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much as a golf club.
    Miriam Jarvison, the family matriarch, was as cool as her husband was friendly. As a young boy, Osborne had been fascinated by the sight of the tall, thin woman with milk-white skin and shiny black hair pulled tight into a bun at the back of her neck. Mrs. Jarvison, Sr. never missed Sunday Mass. A haughty presence always in the same pew, always alone, and always wearing an ankle-length mink coat except in the heat of the summer when the coat was replaced with a rope of beady-eyed minks, their teeth biting their tails to protect her queenly shoulders. The young, motherless Osborne had envied Bud. What must it be like to be loved by such an aloof and lovely woman?
    It wasn’t until his teen years that he realized it might not have been fun. Though her only child was a boy, Miriam Jarvison made it clear to Bud and his young pals that she considered boys to be smelly, dirty, and not welcome in her mansion where plastic runners covered the expensive rugs.
    Osborne’s father liked to joke, “Miriam’s got a smile sure to terrify a young child.” But on the few occasions that Osborne saw her up close it was the woman’s eyes that scared him: black and ice cold.
    When Bud married Nancy Binghamton, the debutante daughter of an auto executive from Grosse Pointe, Osborne assumed Bud had fallen in love with a woman quite unlike his mother. Tall, blond, and athletic, Nancy Jarvison was as imposing as her husband—and a bully.
    Osborne learned that firsthand when Mary Lee, his late wife, found herself banished from the bridge table
and
the Loon Lake Garden Club. All because Nancy perceived Mary Lee as paying too much attention to Bud during cocktails at the Loon Lake Café before a fish fry one Friday night.
    Because Bud’s reputation as a philanderer was well known, Osborne had assumed his wife was not guilty until the day he overheard her counseling Mallory, their eldest daughter, “to be sure to marry a man like Mr. Jarvison who can buy you nice things.”
    So Nancy may have been right: A shark may have been circling. Mary Lee never hid her disappointment that Osborne had chosen to take over his father’s dental practice in “backwoods Loon Lake” instead of moving to Milwaukee or Minneapolis where “you can make a lot more money, Paul.”
    If Nancy was a good golfer, she was even better at holding a grudge. Mary Lee Osborne was banned from Loon Lake society for two years. Two years of crying herself to sleep after berating Osborne for having done “something” to cause her banishment. Two years during which Osborne made sure that whenever there was a social event to which they were not invited, he went fishing. It gave Mary Lee an excuse for their absence and he got shelter from the storm.
    Then something unexpected happened. Osborne’s daughter Erin was assigned to the same second grade class as Christopher Jarvison. Reading and math came easy to Erin, but Christopher struggled.
    One day, clueless to the tension between the two mothers, the second grade teacher suggested Erin help Christopher with his math and reading assignments. When Nancy balked, the teacher said in a firm voice, “Erin Osborne is a sweet and friendly little girl. She’ll make it easy for your son. He won’t be embarrassed to try.”
    Nancy approached Mary Lee warily only to have Mary Lee pretend that nothing had ever happened between them and agree to whatever play dates might work for Nancy. Whew! Soon she was back at the bridge table, back in the garden club.
    Ten years later disaster hit the Jarvison family. For his high school graduation, Bud bought Christopher a bright red ROV, a custom-made recreational off-road vehicle with four-wheel-drive and dual bucket seating. That same week, after a night of partying with beer and single malt Scotch whisky stolen from his parents’ bar, Christopher took a girl out for a ride.
    Driving down a steep embankment five miles out of town, the ROV rolled over, pinning Christopher and