The delivery driver called while I was scraping old paint from the cabin’s kitchen window. He asked where I wanted sixty white folding chairs and eight round tables. For a moment I assumed he had the wrong lake. Then he read my address, including the crooked mailbox number I had repainted that spring. I set down the scraper and walked outside, still holding one glove, as his truck eased between the pines.
I had owned the cabin for three years, although my family still spoke of it as Grandma June’s place. After she died, my mother and sister, Paige, had wanted to sell. I used my savings to buy their shares, replaced the leaking roof, and spent weekends teaching myself which boards could be saved. Everyone signed the papers. Somehow, signatures had not changed the old habit of treating the key as communal.
The driver showed me an order under Paige’s name. The notes mentioned a catered dinner, a dance floor, and a sixtieth-anniversary celebration for our parents. I knew about the anniversary. I did not know that fifty-eight relatives and family friends had apparently been invited to celebrate it on my narrow deck. The cabin had one bathroom, a fragile septic line, and parking for four cars if nobody minded being trapped.
I asked the driver not to unload and called Paige. She answered brightly, as if I had phoned to praise the surprise. She said our parents deserved one beautiful weekend and that the lake had always belonged to all of us. When I reminded her that I owned it, her voice cooled. She told me not to make a legal point out of a family memory. Behind the truck, the water looked perfectly calm. I realized my hands were shaking anyway. The truck’s diesel engine idled while pine pollen floated across its hood.