“Well, I think I know how I can help keep that life afloat. Since we’re not independently wealthy and I don’t want to live out my life in a rumpus room, work would be good. It appears there’s a local need for a multitalented attorney. I have to work in order to feel competent. I’m just waiting to see where you’re headed.”
“I’m not entirely sure yet,” she said. “I might do some part-time teaching.”
“Is that where you feel the most actualized?” he asked. “The most authentic?”
“Why do you have to ask me hard questions? We’ve almost got this nailed down. I think we’ll be happy every day.”
“I think we’ll be happy every day for six months and then you’re going to realize there’s a little something missing, that something that makes you your best self. It doesn’t have to be sixty hours a week as a neurosurgeon, but you do have to know what makes you happy.”
“Besides you? I might be my best self just loving you.”
He leaned close to her and whispered, “That’s what my mother’s doing.”
*
Maggie hated to admit Cal might be right. She had the slightest problem with needing to be right. But it was true, she’d been thinking about earning some money and when she wrapped her head around teaching med students it filled her with about as much excitement as watching a tree grow. She tried thinking in terms of fertilizing their nubile young minds with the exhilaration of making good medicine, academically, and there it was again—watching the tree grow. She did like feeling the excitement of thinking about work, however.
She’d been in the operating room a few times in the past few weeks, but she’d been assisting in pretty tame cases. When she even thought about emergency work it sent shivers up her spine. She couldn’t imagine another ordeal like that horrific MVA that took three young lives.
But there was one thing. Just scrubbing in got her a little jazzed. The nurses and techs were so happy to see her and kept asking when she was going to be back in the loop.
How Cal knew what he knew was a mystery. It was probably something his wife had taught him—he said she was an excellent attorney who had gone her own way, not seduced by the same things that drove him.
Maggie would like to have a daughter. She had very definite ideas about what she’d like that daughter to see while growing up—a mother with confidence and a skill, a talent she had worked at developing.
Then she had a sudden fearful thought. What if she wants a debutante’s ball?
Maybe we should adopt, she thought.
*
Maggie bought a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever actually read it before; she probably either bought the CliffsNotes or watched the movie. But in reading it, she moved into another world, the world of Atticus Finch. She saw him so clearly, dressed in a meticulous but threadbare suit, walking around his town, making time for every human being he passed, working laboriously yet never hurriedly, never impatient or judgmental. In fact, he granted the most understanding to those hardest to understand. Clearly the most admired of all men, rigid in his values yet tolerant. She saw him.
She saw California Jones.
If a man doesn’t know what port he is steering for,
no wind is favorable to him.
—Seneca
Chapter 18
Some very familiar emotions visited Maggie as the end of summer drew near—the feeling that something wonderful was coming to an end. It had nothing to do with Cal, except that her romance with him had begun in early spring. Labor Day weekend approached and that signaled the end of the heavy traffic at the crossing. They would still have some campers, mostly weekend visitors, and the coloring of the leaves in fall brought out the nature lovers. In just a couple of months snow would fall in the higher elevations; in a few months the lake would freeze and the ground would be covered with snow. Cross-country skiing and ice sailing would be in full swing.
The summer camps across the lake would close and the lake would fall silent. The lake cabins for rent would stay open a little longer, but they’d close from November through February.
In winter there would be a few RVs and the cabins would be rented on weekends, but tent campers? Hardly ever. Those hard-core campers who braved it built big, toasty fires at their campsites and spent a lot of time around the potbellied stove in the store.
Life at the crossing would slow down. There just wasn’t going to be a lot of activity, therefore not that much work to do. There would be little to fill the days.
Maggie felt she’d been levitating at the crossing for six months. Her week or two had become half a year. And the thought of going back to that insane pattern she’d lived in exhausted her. But the idea of a long, snowy winter with only Sully and Enid for company held little appeal. The days would be endless.