“Ouch.”
“Thank God, no,” she said. “The doctor has assured us Ardis literally never knew what hit her.”
“That’s nice,” while appropriate, just didn’t seem tactful, so Joe said, “That must be a comfort.”
“For most of us, yes. But her golf partner, Morris, has sworn never to play again. That’s Morris over there.” She gestured toward an affable-looking bald guy in canary yellow golf pants taking a practice swing with an imaginary golf club. He was surrounded by a critique group of similarly attired men.
“Just between us, I do not hold out much hope of that particular vow being honored for very long,” Mimi said.
“Maybe I should leave,” Joe suggested. “If this is some sort of memorial I’m crashing…”
“Please don’t,” Mimi answered. “Ardis has been blowing in the wind over the Mexican gulf since May. At least her ashes have, as per her request. We decided to have the memorial at Chez Ducky because everyone would be here and we thought it would be nice to have it on her birthday.”
“Chez Ducky? What’s Chez Ducky?”
“This”—she swept her arm out—“is Chez Ducky. Eighty acres of weedy lakeshore, scrub alder, and pine trees.”
“And all of these people are Olsons?” he asked.
“In one way or the other. The Olsons take the ‘end’ out of ‘extended.’ Once you’re part of this family, there’s no going back. Not because of divorce, remarriage, adoption, religious conversion, or sex reassignment,” she said. “If you’ve been declared ‘family,’ the only way out is death.”
He couldn’t imagine a family so large and inclusive and unplanned. He and Karen had had only one child. Even before Karen had died a dozen years ago, they’d never been the classic nuclear family. He’d been working overseas most of the ten years they’d been married, while Karen had stayed in Chicago and raised their son. It wasn’t what Joe had necessarily wanted; it had just worked out that way. Karen took pride and pleasure in being a stay-at-home mom, and Joe had done his part by making it possible for her to be one.
“But even that’s just an assumption. Or wishful thinking,” Mimi went on. “Actually, there’s hoards of Olsons on the Other Side just waiting to give the newly departed a big group hug.”
Joe regarded her narrowly. She returned his gaze with unblinking sincerity. He didn’t think she was putting him on, but he wasn’t entirely sure, and that knocked him a little off balance. Joe read most people as easily as Superman reads an eye chart.
She smiled. He relaxed. Of course she was kidding.
She waved her hand around the compound. “And everyone else you see here who isn’t related to the Olsons has long ties to Fowl Lake. Why, the Sbodas over there”—she pointed to a group of redheads with a predilection for plaid—“may have been the first family to build on the lake, though we Olsons fervently resist that notion. Besides,” she said smugly, “we have our original buildings. Those cottages over there? They’ve been here since before World War One.”
Unable to hide her pride, she continued. “Note the simplicity of the design, the clapboard exterior, the narrow porch, the length of the facade. Inside are twin rooms on either side of a central hall, a feature, you may be interested in knowing, that makes them the dictionary definition of ‘cottage.’ So do not make the outlanders’ mistake of calling them ‘cabins.’”
“Go on,” he said, actually interested.
“Well, the Olsons and the Sbodas were the first on the lake, and, as you can see, we are all still well represented. In fact”—she looked around—“excluding you, there isn’t anyone here without a pedigree going back at least three generations. The community around Fowl Lake is notoriously exclusive. We think of ourselves as sort of the Hamptons of the Bogs. Sans the money—Oh!” Mimi abruptly exclaimed, grabbing his elbow.
“You simply cannot miss these cashew bars,” she said, picking up a battered pan of gooey-looking stuff and prying a roughly rectangular-shaped piece out with her fingers. Joe winced.
“Susie must have just set these out,” she mumbled around a mouthful of bar. “They won’t last ten minutes once they’ve been discovered.”
She bumped the pan against his chest. Thus encouraged, he used a plastic fork to pry another square from the opposite corner. One bite told him all he had to know. Some things were worth risking your health for. In quick order, he’d stockpiled several more before moving out of the way of the incoming crowds swarming toward them like yellow jackets at a barbeque, alerted by some sixth sense to the cashew bars’ presence. Together, he and Mimi retreated, carefully shielding their bootie with paper napkins.
