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concern.”
    He got in the Jeep and turned it around. Peter was bowed under the heavy weight of the bag. Ben rolled down the window. “All that said, don’t leave that camera out in the rain. I’ll need it when I get back.”
    “It’ll all be here,” Peter said. “Safe and sound.”
     
    Ben almost turned around several times on the five-hour drive north. It was one thing to pack and take off with the intention of being alone with your thoughts. It was quite another to actually be alone with them.
    He stopped to pick up groceries and continued on to reach the lake just as the sun was falling behind the mountains. It was a marvelous sunset, the sky and water turning first scarlet, and then deep gold. A part of him ached for a camera to record it; a part of him felt relief that he had nothing to do but observe it.
    He carried his supplies into the cabin quickly, feeling a bittersweet nostalgia for the place. The vacation excitement as a kid. Coming in and seeing his grandparents waiting. Swimming with his mother and father. His mother had thick black hair that would float against Ben’s arm when his dad towed them side by side on their backs.
    “Harris family train,” his dad would say, his hand cupped under their chins.
    Then as an adult, there were so many good memories embedded in the place with him and Andi. Even when they lived in San Francisco, they made it back to the cabin for vacations most years. Visit the old man, give the kids a sense of home. The kids on the braided rug in their bathing suits as Ben’s father told them one of his hunting stories.
    “Will you take us sometime?” Jake would ask. “I’d use my dad’s gun.”
    “That old thing?” Ben’s dad would jerk his thumb at the shotgun hanging over the mantelpiece. “It’d blow us all up.”
    Ben’s father and grandfather had built the cabin themselves in the early fifties, several years before Ben was born. The image of his dad as a young veteran back from Europe felling trees alongside his own father had been alive in Ben ever since he was first old enough to hear the story.
    The cabin was simple: a living area with the kitchen off to one side. Fireplace, to the left. Two small rooms in the back: one with a double bed, the other, bunks.
    In the past few years, Ben felt the only thing he had managed to accomplish himself with the property was to keep up with the taxes and do minor repairs. Though his father had been dead for almost three years, and his grandfather twelve, Ben always felt as if the two of them were with him in the cabin.
    And although neither had been judgmental men, now he felt ashamed in their presence.
    Divorced man. Lost his children.
    Ben’s mother was killed by a drunk behind the wheel of a logging truck when Ben was eleven. She was just a few weeks past her thirtieth birthday. As an adult, Ben could look back and see that his dad must have gone through what was a clinical depression. He lost his asphalt paving business by failing to show up at jobs. For days at a time, he didn’t leave the house. He just sat in front of the television. Face stubbled, gaunt. Smoking cigarette after cigarette.
    Finally, Grandfather Harris came by late one night and said, “C’mon, deer season opens tomorrow. Dog’s in the truck.”
    “No,” Ben’s dad said.
    “I didn’t ask you. Just move your butt. You, too, Ben.”
    Ben’s dad had been only an occasional hunter before his wife’s death. However, on that trip, Ben could still remember the color beginning to come back into his dad’s face. A sense of purpose, if not happiness, as he made his way through the woods with Grandfather Harris’s old Remington shotgun broken over his arm, loaded with deer slugs. They found nothing that day, nor the next two. But on their last morning out, he led Ben and Grandfather Harris into the woods and shot a buck.
    Although Ben was sickened by the blood and the deer’s lolling head, the grim satisfaction on his father’s face was better