The bonfire gobbles up the tower of cardboard boxes and licks the edges into crumbs. You toss another victim into the flame’s eager mouth while I perch on a tree stump, ninja-chopping any mosquitoes that dare approach me. Behind us, the sagging lake house overflows with voices.

A gold ring shines on your finger, and I don’t know you from Adam, but we’re all family at the lake. Your smile blooms without coaxing, and it gives me this itch to ask questions, to sate whatever curiosity burns within when someone invites me to know them.

Oh yes, out here you can build a life from scratch, you tell me, painting visions of strawberry fields and deer-meat burgers and ice fishing in the unforgiving Pennsylvania snow. Your voice glows with love for that overstuffed lake house, a three-room shack sandwiched between two palatially renovated vacation rentals. 

I ask how it feels to collect the notes on the walls, the scribblings of your dead grandfather who left the house to you and your wife. 

His words still hunger for…something, you say, and I feel that tug of longing, too—the half-filled journals and ripped photographs searching for answers. In that house, husband and wife lived out happiness on fast-forward through nine children, until she died, and he detached himself from truth, heard those voices in his head, shot himself in your old driveway. 

I didn’t want the house, you confide in me, but someone’s got to feed the birds. The orange column threatens to consume you, but you don’t even flinch. I will the blaze to starve itself; it’s too close to my skin. I can feel the embers tasting me.