She led him to a bench completely encircling the trunk of an old ironwood tree and motioned for him to take a seat. She finished two more cashew bars before she spoke again.
“What’s your story, Joe? How did you come to these strange shores? Who are your people and are they waiting in the woods for your signal to attack? Do we stand in imminent danger of having our picnic raided and our cashew bars plundered?”
“Nope. I’m just visiting.”
“Oh? One of the new places?” Her friendliness faded a bit. “Which one?”
“I’m not exactly sure. It’s somewhere around here. I was on my way when I got the flat. Maybe you know—”
“Nah,” she clipped out before he could finish. “We don’t rub elbows with the McMansioners.”
Ouch.
“How long are you staying?” she asked.
“If I don’t get kicked out, the weekend.”
“Do you get kicked out of a lot of places?” Her face tilted up toward his. It was a piquant face. Definitely used to being au natural. Scrubbed and tanned and a little weathered. Unlike any of the few women he’d dated in the last decade, she didn’t have a bit of style to her.
He shrugged. “It’s the karaoke machine. People go crazy jealous when I break it out.”
She snickered. “Michael Bublé?”
“Paul Anka.”
She laughed, a full-throated and infectious sound, and glanced at him from beneath a fringe of dark lashes. They didn’t need any mascara to exaggerate their length. She was flirting, he realized. And so was he. When had he last casually flirted? But she was so distracting, and the circumstances of their meeting so bizarre, and the whole wake setting so odd, it seemed completely natural.
“Tell me more about your family,” he asked.
“What do you wanta know?” she replied around another mouthful of bar. “They’re just…family.”
She was wrong. There was no such thing as just family. “Who is who?” He angled his head toward the crowded picnic area. “How are you related?”
She blew out her cheeks and looked around. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Okay. Ardis, the deceased, was the oldest of six sibs. The next oldest is Birgie, another maiden lady. That’s Birgie over there, the one that looks like a truck driver.”
He followed Mimi’s gaze to where a square figure with short white hair sat splay-legged across the table from a tall, raw-boned woman with a single long gray braid streaming down her back.
“I thought she was a truck driver.”
Mimi pursed her lips and ignored this comment. “Believe me, the fact that neither of the girls married and that both spent their childhoods—and I use the term loosely—taking care of four younger brothers has not been lost on anyone. After Birgie came Emil, who is dead but survived by half a dozen grandchildren. The oldest one of his grandchildren is Gerry, the big guy who wanted me to play volleyball. He’s married to—forget it. Let’s stick with the principals.”
“Okay.”
“After Emil were the twins, Charles and Calvin. Calvin, too, is dead, but Charlie is one of the guys trying to improve Morris’s never-again-to-see-a-fairway swing.” She pointed to a tall, skinny old man wearing mirrored aviators, his hands on his hips as he stood silently watching Morris take another imaginary swing. “Charlie is a bachelor.”
/> Mimi then nodded to the woman with the long gray braid. “Sitting across from Birgie is Calvin’s widow, Johanna. Johanna of the water-packed ham? Charlie and Johanna have lately become an item. They think none of us know.
“After the twins came my grandpa John. He died a while back after marrying twice. The first one produced my father, John, and the second marriage, to Naomi…” She looked around. “She’s the one wearing a bedsheet.” She shrugged. “Anyway, the second marriage to Naomi produced my half-uncle, Bill.”
“Is your father here?” Joe asked, curious.
Her expression didn’t change an iota, but suddenly where there had been a relaxed, easy candor, there was a distance. “Nope. My parents were divorced when I was a baby.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Happens a lot,” she said brusquely.
“Anyway, my grandmother passed on early, and after a couple decades, Grandpa married Naomi and promptly got her pregnant with Half-Uncle Bill.”
“Which one is your half-uncle Bill?”
