pulled off to the side of the road, locked up the old Bronco, and set off with Stevie through the woods.
It was twilight then. Normally the air under the pines would have been cool and sharp scented, but the heat was holding and the smell in the air came from the forest fires to the north. The undergrowth was brittle. Whenever Cork or Stevie brushed against the branches and brambles, they gave off a sound like the rattle of bones.
Stevie held Cork’s hand tightly and warily eyed the woods around them.
After ten minutes on the trail, Cork knew they’d passed onto Iron Lake Reservation land, the far northwest corner where there was only one cabin for miles. The cabin belonged to Henry Meloux, the oldest man Cork had ever known, although years seemed a feeble measure of a man like Meloux. He was a mide, one of the midewiwin, a member of the Grand Medicine Society. To many of the whites in Tamarack County, he was known as Mad Mel. Cork, however, had respected the man his whole life.
As they neared Meloux’s cabin on the small, rocky peninsula along a north arm of Iron Lake, Cork sniffed the air with concern. The pervasive smell of distant fire had suddenly grown powerful and immediate. Cork broke from the pines into a clearing that gave him an unobstructed view of the cabin and the lake. Beyond the cabin, tattooed against the pale blue of the twilight sky, rose a dark coiling. A column of smoke.
“Come on, Stevie.”
