The Weekend Separation
I run the general store out at Cutter's Landing on Lake Winnisquam, and if you want to know everything that happens on this stretch of New Hampshire shoreline, just work the counter for twenty summers. People think they're invisible when they buy a bag of ice and a six-pack. They're not. I know who's fighting, who's cheating on their diet, and who just got a raise because they suddenly start buying the good coffee.
So when Carol Metzger came in that Friday evening buying a single-serve coffee maker, a jar of instant creamer, and — this is the part I noticed — table salt, even though I knew for a fact she and her husband Frank kept a full canister of Morton's up at the cabin, I figured something was up.
"Restocking?" I asked, ringing her up.
"Starting fresh," she said, and didn't smile about it.
The Metzgers had owned the camp on Bear Paw Road for maybe fifteen years — modest place, one of those 1960s lake cottages with a detached bunkhouse out back that Frank used as a workshop until their daughter was born, then it became storage, then eventually just a place with a cot in it. I only know the layout because I helped Frank haul a new water heater up there once, back when my knees still let me do favors like that.
What happened, as I pieced it together from her that evening and from Frank the next morning when he came in for bacon and forgot his wallet, twice, was this. Frank had come out of the shower in his flip-flops and tracked water across the porch Carol had just mopped. She'd said something. He'd said, "Don't start." And that phrase — she told me later he'd used it on her for thirty-one years, whenever she brought up anything from a running faucet to his mother to the fact he'd once bought her the wrong-colored garnet earrings for their twenty-fifth — had finally worn clean through.
By the time the argument circled back through old vacations and his mother's habit of rearranging the pantry, they were both worn out. Carol suggested they live separately. Frank looked around at their third of an acre and asked, "Where?"
"Here," she said. "You take the cabin. I'll take the bunkhouse."
They gave it until Monday morning.
Now, I've sold coffee filters and antacids to half the marriages on this lake, and I'd never heard of anybody trying a trial separation without leaving the property. But that's Carol for you — she taught high school algebra for thirty years and doesn't believe in solving a problem you can't first write on the board.
She came back in Saturday for a box of granola bars, and I asked, careful, how the science experiment was going.
"There are rules," she said. "Shower schedule. Refrigerator zones. No unsolicited advice."
"And the salt?"
"I bought it. It's mine."
I didn't push. But my nephew delivers propane out that way, and he mentioned there was a sheet of loose-leaf paper taped to the cabin door with actual handwriting rules on it, some crossed out, some added in a different pen. Divorce paperwork drawn up in ballpoint on the back of a grocery list — only on this lake.
Saturday night we got that storm that knocked the power out from Laconia to Meredith. I was up anyway, boarding the porch windows at the store, and I could see the Metzger place from the water side when the lightning hit. Around eleven, I watched a light bob across their yard — somebody had gone out in the rain toward the cabin. Next morning my nephew heard the whole story from Frank direct: a window had blown open in the bedroom, knocked a plant off the sill, and Frank had gone up on a kitchen chair in his underwear trying to wrestle the sash shut. Carol came out from the bunkhouse — not to help, she told him, just because the banging was interfering with her sleep — and held the chair steady while he got it latched.
"That's not assistance," she reportedly told him. "That's noise abatement."
Frank came in Sunday for bacon — forgot his wallet the first time, came back an hour later, forgot it again — and I asked him straight out if the marriage was ending.
"Nah," he said. "Just till tomorrow."
"That's a specific number for a divorce."
"It's not a divorce. It's a trial. Like a mattress."
He told me about the yard notebook — they were passing written notes back and forth about the garden hose schedule and whose turn it was for the dump run, and by Saturday afternoon it read, in his words, "like two feuding condo boards." He also mentioned, a little sheepish, that he'd fixed a dripping bathroom faucet he'd been ignoring since Memorial Day, purely because he suddenly had free time and nobody handing him a screwdriver and a look.
Carol had noticed that too, apparently. Asked him point blank if he'd fixed it on purpose to make some kind of statement. He said he just finally had time. She said he'd had time for two months. He said he hadn't had a reason.
Their daughter Jenny drove up from Manchester Sunday afternoon with her son, no idea any of this was happening, and by my nephew's account she about lost it when she saw the taped-up rulebook still on the cabin door and a strip of masking tape on the fridge marking "TOP SHELF: DAD."
"You're both over sixty," she told her mother.
"That's exactly why we're moving fast," Carol said.
But apparently by dinnertime that same evening, whatever wall had gone up between them for forty-eight hours came right back down, at least enough to work a grill together. Frank lit the charcoal, Carol made a salad, and — this is the detail that got me, because Jenny told my nephew's wife at the Fourth of July potluck weeks later — Frank passed his wife a knife before she even asked for one. Small thing. But if you've watched two people orbit a barbecue pit for as long as I have, you know the ones who anticipate each other's next move are the ones who aren't really finished.
Monday morning, the propane truck went by the Metzger place on schedule, and my nephew said the notebook was gone from the porch rail. Whatever got decided happened Sunday night, apparently on the porch, with the rulebook between them one last time — Frank told me later he'd crossed out two of the rules himself and replaced them with one line: "Don't stop the other person from starting."
I don't know what that means exactly, and it's none of my business. What I do know is that Carol came in that Tuesday, bought her regular canister of Morton's — the same brand as the one already up at the cabin — and set the little single-serve coffee maker from Friday right there on my counter.
"Don't want it?" I asked.
"I'm keeping it," she said. "It's going in the bunkhouse. Permanently."
"So the cabin's staying a two-address situation?"
She thought about that a second, the way she used to think before writing something on a whiteboard.
"Let's say it's staying an option."
Then she paid for the salt, waved off the receipt, and drove back up Bear Paw Road with a bag in one hand and, I noticed, Frank's fishing hat on the passenger seat — the one he swore he'd left at the cabin all summer. She'd clearly gone and gotten it herself. Didn't ask him if he wanted it back. Just took it.
