Up at Butternut Lake

by Mary McNear

  “Probably,” Everett agreed. “Especially since I don’t know these roads that well.” He pushed his light brown hair out of his light brown eyes. He looked both shy and sleepy at the same time.

  And Win, who soon discovered that Poppy and Everett hadn’t had dinner yet, started to make it for them while they unloaded the car. When the grilled cheese sandwiches were browning in the pan and the tomato soup was bubbling in the pot, she stuck her head out the kitchen door to check on their progress. Everett was carrying one of Poppy’s suitcases into the cabin, and looking at it, Win cringed reflexively. It was overpacked, bulging at the sides, and something—a bathrobe, she thought—was trailing out of it. Soon, she knew, that bathrobe would be flung, carelessly, over a piece of her furniture, most likely the living room couch. But just then, Win saw what Poppy was carrying into the cabin, and her jaw dropped.

  “Poppy, you didn’t bring him. You know I’m allergic to him,” she said, pointing at Sasquatch’s pet carrier.

  “Of course I bought him,” Poppy said, mystified. “What else was I supposed to do with him?”

  “Leave him with a friend?”

  “Win, I can’t leave him with someone else. You know that,” Poppy said, looking wounded.

  But Win was already heading back into the kitchen, and already convinced her eyes felt itchy.

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  CREDITS

  Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

  Cover photographs: boat © by Alistair Scott /Shutterstock;

  cabin © by Terry Wild/Terry Wild Stock

  P.S.

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  About the author

  Meet Mary McNear

  MARY MCNEAR is a writer living in San Francisco with her husband, two teenage children, and a high-strung minuscule white dog named Macaroon. She writes her novels in a local doughnut shop, where she sips Diet Pepsi, observes the hubbub of neighborhood life, and tries to resist the constant temptation of freshly made doughnuts. She bases her novels on a lifetime of summers spent in a small town on a lake in the northern Midwest.

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  About the book

  Author Essay

  THE STORY OF ALLIE AND WYATT started to take shape in my mind a few years ago when I was watching a TV news story about a local National Guard unit that had been deployed to Afghanistan. In the piece they interviewed the young widow of one of its members, who also had a young son, and she looked absolutely stunned by what had happened to her husband. And I remembered thinking that when her husband joined the National Guard it had probably never occurred to either of them that one day he would be fighting a war half a world away.

  The story was heartbreaking to me, especially since my own children were still young at the time, and I couldn’t imagine my husband not being a part of our lives. I wondered how this family would go on, how they could even begin to rebuild their lives. Hopefully, everyone would rally around them, relatives would come stay with them, neighbors would bring them casseroles, and the son’s school would have a fund-raiser. But then what? What about when all the others had gone back to their own lives? They’d be on their own again, wouldn’t they?

  And then I remembered something a friend of mine who’d lost her husband suddenly had once told me. She’d said that in some ways the beginning was easier. This period was scary and shocking and incredibly lonely, but everyone knew, or could at least imagine, how difficult it was for her. Later on was when it got harder. Not because all of them went back to their own lives, but because everyone seemed to be saying to her, in so many words, “So when are you going to get back to your own life?”

  This was especially true of my friend because she was still young, as were her children. Several people—well-meaning, obviously, but misguided—actually said to her: “You’re lucky you’re still young. You can get married again and give your children another father. You can even have more children if you want to.” And when she pointed out that she wasn’t ready to move on yet, some of these same people seemed impatient with her.

  Maybe, I thought as I considered that mother on television, the hardest part would come later for her, as it had for my friend. Or maybe the situation would just be hard in a different way. A new way. And that was when I started thinking about a mother and son who had been through a similar experience. How would they move on? And what if they weren’t ready to do so when everyone else wanted them to? How might they handle this in their own time and in their own way? What would it take them, what does it take anyone, really, to start over again?

  I chose to explore that question through the eyes of Allie, a young widow whose National Guardsman husband has died in Afghanistan, and Wyatt, her five-year-old son. I decided that at the beginning of the novel they would relocate from suburban Minneapolis to a fishing cabin in northern Minnesota that has been in their family for several generations. That cabin and the lake it is on are both intimately familiar to me; I spent my childhood summers in and on their real-life counterparts. My great-grandfather built my family’s cabin in the Upper Midwest during the Depression, and while it has since been divided among countless aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and cousins, I still spend a couple of weeks there every summer with my mom, my sisters, and our children. Because no single family owns the cabin and maintenance and upkeep are dealt with by “committee,” the place can sometimes look a little neglected. But the torn rug that people have been tripping over for years and the sliding screen door on the back porch that hasn’t worked properly since the Eisenhower administration have also become part of the place’s charm. In a world of granite kitchen countertops and megapixel flat-screen TVs, our cabin looks exactly like what it is: an uncomplicated, quiet place to spend a few weeks every summer remembering what it is we loved about these woods and this lake when we were children.

