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AFTER ADALYN HAD MANAGED to get her grandfather to slowly eat half a sandwich and drink half his mug of “chocolate” as he called it before dozing off again, she went into the office and studied the reservation book—something he still kept by hand. He also was only reachable by a land line and kept an old message machine...the kind that used a cassette tape.
“Sheesh, Gramps,” Adi said under her breath. “What happens when that old cassette gives out? Where do you even buy a new one?”
She ran a pencil eraser down the pages of the reservation book. Only half the Kreature Komforts cabins were reserved for the summer. Adalyn glanced out the window and tapped her lips with the pencil. Only half? Ever since she could remember, the cabin complex had been solidly booked from July through September. How long had reservations been languishing?
She grabbed his master key from the hook and eased out through the squeaky door to take stock. There were twenty cabins in five circles of four, each circle sharing a campfire pit and barbeque. Across the creek was a group of newer cabins, added twenty years ago. In years past, families would gather together in these campfire circles, making quick friends with their temporary neighbors, sharing stories of hikes and fishing and bear and moose sightings. Now she could see that several screen doors were broken—either screen or hinge—and one was entirely set to the side. Chinking was missing from between the logs of the walls. A few chimneys were in noticeable decay. Gramps had never let things slide like that, she thought with concern. Evidence of his declining health?
Had she just missed such details when last she was here? Had it already been in decline and she was too absorbed in college life to notice? Or had all this happened in the last five or six years?
Choosing a cabin on a whim, she opened the door with the master key. It was winter-musty as well as dusty, the mattresses of the two bunk beds up on their side to prevent mold from forming. A mouse skittered across the far corner, making her jump, then shiver. She hated mice. Hated them. And now...How many cabins were infested? She knew that once mice got in, they were notoriously hard to get out. Gramps had always been meticulous about setting traps and watching them all winter, and more intensively come spring. She didn’t see one trap out. And with missing chinking why bother? If you trapped one, another could just squeeze back on through.
So, chinking is first on the list, she said to herself, making a mental note. Exterminators next. Because there was no way—no way—she’d be on her knees, pulling out dead mice from the traps. She shivered again. She might’ve once been Montana-tough, but now she’d allow her citified self that luxury at least. No curling, creepy mouse tails for her...Mmm-mm, no. She’d gladly assign that to another.
Shaking off the thought of dead mice, she moved to the kitchen. The appliances—a tiny two-burner stove and oven, as well as a fridge—were probably thirty years old. Both had doors open, again to prevent mold from forming. There was a small chance that guests would deem them “rustic” or “charming.” As long as they were clean enough and still worked. But looking around, Adalyn had to admit that the whole place needed an overhaul. The floors required refinishing; the lighting could be updated; fresh linens would help a lot.
She went to the doorway and looked out, then back over her shoulder, then toward the lake and woods and mountains again. The location was incredible...with a reboot on design and a marketing campaign, could she make the cabins a tourist highlight, suitable for the grand old park? Excitedly, she moved to the next cabin and then the next, taking stock. The roofs had all been replaced a few years ago, thankfully, in the traditional green asphalt tile that the rangers favored. The stonework of the front steps at each entry seemed solid. The logs that made up the walls looked like they could last another fifty years—they only needed the white chinking fixed. And fixing that would give them a nice, bright lift.
So does Gramps have any money to put toward that work? If they revamped the campground the way she was thinking and garnered good reviews, could they charge double the price for lodging? She knew that her grandparents had always wanted to keep the prices down, encouraging families to come. But good grief, the big lodges charged over three-hundred a night for a room. Couldn’t they charge a couple hundred for a cabin that slept four?
“Especially if it felt like affordable luxury,” she whispered, tapping her lips with her finger. “A splurge.” She stepped down and closed the door behind her, smiling with excitement for the first time since... well, since the day Connor got down on one knee and proposed to her. She blinked away the tears that seemed to always accompany that particular memory—probably because memories of the day he broke off their engagement immediately followed. From such a high point to such a low—
Stop it, Adi, she told herself. Quit running that film through your mind, over and over again. It’s done. It’s in the past. It’s time to start thinking about your future.
And her future? Well, for the next three months, it was this place. This place in which her grandparents had invested most of their working years. These sweet cabins on a glorious lake in one of the prettiest parks in the country. Would it not be a good place for her to stake a claim too? To invest a bit of herself? Give back when all she’d ever done was take?
