He hadn’t just bought a getaway property. He’d bought a small business, called Denny’s Cabins (named for the man who’d originally built them back in the sixties). There were five rustic cottages, a few docks, and half a dozen small aluminum fishing boats with low-powered outboard motors bolted to the back. There was always one available for Dad to go fishing whenever he felt the urge, which actually wasn’t all that often. He liked the tranquility of living at a fishing camp, even if he didn’t drop his line into the water every day.

I’d only been up there a couple of times, the first soon after he bought it, to see what he’d gotten himself into. There was a two-story farmhouse and barn on the property, a couple of hundred yards up from the lake, but Dad had chosen not to live in it, preferring instead to take the largest of the five cabins, fully winterize it and spruce it up with new furniture and flooring and appliances, and live year-round at the water’s edge, even in winter, when the lake froze over and the winds howled and the only people you were likely to see were lost snowmobilers and the guy who plowed the lane that wound its way in from the main road. Living in the farmhouse, with all that room to roam around in, would have been a constant reminder to Dad of how alone he was.

The second time I went up, a year or so later, I took Paul. He was eleven, and I’d had this notion that a father-son fishing trip would be the ultimate bonding experience, which it was not, because children who have grown up accustomed to blasting space aliens on a TV screen are ill equipped to sit in a boat for five hours waiting for something to happen. Anyway, I had phoned Dad and asked about renting a cabin for a weekend, not knowing that he’d berate me for two solid days about not getting our Camry rust-proofed.