“Look at you two,” Odd said, feeling as sad as he did angry. “Couple of quacks.” He shook his head fiercely. “I want you to take a gander at my boy here.” When neither of them looked up, Odd said, “All right. You mind your own business. That’s good. We’ll all mind our own business. From this day forward, don’t utter his name. Don’t even look at him. If you pass us on the Lighthouse Road, walk on by. If anyone asks about him, about me and Rebekah, you shrug your shoulders and don’t know a damn thing. Understand? You never breathe a word about this.”
He’d not waited for them to respond, those loonies sitting there holding hands above the linen tablecloth, only cradled the boy and turned and went about his life. And so Harry became, like his father a quarter century before him, Gunflint’s motherless son, the heir of their blind-eyed sympathy.
Odd looked over at him and wondered again what his hardheartedness had done to the boy.
“Hey, bud,” Odd said. “Hell of a morning for catching fish, ain’t it?”
“It’s unnatural, the way they’re biting.”
She was fifty-seven years old as she stood at the window. Except for that year in Duluth with Odd she’d spent almost forty-four of those years living here, the last ten of them alone. The apothecary had de volved first into a general mercantile, then a clothier, and finally a haberdashery before it became nothing more than a madwoman’s madhouse. That was what people thought, anyway. What the high school– aged kids said as they roamed the Lighthouse Road on Friday nights. Sometimes they threw rocks through the big front window, once they painted a large owl on the clapboard siding. She thought nothing of their mischief, was only relieved to know that Harry was not among the vandals.
She looked up and down the shore at the snow in the pines. Some of the trees had grown in the years she’d been there, others had been felled, but the shape of the wilderness had stayed the same. The shape of the lake, too. She took comfort in this, felt some affinity with the years.
But it was a comfort short in lasting. As soon as she settled her gaze back on the ice fishermen, the vagaries of time that a moment ago had provided solace were now as cruel as the wind.
Out on the lake the ice fishermen were hauling them in, one after another, even as the fissures spread like veins through the ice, even as the wind stiffened from the northeast.
Odd said, “That wind is coming around now, ain’t it?”
“Maybe we should call it a day.”
“Look at that pile of fish. We’ve never had a day like this.”
“Still. The wind.”
“We’ll be all right.”
And because Harry believed every word his papa ever said, he dropped his line into the lake again.
To Gillian van Leuven, Laura Jean Baker, Thomas Maltman, Emily St. John Mandel, and Kevin McColley, my gratitude. Thanks and admiration to Greg Michalson. To Caitlin Hamilton Summie, Rich Rennicks, Rachel Kinbar Grace, Steven Wallace, and all the other fine folks at Unbridled, much appreciation for all your hard work and commitment. Matt and Jenae Batt, I owe you. To Laura Langlie, a bouquet of flowers. Pops, I have another question for you….
Finn, Mac, and Liese, you’re my inspiration.
And to Dana, what thanks could ever be enough?
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Denver, Colorado
© 2012 by Peter Geye
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Geye, Peter.
The lighthouse road / by Peter Geye.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-60953-084-6
1. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.E925L54 2012
813’.6—dc23
2012009270
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
book design by sh.cv
First Printing
