Read The Summer Guest for Free Online

to remember who I was. But of course he’d call me Jordan. A dumb idea for certain, but still I thought it: How many Jordans could he know? My own father, who died when I was three, was the only other one I’ve heard of, and him I barely got to know, before his engines failed one summer night off Newport News and he crashed into the sea. (For a few bad months in college, when I’d fallen into a deep funk over nothing obvious, I passed a few hours in the company of the campus psychologist, an earnest young woman with a smile like something she had gone to school to learn. She got it in her bean that the fact that my father’s body had never been recovered was probably the root of all my woes-not wrong, but not exactly rocket science, either. In any event, one day my bad mood lifted and never returned.)
    By this time, little January had been sprung from her car seat and was toddling around the driveway, dragging a stuffed Humpty Dumpty. I should say at this point that Hal’s wife, Sally, rarely came to the camp; I’d probably laid eyes on her twice in my life, though she was some sort of Wall Street lawyer and was probably just too busy. It was nice to see a man who would actually bring his eighteen-month-old along on a last-minute jaunt to the North Woods, but I could also tell that Hal was about at the end of his patience. He scooped his little girl up onto his hip and gave us all a weary look that said, Long day, not my idea, could we please just hustle this along and get the old man indoors? He lifted an eyebrow at Kate. “Could you?”
    Kate stepped up and took January from him, making cooing promises about going down to the lake to see the ducks; Hal, his hands free, moved around the walker and pulled the mask up to Harry’s face.
    “We’ve got dinner waiting for you in the dining room, Harry,” Joe said. “We can take your things to your cabin for you, so you just go along and get yourself settled.”
    Harry said nothing; for a moment, we all just stood there, watching him haul in the air like a man with his face in a two-pound rose. It hurt like hell to see him that way; no one should have to think about breathing, which by then every one of us was.
    Then, from inside the mask: “ Jordan?”
    “Yes, sir?”
    “Goddamnit, it’s Harry, Jordan.”
    And what else could I do? I laughed, relieved as hell. And then Kate laughed, one of my favorite sounds in all this world, and Hal, and everybody else-even little January-all of us glad for the moment to hear a joke, to let the day’s minefield of a mood and this god-awful sense of death in our midst evaporate like a morning fog.
    Harry looked around like we had lost our minds. “What’s so funny I’d like to know?”
    Hal put a thick hand on his father’s shoulder. “Nobody’s laughing at you, Pop.”
    “Well, you could if you liked.” Harry pulled the mask from his face and let it dangle there. His damp gaze drifted up into the pines, then fell back on me, standing there with one hand still on the walker, wondering what to do next.
    “ Jordan, I’m here to catch a trout before I croak. Can you do it?”
    I shot a glance at Joe, who was gathering their bags, then at Kate, keeping January busy with the Humpty Dumpty, and I saw that they were thinking the same thing I was: none of this was anyone’s idea but Harry’s. Pure harebrained whimsy, no matter how you sliced it: Harry was in a lot of pain, and he belonged in a hospital or at least in bed, not floating around the lake with me and scaring the wits out of absolutely everybody.
    But then I thought: a last trout. Not out of the question, and of course that was what he’d want. More to the point, what difference did it make what Harry wanted, so long as he wanted something? It could have been a trip to Disney World or a glorious hour with a three-hundred-dollar hooker (though Harry never struck me as the type for either one), as long as it was something still ahead of him.
    “Hell yeah, Mr.