She moved back to Gramps’s cabin, eager to find out what he’d think of her ideas. She’d have to tread carefully. This place had always been his baby...would he think she was meddling? Adalyn found him sitting in his worn wing-backed chair by the window, glasses far down on his nose, a carefully folded newspaper in his hand. “Says here,” he said, tapping the paper with some disgust, “that there are already so many tourists in the Valley that locals can’t get cell coverage.”
“Already?” she said, sitting down in the matched chair that had always been Gram’s. “It’s early in the season for that to be happening.”
“I just don’t understand it,” Gramps said. “Why you young folk would trust cell phones. At least my phone is always usable, no matter how many people come to the park.”
“Unless a storm takes it out,” Adalyn said dryly.
“Well, sure,” he said, waving his hand. “That happens two or three times a year.”
“Or six or seven?” she said, giving him a teasing smile.
“Maybe so. But it’s always back the next day,” he said, pointing at her. “Mark my words, Adi girl. You’ll be using my old phone at some point this summer.”
“Oh, I hope so,” she said, looking over at the huge, avocado-green clunker that still had the rotary dial. There was something so reassuring in the heft of the handset, the whirr of the dial after each number. “Remember how we used to have a party line? Chase and Logan would get on when I was talking just to bug me.”
“Hmmph. Those boys didn’t have anything over Mrs. Mason,” he said, remembering a ranger’s wife who’d lived up the road. “She’d listen to everyone’s conversation just to pass the night away. It made Alice so angry!”
“Grams never did abide a busybody,” Adalyn said, nestling back and putting her feet up on their shared ottoman.
“No, she did not,” Gramps said. “Back in those days, all reservations were done by mail. We didn’t have the phone calls and whatnot,” he said, waving his hand toward his desk in clear irritation. “It was all,” he paused to heave a sigh, “so much more civilized.”
“Or maybe it just felt that way because Grams took care of all of that?”
“Could be a bit of that,” he admitted.
“It’s been a lot for you, hasn’t it, Gramps? Since Grams passed on?”
“In more ways than one, Adi girl.”
“I imagine. This place,” she paused to look around, “was always yours, together. Was it hard to stay? After she died? I mean, did you ever think about moving back to Minnesota? Or to Chicago, to be closer to me?”
“It’d be nice to be nearer to family,” he said, tilting his head and then shaking it. “But no. Alice convinced me to move to Montana when I was twenty years old. And the day I got here, I knew I’d die here too. Logging was my trade, at first,” he said, as if Adi didn’t know. Did he think she’d forgotten? “But Alice was smitten with the park. ‘Preserve the forest, Gene,’ she’d tell me. ‘Don’t tear it down.’”
Adalyn nodded, happy to share the well-worn memory with him. “And she got the job at the lodge that summer, right?”
“That very summer,” he said, leaning his head back and taking off his glasses, wiping them of dirt and lifting them to the waning light. “It wasn’t but a couple of years before this place became available. The rest was history,” he said with a smile.
“It certainly was,” Adalyn said. “Most of your life has been spent here.”
“May through September. Then I was off to log, no matter what your grandmother had to say about it. Had to bring home the bacon.”
Adalyn nodded. The two had moved to Kalispell and rented a house there, so their kids could go to school. Some years Gramps had gone as far as Oregon to bring home that “bacon,” leaving Grams to see to the kids. Was that what had planted such wanderlust in her mother? To see what her father might have seen? Or as some sort of payback? Leaving him as she had been so often left?
But back then, it was just what people did. Made ends meet best they could.
“So the cabins were here from the very start? When you took over the concession?” she asked.
“The cabins were here. The rest was up to us. The name, the sign, the linens. It was your Grams’s idea to host games each night, to create a bit of ‘community,’ she said.” He shook his head. “These days it seems people want more of their own space.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Adalyn said with a smile. “I remember lots of nights, watching people play charades and share stories of the park with strangers. And it was like they were sudden friends.”
“Yes, it was,” Gramps said with a nod.
“It was magical for me too, Gramps,” she said. “All those years I was here for the summer...to spend all that time with Grams and you, and Chase and Logan...” Her voice cracked and she coughed. “Well, that was a gift to me.”
