The Color of Water in July Read Free

the warped glass, out toward Hemingway Point. With the lights on in the living room, she could see her own reflection faintly in the windows, her same narrow face, with fair hair in a ponytail. She was wearing button-fly Levi’s and a white cotton T-shirt. Exactly what she might have worn the last time she was here, when she was seventeen.
    Russ started fingering the Navajo rugs and inspecting the Ojibwa sweetgrass baskets. Jess stood there with their suitcases—there were so many rooms here, most of which had always stood empty. At first, she wasn’t sure which room they should use.
    “Come on, Jess. Let’s put our bags in here.” Russ pointed to one of the ground-floor bedrooms with wide windows looking out on the lake.
    Mamie’s room. Jess hesitated, then decided her hesitation was silly. She grabbed the handle of her suitcase and wheeled it into the room.

    “I can’t find an outlet, Jess!” Russ hollered from his position under Mamie’s Victorian writing table. Jess was standing upstairs on the balcony. From where she stood, she could see into the room that used to be Mamie’s. It was a feminine room with frilly white curtains and pictures of Gibson girls hanging framed on the walls. Jess’s grandfather had run off when her mother was a baby. Her grandmother’s room bore no trace of him. All she could see of Russ was his jeans-clad legs and the pointy toes of his expensive leather cowboy boots. His computer paraphernalia crowded the top of Mamie’s writing desk; his bomber jacket and camera case were strewn across the bed, lenses, camera paper, and other junk littering the spotless pink-and-white chenille spread. “We’re going to need to get set up for Internet access.”
    Russ had already been on and off the phone with the magazine half a dozen times.
    “Classic Gaines,” she kept hearing him say. “His signature work.”
    When Russ wasn’t on the phone, he walked around with Jess like a tour guide, showing her things about the cottage that she had never consciously noted.
    “See the foundation.” Russ pointed to the uneven heaping of gray stones that ran along the base of the shingled structure. “That’s local flint. Arts and Crafts style. Characteristic.” Inside, he pointed at the walls and ceilings. “Look at the pine board—unvarnished, so Gaines—that golden-honey color.” Jess had never really noticed the walls, had taken for granted their warm amber hue.
    But she knew that they were pine boards— number one white pine planks . Jess almost felt like she could hear a voice, long forgotten, whispering in her ear. She shook her head. No , she was not going to think about him. All that was so long ago. Jess ran her hand along the smooth, knotty surface of the wall, feeling the carefully grooved edges, the slightly shirred ends.
    “The amazing thing about this place,” Russ said, “is that it hasn’t had a thing done to it. You just don’t find cottages like that. They’ve all been screwed around with, mucked up.”
    In the bedroom, Russ was drawn to a collection of small Indian artifacts on the shelf in the corner. They were little tourist trinkets, painstakingly made by hand: a miniature birch-bark canoe, a finely beaded sandal, and two small woven baskets, one with a tiny doll in deerskin cradled inside. Russ handed one of the baskets to her. “Do you see how fine the weaving is?”
    She examined the intricate beadwork, the careful stitches. Each basket had a name stenciled on it: Mamie , written on the basket that still held the doll; Lila , on the basket that was empty, the doll no doubt lost long ago during play.
    “How am I ever going to figure out what to do with this stuff?” Jess said.
    “Are you kidding? These old handmade tourist trinkets from the twenties are worth a small fortune.” Russ picked up a hand-painted toy tomahawk and brandished it toward his reflection in the mirror.
    Russ didn’t understand, but maybe that was just as well. These were just things