He was something of a worrier, Arlen Walker was, and I’ll understand if you find that amusing. His perpetual state of anxiety was as much of an annoyance for his wife and my mother, Evelyn Walker, as my conviction in the certainty of worst-case scenarios has been for my long-suffering Sarah.
“For God’s sake, Arlen,” Evelyn would say, “loosen your gas cap a bit and let the pressure off.”
While family trips seemed to be sources of great anxiety for Dad, he still enjoyed his time in Fifty Lakes, away from the city, away from work. There were rare glimpses of something approaching contentment in this man who seemed unable to relax. I remember seeing him once, his butt perched on a rock at the water’s edge, his bare feet planted on the lake bottom, water lapping up over his ankles. His shoes, a balled sock tucked neatly into each one, rested perfectly side by side on a nearby dock.
I approached, wondering whether I could get a couple of quarters out of him so Cindy and I could buy candy bars at the camp snack bar, and instead of reprimanding me for some misdeed of which I was not yet aware, he reached out a hand and tousled the hair on top of my head.
“Someday,” he said, smiling at me and then looking out over the small lake.
And that was it.
“Someday” came eight years ago. Mom had been dead for four years at the time, and Dad decided the time had come to make a change. He retired from the accounting firm, sold the mortgage-free house in the city my sister and I had grown up in, and bought a twenty-acre parcel of land up in the Fifty Lakes District, south of the village of Braynor, that had two hundred feet of frontage on Crystal Lake.