“No more than it was a gift to us, Adi girl. You, our only grandchild. What grandparent wouldn’t thank God for such time?”
Adalyn smiled. “Maybe grandparents who didn’t like their grandchildren sneaking out to watch the Northern Lights?”
“Ach. Any grandparent who wouldn’t cheer that child on is a stick in the mud!”
“Or maybe a grandparent who didn’t enjoy a child coming in, dripping on the wood floor and nearly hypothermic because she’d been swimming in the lake?”
“It only made you stronger,” he said dismissively, thumping his chest. “Swimming in glacial water is good for the blood. Ask any Norseman.”
She laughed under her breath. “It certainly makes the blood pump in sheer shock.”
“Especially this time of year,” he said, lifting a gray brow and casting her a knowing look. Water this cold—recently melted off the glaciers and snows above—was apt to send a body into hypothermia within minutes.
“Do you still dive in?” she asked, regretting it as soon as she said it. Would he consider it a challenge?
“The first of every July, August and September,” he said with a firm nod.
“Umm...Does your doctor approve of that plan?”
“Doc doesn’t need to know of it. As I said, it’s good for the blood. Not so much in June.” He brushed a hand over his mouth. “That water is wicked-cold right now.”
They fell into a companionable silence for a bit, each remembering cold dives off the dock. How one’s muscles contracted in pain, how the lungs seized in shock...
“So, Gramps,” Adalyn said. “I had a look around the place. And I see from your reservations book that you’re only half-full this season?”
“Yes,” he said sadly. “The place isn’t what she used to be. And the summer-folk know it.”
She smiled over that term. The summer-folk. He’d always called tourists that.
“It seems like we need to do some repairs, Gramps,” she said. “Maybe consider a marketing overhaul. You’ve done such a great job, all your life, keeping things up. But maybe...maybe in these last years—”
“Out with it, Adi girl,” he said, heaving himself up to toddle over to the window. “You’ve seen what I’ve seen. There aren’t some repairs to be done. There are a lot of repairs.” He turned partially toward her, but did not meet her gaze. “And I...well, I’m not quite as up to the task as I once was.” He gazed out to the lake, through the window. “But it doesn’t matter much.”
She rose and went to stand beside him by the window. “It doesn’t matter?”
“Nah,” he said. He turned toward her and took her hand in his. “It’s good that the Lord saw fit to bring you here this summer, Adi girl. Because this summer will be our last.” He turned and lifted an aged hand to the window sill, gazing outward.
“What? What do you mean?”
“Our concession is up,” he said, with a clamp of his lips and lift of his shoulders. He spoke of the rental agreement he had with the park officials for the property. “We renewed twenty years ago. These days, it’s up for grabs every ten. I’m thankful we lasted this long.” He waved toward the reservation book. “With the park taking fifty per cent of all we make, those bookings won’t see us through. And even if they did, they’re asking me to present a plan for the next ten years. Plans to ‘renew the property,’ they say, all ‘while respecting our strict codes to protect the environment,’” he quoted, shaking his finger, with some disgust. “What does that even mean, Adi girl? Have I not been ‘protecting the environment’ every summer I’ve kept this place in operation?”
He held her shocked gaze for a moment and then toddled back to his chair, sinking wearily into it. Her heart went out to him, even as her mind raced. This place, lost to them forever? It couldn’t be. It simply couldn’t be. And protecting the environment...given today’s ideas on that, the park service might mean everything from keeping people from a bonfire to recycling every single thing they could, to not washing linens or using paper towels.
All of which was way beyond what Gramps could deal with.
She turned and walked over to him, falling to her knees beside him, taking his hand in hers. “Gramps,” she said in a whisper. “You said that it was good that the Lord brought me here this summer. Maybe that was for more than a chance to say goodbye. Maybe it was because I might have ideas on how to renew our concession. Because I do, Gramps. Walking around this afternoon, my mind is full of ideas.”
“Oh, Adi girl,” he said, lifting his other hand to her cheek for but a moment. “I know it pains you to think of letting this place go. As it does me. But you have your life in the big city. I couldn’t ask you to give it up. We’ve had a good run here. Now maybe it’s someone else’s turn.”
“But what if...Gramps, what if I wanted to do it?” It was out before she’d really thought it through. She bit her lip and waited on him to respond.
He stared at her for a long moment. “Then, Adi girl, we’d need to talk some more.”