  Once I had the idea of setting the novel on this lake, which I renamed Butternut Lake, the look and feel of the town of Butternut began to take shape in my mind. I didn’t model this town on the town nearest to our summer cabin, though, because that town is too small! At about five hundred people, that town is less than half the size of the fictional Butternut. So instead I drew inspiration from the many other small towns in that area, an area where northern Michigan, northern Minnesota, and northern Wisconsin converge. We’re often told that the American small town is in decline, but these communities would seem to counter this statement. And so, too, I decided, would Butternut, with its thriving businesses, shops, and restaurants. Well, restaurant. Because when you have a coffee shop as good as Pearl’s, you don’t need any other place to eat!

  As the town of Butternut came into focus for me, its residents did, too. And here again I looked to models in the real world. The people who live in the Upper Midwest are different in many ways from their neighbors farther to the south and west. Maybe it’s their proximity to Canada, a stone’s throw away, or maybe it’s the long winters or the short growing season, but the people who live in this part of the country tend to be reserved, especially with outsiders. This reserve shouldn’t be confused with unfriendliness, though, because once it gives way you discover that they have a real warmth and generosity of spirit that informs almost everything they do. I knew the characters in Butternut would have those same qualities, but like Allie would also have their own challenges to overcome, their own mistakes to grapple with, and their own complicated relationships to sort out.

  Once I got to this point in the process I was ready to take Allie and Wyatt, plunk them down into their family’s old cabin, and stand back and let the lake, the town, and the people work their magic on a mother and son desperately in need of some. At the same time, though, I tried to keep one thought front and center in my mind: starting over after any kind of tragedy is one of the hardest, loneliest, and scariest things any of us will ever have to do. And those who’ve had to do it in the past or are doing it righ
t now are the real heroes among us.

  Q&A with Mary McNear

  How did you start writing?

  Ever since I can remember, I’ve been making up stories, though I haven’t always put them down on paper. As a child, I used to invent characters and intricate plots and then bully other children—usually my younger sister, younger cousins, or younger neighbors—into listening to them. As I got older, though, I decided that I wasn’t brave enough to be a writer—something I believed it took a special kind of courage to be. So instead, after I graduated from college I went to graduate school and tried not to think about writing anymore. I wasn’t entirely successful, though. For one thing, I kept making up stories—though I didn’t make anyone listen to them anymore—and I was assaulted with frequent and painful reminders of what it was I really wanted to be doing. Bookstores, libraries, airport newsstands—the world was filled with evidence of other people writing the kind of fiction I wanted to write, namely women’s fiction. Not surprisingly, I tried to avoid reading it myself. (I read a lot of mysteries, which I love, but which I’ve never actually wanted to write myself!)

  But when I was in my early thirties and completing a PhD program, our son—who was three at the time—was diagnosed with autism. To say that this news was life-changing doesn’t quite begin to cover it. But as I reordered my expectations and priorities, one of them refused to budge. I wanted to write novels. And I figured if our son was brave enough every day to confront a world that often felt incomprehensible and overwhelming, then I sure as hell could be brave enough to put pen to paper. So when I dropped out of graduate school and gave myself over to raising a child with special needs, I did something else, too. I made myself write for an hour a day. This was much harder than it sounds, especially since our daughter was born six months after our son’s diagnosis. But I wrote for that hour even if it came, as it often did, at six o’clock in the morning or at twelve o’clock at night. I’m pretty sure it was that hour every day that kept me sane during those years.

  Our son, by the way, graduated from high school this year. He’s a bright, gentle, sweet young man. And the descendant of my first novel, which I started fifteen years ago in the waiting room of the speech therapist’s office, is now being published!

  Is Up at Butternut Lake your first novel?

  It’s my first novel to be published, but it’s not the first novel I’ve written. There were many novels before this one, but if I have a strength as a writer I hope that it’s honesty, and I knew the first several novels were not publishable. I didn’t get discouraged because I also knew they were getting better. Writing, of course, is a famously nonlinear undertaking, and yet what surprised me the most about the books I wrote was that every single one of them was better than the one before it. Finally I knew I was getting close—really close. And Kimberly Whalen, who would become my agent, agreed. In fact, she said if I submitted my next novel to her, she’d read it and perhaps we could discuss representation. So I wrote it, she loved it, and the rest . . . well, the rest is this novel, Up at Butternut Lake.

  How long did it take to write?

  Up at Butternut Lake took a year to write and another year to edit. Originally it was twenty-five thousand words longer than it is now, but my agent, Kimberly Whalen, thought it needed to be shorter—and she was right. So I set about the humbling process of cutting supporting characters and subplots that, of course, I was very attached to. The upside, though, was that the editing process made me consider what was absolutely essential to the story I wanted to tell. It was hard, but it made the book much stronger.

  What do you feel is the central theme of the novel?

