Ma worked down to Royce Flowers over on Castle Street, but only full-time in November and December – a dab hand at those Christmas wreaths, she was, and not bad when it came to funeral arrangements, either. She did Dad’s, you know. Had a nice yellow ribbon on it that said HOW WE LOVED THEE. Almost biblical, don’t you think? People cried when they saw it, even ones Dad owed money to.

When I got out of high school I went to work at Sonny’s Garage, balancing wheels, doing oil changes, and fixing flats. Back in the old days I also used to pump gas, but accourse now that’s all DIY. I also sold some pot, might as well admit it. Haven’t done it for years, so I guess you can’t charge me on that, but in the eighties that was a pretty good cash-and-carry business, especially in these parts. Always had enough jingle to go out steppin on Friday or Saturday night. I enjoy the company of women, but have stayed away from the altar, at least so far. I guess if I have any ambitions, one would be to see the Grand Canyon, and another would be to stay what they call a lifelong bachelor. Less problems that way. Besides, I got to keep an eye on Ma. You know what they say, a boy’s best friend is his—

I will get to the point, Ardelle, but if you want it, you have to let me tell it my own way. If anyone should have a little sympathy for tellin the whole story, it’s you. When we was in school together, you wouldn’t shut up. Tongue hung in the middle and running at both ends, Mrs Fitch used to say. Remember her? Fourth grade. What a card she was! Remember the time you put gum in the toe of her shoe? Ha!

Where was I? Camp, right? Out on Lake Abenaki.

Ain’t nothing but a three-room cabin with a lick of beach and a old dock. Daddy bought it in ninety-one, I think it was, when he run into a little dividend from some job. That wasn’t enough for the down payment, but when I added in the income from my herbal remedies, we was able to swing it. The place is pretty skeevy, though, I’m willing to admit that. Ma called it the Mosquito Bowl, and we never fixed it up worth a tin shit, but Daddy kep to the payments pretty regular. When he missed, Ma n me chipped in. She bitched about giving away her flower money, but never too hard; she liked going out there from the first, bugs and leaky roof and all. We’d sit out on the deck and have a picnic lunch and watch the world go by. Even then she wouldn’t say no to a six-pack or bottle of coffee brandy, although in those days she kep her drinking mostly to the weekends.

The place was all paid off around the turn of the century, and why not? It was on the town side of the lake – the west side – and you both know what it’s like over there, all reedy and shallow, with plenty of puckerbrush. The east side is nicer, with them big houses the summer people have to have, and I imagine they looked acrost at the slums on our side, all shacks and cabins and trailer homes, and told themselves it was a shame how the locals had to live, without so much as a tennis court to their names. They could think whatever they wanted. Far as we were concerned, we were as good as anybody. Daddy’d fish a little off the end of our dock, and Ma would cook what he caught on the woodstove, and after oh-one (maybe it was oh-two), we had the runnin water and no longer had to trot to the outhouse in the middle of the night. Good as anybody.

We thought there’d be a little more money for fixin up once the place was paid off, but there never seemed to be; the way it disappeared was a mystery, because back then there was plenty of bank loans for people who wanted to build and Daddy was workin regular. When he died of a heart attack while on a job in Harlow, in oh-two that was, Ma n me thought we was pretty well skint. ‘We’ll get by, though,’ she said, ‘and if it was whores he was spendin the extra on, I don’t want to know.’ But she said we’d have to sell the place on Abenaki, if we could find someone crazy enough to buy it.

‘We’ll get showing it next spring,’ she said, ‘before the blackflies hatch out. That okay with you, Alden?’

I said it was, and even went to work sprucin it up. Got as far as new shingles and replacing the worst of the rotted boards on the dock, and that was when we had our first stroke of luck.

Ma got a call from an insurance company down in Portland, and found out why there never seemed to be any extra money even after the cabin and the two acres it stood on was paid off. It wasn’t whores; Dad’d been putting the extra into life insurance. Maybe he had what you call a premonition. Stranger things happen in the world every day, like rains of frogs or the two-headed cat I seen at the Castle County Fair – gave me nightmares, it did – or that Loch Ness Monster. Whatever it was, we had seventy-five thousand dollars that we never expected just drop out of the sky and into our Key Bank account.

That was Stroke of Luck Number One. Two years after that call, two years almost to the day, here come Stroke of Luck Number Two. Ma was in the habit of buying a five-dollar scratch-off ticket once a week after she got her groceries at Normie’s SuperShop. For years she’d been doin that and never won more than twenty dollars. Then one day in oh-four she matched 27 below to 27 above on a Big Maine Millions scratcher, and holy Christ on a bike, she seen that match was worth two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. ‘I thought I was going to pee my pants,’ she said. They put her pitcher in the window of the SuperShop. You might remember that, it was there for two months, at least.

A cool quarter million! More like a hundred and twenty thousand after all the taxes was paid, but still. We invested it in Sunny Oil, because Ma said oil was always gonna be a good investment, at least until it was gone, and we’d be gone by the time it was. I had to agree with that, and it turned out fine. Those were go-go years in the stock market, as you may remember, and that’s when we commenced our life of leisure.

It’s also when we got down to serious drinking. Some of it we done at the house in town, but not that much. You know how neighbors love to gossip. It wasn’t until we were mostly shifted out to the Mosquito Bowl that we really went to work on it. Ma quit the flower shop for good in oh-nine, and I said toodleoo to patchin tires and replacin mufflers a year or so later. After that we didn’t have much reason to live in town, at least until cold weather; no furnace out to the lake, you know. By twenty-twelve, when our trouble with those dagos across the lake started, we’d roll on out there a week or two before Memorial Day and stay until Thanksgiving or so.

Ma put on some weight – a hundred and fifty pounds, give or take – and I guess a lot of that was down to the coffee brandy, they don’t call it fat ass in a glass for nothin. But she said she was never the Miss America type to begin with, or even Miss Maine. ‘I’m a cuddly kind of gal,’ she liked to say. What Doc Stone liked to say, at least until she stopped goin to him, was that she was going to be a dying-young kind of gal if she didn’t quit drinkin the Allen’s.

‘You’re a heart attack waiting to happen, Hallie,’ he said. ‘Or cirrhosis. You’ve already got Type Two diabetes, isn’t that enough for you? I can give it to you in words of one syllable. You need to dry out, and then you need AA.’

‘Whew!’ Ma said when she got back. ‘After a scoldin like that, I need a drink. What about you, Alden?’

I said I could use one, so we took our lawn chairs out to the end of the dock, as we most often did, and got royally schnockered while we watched the sun go down. Good as anyone, and better than many. And look here: somethin’s gonna kill everyone, am I not right? Doctors have a way of forgettin that, but Ma knew.

‘The macrobiotic sonofabitch is probably right,’ she said as we tottered back to the cabin – along about ten, this was, and both of us bit to shit in spite of the DEET we’d slathered ourselves with. ‘But at least when I go, I’ll know I lived. And I don’t smoke, everybody knows that’s the worst. Not smoking should keep me going for awhile, but what about you, Alden? What are you going to do after I die and the money runs out?’