She looked around again. “Not here. But there’s his wife.” She pointed at a well-packaged brunette in a dark, short-sleeved dress. “Debbie.” Her upper lip curled as she said the name. “She’d be the one in obligatory black,” she said. “I suppose we should be thankful someone in the family has a sense of decorum.”
“You don’t like Debbie.”
“I don’t like her or dislike her. She alarms me.”
“Why’s that?”
“She always looks like she’s wondering what good use she can put me to and suspicious there might not be one,” Mimi confided.
“And you’re worried she might be right?” Joe asked, quietly sympathetic. He could imagine how unpleasant it would be to have someone question your value. Not that anyone had ever questioned his.
“God, no!” Mimi rocked back. “I’m worried that she’ll never figure out that she is right about me and leave me the hell alone! It’s exhausting just knowing she’s out there planning something or arranging something or fixing something. Just look at her.” Mimi jerked her head in the direction of the picnic tables where Debbie bustled about, older people scattering before her approach.
Joe studied Debbie. She didn’t seem so bad to him. A woman who saw confusion and imposed order; what was wrong with that?
“Is Bill also an organizer?”
“Nah,” she said. “Olson men are utterly and blissfully un-desirous of heading anything. Especially anything that has to do with Chez Ducky. I suspect it began when Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Günter wrote in his Chez Ducky journal, ‘I make decisions all the time but here, in this place of retreat and refuge, I refuse to make any.’”
The notion was as foreign to Joe as ritual disfigurement. He couldn’t imagine not heading things. Control was too important a thing to cede to the less capable. Not to mention irresponsible.
“Ever since then, the Chez has been strictly a matriarchy,” Mimi continued. “There are six legal heirs to the place, but everyone’s kids and spouses and whoever else wants to gets a say in what happens here. Every year, just before we close up the cottages, we have a family meeting to decide if anything needs to be decided. Ardis used to oversee that, and before her my great-grandmother Lena.”
It sounded to Joe like a criminally inefficient way of dealing with things. “What does this matriarch do?”
“Besides look wise at the end-of-the-year powwow? Just stuff related to Chez Ducky. Poll the family on things like whether we should get a phone line in here or just hope the microwave tower in Bemidji gets a stronger signal. Keep the golf scores for the family tournament. Make sure the inner tubes are patched.” She said this last with a solemnity that suggested it was one of the more important duties.
“You don’t have phone service?”
“Not a land line. We get cell on and off.”
“Who’ll be the matriarch now?”
“Birgie,” Mimi said. “She has large shoes to fill.”
“What if Birgie doesn’t want to fill Ardis’s shoes?” he asked conversationally.
“Oh, she doesn’t,” she said. “But it’s one of the last traditions the Olsons have. The oldest Olson woman has been here ruling the roost at Chez Ducky ever since Olsons bought the land.”
“If Birgie doesn’t want to do it, why not you?” he asked. It seemed a reasonable suggestion. She obviously cared about the place, and she was just as obviously intelligent. “Ever think of initiating a coup d’état?”
She burst into laughter. “Me? Ha! Nope. If Birgie doesn’t take the honors, someone else will, and we’ll just carry on like we’ve been carrying forever.”
She glanced toward the burr oaks at the far end of the compound. “Except for the view.”
He shifted. “The McMansions?”
She gave him a sharp glance. “Bingo.”
“I take it you’re not too happy about the, ah, recent lakeshore development.”
“Lakeshore?” She eyed him narrowly. “Look, I may be fond of this place, but it’s like being fond of a ditzy relative who farts in public. You like ’em in spite of their shortcomings, not because of them. The only reason the Sbodas and Olsons and everyone else here have a place on Fowl Lake is because none of their families, even way back when prime lakeshore was cheap, could afford better.”
“But you’ve stayed for generations.”
“Well, it’s better than nothing,” she said practically. “None of us are wealthy enough to trade up. But now people like your friend have run out of premium lakeshore to exploit and are starting to take over the smaller lakes. Crappy lakes. Like this lake. Only they call ’em ‘wilderness lakes.’” She snorted derisively. “They’re running off the locals. Putting up monstrosities and eating up acreage and raising the property taxes until people who’ve been here for decades can’t afford to stay.”
