This he waved off as Tracy, seated at the table, watched him, a cup of coffee balanced in her hands. In front of her, right where she’d left them the night before, were their passports, the boarding passes she’d printed out after checking in online to their flights—“just to be on the safe side,” she said—and their itinerary. Doodling at some point since, she’d drawn a row of hearts across the top, right over the word DEPARTURE.
“This is crazy,” I said, looking from it back to my dad. “It’s your honeymoon. I’m not going to be the reason the dream trip gets canceled.”
“No one is blaming you,” he said.
“Certainly not,” Nana seconded. “Things happen.”
“Maybe not now,” I said. “But just think of the long-term resentment. I mean, I have enough baggage, right?”
I thought this was funny, but my dad just shot me a tired look. He took my anxiety personally, as if he’d broken me or something. Which was nuts, because all he’d ever done was hold me together, even and especially when the rest of my world was falling apart.
“We reschedule,” he said firmly. “I’ll call the travel agent right now.”
“What about Mimi Calvander?” Nana suggested.
Silence. Then Tracy said, “Who?”
Behind me, I could hear the clock over the stove, which I always forgot made noise at all except during moments like this, when it was loud enough to feel deafening. “Mimi?” my dad said finally. “Waverly’s mom?”
It was always jarring when my mom’s name came up unexpectedly, even when it wasn’t early in the morning. Like she belonged both everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
Nana looked at my dad. “Well, she is family. North Lake isn’t too far. And Emma’s stayed with her before.”
“I did?” I asked.
“A long time ago,” my dad said. He’d stopped pacing: he was processing this. “When you were four or so. It was during the only trip your mom and I ever took alone. Vegas.”
A beat. The clock was still ticking.
“Second honeymoon,” he added softly. “It was a disaster, of course.”
“Well, it’s just an idea,” Nana said, taking another measured sip.
“You have to go to Greece,” I told my dad. “It’s your honeymoon, for God’s sake.”
“And this is your grandmother,” he replied, “who you haven’t seen in years.”
“I do know her, though,” I said quickly. He looked at me, doubtful. “I mean, not well. But I remember her. Vaguely.”
“Okay, stop,” my dad said. He rubbed his face again. “Everyone stop. Just let me think.”
It was one of those moments when you can just see the future forking, like that road in the yellow wood, right before your eyes. I knew my dad. He’d give up Greece for me. After all he’d already sacrificed, a whole country was nothing at all. Which was why I spoke up, saying, “Mimi, at the lake. With the moss on the trees. There’s porch swings on the dock. And an arcade down the street you can walk to. And the water is cold and clear.”
He looked at me, sighing. “Emma. You were four.”
“Mom talked about it,” I told him. “All the time.”
This, he couldn’t dispute. Every now and then, he got to hear the bedtime stories, too. “You don’t understand,” he said. “Your mother’s family is . . .”
He trailed off, all of us waiting for a word that never came.
“And the high tourist season is just getting started,” he continued. “Which means Mimi is probably too busy to take on anything else.”
“I don’t know about that,” Nana said. “It’s been so long, I bet she’d love to see Emma.”
“Sometime,” my dad said. “Not today, this second.”
“But we don’t know that for sure,” I told him. “If she’s really anything like Mom, she’s not much of a planner.”
He looked at me again. “North Lake, Emma . . . it’s . . . different. They’re different. It’s not like here.”
“I wouldn’t be moving there,” I told him. “It’s three weeks.”
More silence. More ticking. “You really want me to do this?”
What I wanted was for him to go to Greece and sail that boat across the water there, with Tracy beside him. So I knew what to say.
“Yes,” I said as Nana caught my eye. “Call her.”
All my life I’d thought my mom grew up so far away. But after an hour and a half, we were there.
“Anything look familiar?” my dad asked.
“Every single bit!” I said, my voice bright. “Especially this part right here, the exit ramp.”
He shot me a look I knew had to be sharp, not that I could tell from behind his dark sunglasses. “Hey. Don’t be a smartass. I was just asking a question.”
Actually, what he wanted was reassurance that this would not turn out to be the worst idea in the history of ideas. But the truth was that it was all new to me, and I’d always been a bad liar.
“Wait a second,” I said now as we approached a single red light, blinking, and came to a stop. “There are two lakes?”
He peered at the sign across from us, then smiled. “No,” he said. “Only one.”
It didn’t make sense, though. If that was the case, why was there an arrow pointing to the right that said NORTH LAKE (5 MILES) and another to the left indicating the way to LAKE NORTH (8 MILES). “I don’t get it.”
“What we have here, actually,” he replied, “is one of the great idiosyncrasies of this area.”
“Second only to you using the word idiosyncrasies while sitting at an exit ramp?”
He ignored me. “See, when this place was first settled, it was pretty rural. Working-class people both lived here year-round and came to vacation in the summers. But then, in the eighties, a billionaire from New York discovered it. He decided to build an upscale resort and bought up one whole side of the lakefront to do just that.”
We were still sitting there at the light, but no one was behind us or coming from either direction. So he continued.
“They had a big grand opening for the first summer . . . and nobody came. As it turned out, the rich folks didn’t want to spend big money to stay at North Lake, because it was so solidly known as a blue-collar vacation spot.” He put on his blinker. “By the second summer, though, the developer figured this out, and incorporated his area as Lake North.”
“Which was the same place.”
“But it sounded like a different one,” he said. “So the rich folks came and bought houses and joined the country club. And from then on, there were two towns. And one lake, that sounded like two, between them.”
Still not a single car had passed or come up behind us at the light. Despite different economies, neither town seemed to have much going on, at least at the current moment. “Let me guess,” I said. “When you came here with Nana in high school, you went left here, to Lake North.”
“Smart girl,” he replied. Then he put on his blinker, and we turned to the right.