  Well, in one way or another, all of the other characters in the novel come face-to-face with their pasts, whether it’s to take responsibility for mistakes they’ve made, grieve for losses they’ve endured, or overcome old fears that are now holding them back. Jax, for instance, has to meet head-on a series of bad decisions she made before her marriage to Jeremy—decisions threatening to tear apart the family she loves. Walker must acknowledge his unresolved feelings of guilt and pain over his marriage to Caitlin and the baby they lost. And Caroline must conquer her fear of taking risks and having a relationship, a fear developed over years of being a single working mother. Even Frankie must carve out a life for himself, despite the years he lost to jail. The death of a loved one, deception, a failed marriage, the darker parts of our past—all of these things can threaten the present and overshadow the future unless we confront them head-on. I wanted to write about how this process unfolds for the different characters in the novel.

  In the novel you write about two women, Allie and Caroline, who are single mothers, each with one child. You also explore the friendships between Allie, Jax, and Caroline. Why did you choose to write about these three women?

  I was interested in writing about how the friendships between these three women would evolve naturally in a small community. Allie, the one who has only recently returned to Butternut, is the one who brings them together as a group of friends. But they all have a common past in this town, and they all have children. These women understand that parenting—single parenting in particular—can be hard and lonely. Allie has to make big decisions without a partner to consult. Caroline’s daughter has recently left for college, so Caroline has to come to terms with this life change without a partner to ameliorate her sense of loss. And while Jax has a husband, the secrets she has kept mean that in many ways she’s had to navigate the experience of parenting alone. I wanted to write about the challenges of motherhood, but also about how friendships with other women can bring humor and insight to these challenges. Finally, I wanted to consider the role of friendship in our lives more generally. It isn’t just single mothers who rely on friendships to get them through the day—it’s all of us. You need friends who support you and make you laugh, but as Allie, Caroline, and Jax discover, you also want friends who can nudge you gently when you make mistakes or get off track.

  In your bio you mention you write your books in a doughnut shop. Why is this a good setting for you?

  One of the reasons I write in a doughnut shop is because writing can be lonely, and this way I’m always surrounded by people. But I also write there because I’m a world-class eavesdropper. I’ve actually used some of the dialogue I’ve heard there in my novels!

  What made you want to write books with romance in them?

  I thought about that recently when our daughter, who’s in high school, invited a group of her girlfriends over to our house to get ready for a dance. None of them has a boyfriend, and all of them, it turned out, spent most of that night dancing with one another. But no matter. This was clearly beside the point. Because the point, as they were discovering that night while they gave one another manicures and wobbled around in unfamiliar high heels, was the sense they shared that something might happen at the dance. What it was they didn’t know, but the possibility of it hung in the air that night more palpably than the Nicki Minaj perfume my daughter insisted on spritzing over everyone.

  It doesn’t matter what age we are. We remember that emotion. And even better, we still feel it! Not when we’re getting ready for a dance, maybe. But at other moments that sense that something might happen finds and surprises us. I tried to capture that feeling—that jittery, scary, but mostly delicious feeling—when I wrote about Allie’s falling in love with Walker. Because the next best thing to feeling something yourself is reading about someone else feeling it.

  Where do you get story ideas?

  As I said above, I got the idea for Allie and Wyatt’s story line watching the news. But I look for ideas every summer when I go back to the Midwest. Except for my summers there, I’ve lived in the city all my life, so I have an outsider’s fascination with small-town life. When we go into the town five miles from our cabin, I like hanging out at the little coffee shop or in the tiny public library, which is housed in a converted log cabin. I think about all the things the people who live there know about
one another, but I also think about all the things they don’t know about one another. The things they don’t know about one another are intriguing, and are often the subjects of my novels!

  Discussion Questions

  1. Allie is torn between grieving for her deceased husband, Gregg, and falling in love with Walker. Is there an acceptable amount of time to grieve for a loved one? Must Allie stop grieving in order to move forward in her life?

  2. Allie abruptly ends the relationship with Walker after Caitlin shows up at his house. She tells Walker she needs to protect Wyatt from the uncertainties of their relationship. Does she do the right thing? Is she simply protecting Wyatt? Or is there more to it than that? Is her reaction unreasonable?

  3. After living in the cabin on Butternut Lake for only a couple of months, Wyatt tells Allie it feels like “home.” What makes a place “home”? Does time have anything to do with it?

  4. Why does Allie owe it to Gregg to remember him? How does Allie balance remembering Gregg and enjoying her new life with Walker?

  5. Jax deceives Jeremy twice. First she fails to tell him that Joy is Bobby’s daughter. Later she doesn’t tell him that she’s withdrawn ten thousand dollars to pay off Bobby. Is a lie of omission—especially a big one—just as reprehensible as an outright lie?

  6. Bobby’s appearance in town is an opportunity for Jax to come clean and tell Jeremy the truth. But she doesn’t. Does Jax believe that Jeremy will no longer love her if he knows the truth? How does Jax underestimate Jeremy’s love for her? And how might her own unhappy childhood have compelled her to deceive him?

  7. Jeremy knows from the beginning that Joy is not his daughter. Should he have told Jax when Joy was born that he knew the truth but loved them both anyway? By not doing so, was he complicit in Jax’s deception?