“I suspect I’m going to regret saying this, but aren’t you overreacting?” he asked.
She regarded him sadly a few seconds, then slapped her thigh and stood up. She reached down for his hand. He didn’t hesitate to take hers. “Come on, Doubting Joe,” she said. “Let me show you something.”
Chapter Six
Mimi was limping purposefully past Cottage Two when her great-aunt Johanna literally popped out of the bushes.
“Geez!” Mimi gasped. “You scared the crap out of me, Johanna!”
“Sorry, Mimi,” she said, regarding Joe with interest. “I’m hiding from Naomi. She keeps trying to hang a bedsheet on me.”
“It’s a tunic,” Mimi said. “She wants us to celebrate Ardis’s passing in a traditional Viking manner.”
“And that means a toga? I thought togas were Roman.”
“It’s not a toga, it’s a tunic,” Mimi repeated patiently. “And just be glad she didn’t pound breastplates out of garbage-can lids.”
Johanna’s gaze shifted to Joe. “And who might this be?”
“This is Joe.”
“How do you do, Joe? You must have just gotten in. Staying the night? The week? The cabins are awfully cozy, aren’t they? I hope Mimi’s taking good care of you?”
Mimi waited. Johanna was the romantic in the family and fancied herself a matchmaker. The fact that she’d never actually had any success in this area did not deter her.
“I couldn’t hope to be in better hands,” Joe was saying, “Miss…?”
Johanna fluttered. “Olson. Mrs. Olson, actually. Johanna Olson.”
“Ah, lucky Mr. Olson.”
Smooth, Mimi thought admiringly. He’d even managed to say it without sounding smarmy. Which was quite a feat since it was a highly smarmy comment.
“Oh, he died,” Johanna volunteered. “Thirty-five years ago come November.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Joe said, dialing down the charm.
Johanna nodded, lowered her eyes respectfully, then said, “So. How did you meet our Mimi, Joe? Did you call her eight hundred number? She meets a lot of men that way. Of course, mo
st of them are losers, not to put a shine on it. I can’t imagine you calling.”
Mimi looked at Joe to see how he handled these decidedly provocative comments. Unsurprisingly, he looked nonplussed. How else would he look? Johanna had made it sound like she worked on a phone sex line.
Mimi took pity on him. “Gotta go, Johanna. Taking Joe on the grand tour. Back later.” She hooked an arm through his, steering him away from Johanna and onto the footpath leading through the woods.
“What did she mean?” Joe asked.
Now, Mimi wasn’t embarrassed by her occupation, but experience had taught her that most people considered phone sex purveyors marginally more principled than mediums. So generally when she met people, she tried to keep from revealing her unusual career until after she’d hopefully established herself as a sound, reasonable, and principled woman. But even if Joe was the handsomest man she’d met in ages, he was just somebody’s temporary houseguest, and she was just filling up a few hours before the toasts to Ardis began. There was no reason to equivocate.
“I’m a tele-medium,” she said, hobbling along. “People call the eight hundred number I work for and I contact the Other Side for them.”
He slowed down. She kept moving.
“Really?”
“Yup. We work out of an office and everything.”
“Huh. Then…you weren’t kidding when you said there’s no escape from your family even after death? I mean, you think you really know this for a fact?”
“I just calls ’em like I sees ’em,” Mimi said. She could almost hear Joe mentally floundering for the right tone, some rejoinder that would be neutral. She’d been here before.
“Interesting,” he finally said. “How does that work? Do you charge by the minute?”
As a neutral gambit, it wasn’t half bad. He didn’t even sound flustered. “Mostly, but we have All You Can Talk weekly and monthly payment plans available, too. Look,” she said, happy to leave the subject of her work behind. “We’re here.”
They’d come out of the woods and stopped cold. They’d had to. The other option was to walk into a wall of logs.
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