My last summer at the lake

Jack Benjamin | Aug 12, 2010

Summer fiction by Jack Benjamin  (Part 1 of 4)

All of my years in the wilderness of despair and hope, those meaningless everyday events, all seem connected now that the clock has stopped ticking.

As I dropped to the ground grasping at my chest with the chain saw still running on that cold December morning, it was as if my whole life had led to that moment, and although it had no profound meaning my life did fit together like some sort of story. Not a happy story, mind you, but a story about promise and possibility, happiness and sadness and failure. Just like a life.

One of my regrets was losing the cottage. That was not easy for me. It was a legacy of my youth, it was something my family had built, and it was the place where I spent my summer as a kid. I learned to swim and fish at the cottage. I found out I liked walking along gravel roads. It was where I drank my first beer, where I had my best parties as a teenager. It took me from nature walks to sex and drugs and rock 'n roll in a few short years - well at least drugs and rock 'n roll.

But I never would have lost the cottage if it hadn't been handed to me in the first place.

My brother Phil was always a pain. He was only a year older than me but he acted like he had been everywhere I was going to already and couldn't be bothered. We'd go up together, with my friends Syd and Rennie. And Phil would be driving because my parents would only let him drive the big car even though he was the worst driver.

As we drank beer and smoked joints he was drinking wine and telling us we were stupid because we were laughing. He kept saying the neighbours were going to call the cops on us if we didn't keep quiet.

“They can hear every word you are saying when you guys are at the point” he said, “sound travels over the water you know.”

Phil was such a know it all. I hated him. I couldn't wait for him to go off and become a scientist or a doctor.

And he did. Go off that is. Instead of a doctor he became a lawyer, and he married a lawyer and they had a daughter and went to her family cottage in the Muskokas and then they built their own cottage up there.

By the time our parents became old and sick Anne Marie and I took care of them for the most part. Well actually Anne Marie did a lot of it, as she never tired of telling me.

They died within a year of each other, and after my mother’s funeral Phil said he could find someone to do the paperwork, which was fine. The house in Gan had already been sold and the money from it had gone into caregivers, medical costs and funeral expenses, leaving the cottage as the only real asset in the estate.

A month after the funeral we had lunch at Chez Piggy. Phil came up from Toronto alone, just for the meeting. I had wanted to meet at the cottage, on Bobs Lake, but he was taking the train in and was carrying on to Montreal after the lunch, so I drove in from Verona, where we were living at the time. It was 2001, in the early fall.

I had noticed at the funeral that Phil didn't look good. He had gained weight, not a lot of weight, but enough to make his face look a bit different. Julie, on the other hand, looked as hard and cold as ever. She was all tears and smiles, but I could always see through her, and I could barely talk to her at the funeral.

I couldn't forget the look on her face, which was mirrored by Phil, that first time she came to the cottage. “It's so quaint,” she said, as my parents gave her the tour, but I saw through her. I hated my parents for being so pleased at that moment.

My mother shot me a look. She knew that Phil was leaving us behind. She knew he was jumping classes, leaving his hard-working parents and his lazy, pot-smoking brother behind, and never coming back. She may have been ok with it, but I was full of resentment.

Phil never did really come back to our family, but there was an inkling that day at Chez Piggy, when I thought I could detect a bit of weariness in his face. Losing both of our parents in succession seemed to have broken his sheen.

First we ate, talked about our wives and kids, both of us talking and neither of us really listening. Phil got down to business.

“So, what should we do about the cottage?” he asked. “I got it appraised at 250 but I think we could get a bit more,” he said.

“I guess that's all it means to you,” I said, starting to get a rise. “To me, it's our family cottage. I think it should stay in the family. But I can't afford to buy you out. I’ve only got 5 years in at teaching, so I don’t have any savings.”

I felt my throat constricting. I was ready to have it out with him, finally, after all these years, at Chez Piggy, no less. Everything I had ever done meant nothing to him. My struggles, finally getting a teaching degree and a job, my kids – it all meant nothing to him. “It's our cottage. Dad built it. Do you remember what it was to us when we were kids? It hasn't changed for me.”

“I thought you might want to keep it,” he said quietly, with no arrogance in his tone or in his look.

I was a bit confused, but still ready to fight.

The waiter came over to the table.

“Get us a couple of beers, Stellas, ok,” he said to the waiter.

“I've got to drive back to Verona soon,” I said, “I took the afternoon off but I have to go shopping and pick up Liam at Harrowsmith at the end of school.”

“Just one beer,” he said.

So we sat on the patio at Chez Piggy on that warm September afternoon under the shade of grape vines, and Phil talked a bit.

He talked about his life, about his family, his kids, his lawyering, but for once he did not seem to be bragging, and for once I listened because this wasn't an act.

“We don't fight, Julie and Astrid and I, not like Mom and Dad did and not like you and I did ...” his voice trailed off. “I guess with Mom and Dad gone I'm seeing where all this is going,” he said.

“You remember the boat ride?” I asked.

“Yes I do,” he said, “I remember the boat ride.”

I looked at him, and he looked at me. I saw in him what he must have seen in me, a middle-aged man trying to finally become an adult.

“You can have the cottage,” he said, “keep the cottage. You watched over them for all these years. Keep the cottage”

He looked so sad, but I felt happy. I was happy to be near him, for once, and happy about the cottage, and happy to have a brother.

“What about Julie?” I asked.

I knew that Phil had been sent to Kingston with instructions from Julie to get some money for the cottage.

“Julie's ok with this,” he said.

He was lying and both of us knew it.

“Do you remember how we felt when Dad would arrive at the cottage on the third Friday in July?” Phil said. “The back of the station wagon would be full of tools. Mom would be so happy to have some help with us because we were such a pain. I remember him unloading the car right away, before sitting down on the dock for a beer. He would be up every morning before 7 working on the cottage or the shed or something before the heat off the day came. That was his two weeks off. I wondered what it was like to be so old, but he was so young then. He was happy then.”

Phil got the bill. “I'll charge it to a client,” he said.

I told Phil the cottage was still all of ours, but he insisted on signing it over.

A week later I phoned and invited Phil, Julie and Astrid to join Anne Marie and myself and the twins for a gathering at Bobs Lake at the end of the summer to spread our parents’ ashes on the lake. I was going to run into Gan to bring my uncle and aunt out to the lake as well.

The gathering never happened. The ashes are still in two boxes on a shelf at the cottage, and Phil never did get back there.

But it was Phil who kept the cottage in the family, and years later I ended up pissing it away, when I pissed away my marriage after 23 years.

(Next week – the boat ride)