Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [72]
Paul and Kevin were with Paulie, but they counseled no decision. “Don’t put the wall up now,” Paul said. “See how you like it. It’s a hell of a lot easier to put one in later if you think you want it than to put one in now and then have to take it out.”
I could see which way this tree was falling. I delayed making up my mind and after a couple of weeks came around to the nowall position. Paulie was right, and I realized that a writing room was really just one more bit of writerly superstition, not unlike insisting on exactly the right color paper before starting to work. The open space admitted more conviviality and elbow room. But I held my ground on the need for a closed-in first-floor storage closet, which I saw as necessary for outdoor gear. I wanted a locker where we could put rods, boots, snowshoes, fishing vests, ropes, wool coats and such out of sight and behind a locked door for the periods when I would be absent. The building team was fine with that.
Paul was coming out regularly now to the cabin. I had him back and he was giving me a lot of time. In fact, he was giving me the summer. I looked forward to the appearance of his pickup truck at the top of the driveway. As he stepped from the truck I would meet him and update him on the progress I had made, either with Billy or by myself, and he would inspect the work and make suggestions on what to do next. He was more relaxed than he had been in the spring, when I sensed that he had been preoccupied, and he seemed to be enjoying himself again in the work. But it was clear to me that there was something turning in his life, and I was fairly certain it wasn’t good. I knew from Kevin’s comments that all was not well at home. I did not push him to talk about it. I remembered, too, Kevin’s comments about the cabin being an escape for Paul, and a source of enjoyment. I did not want to disturb his retreat, if that’s what the cabin work had become for him.
Paul and I had not had the kind of relationship where we brought our problems or struggles immediately to the surface of our conversations, he even less than I—much less than I. But we had been close readers of each other’s lives, and we knew that we would get a sympathetic and thoughtful hearing if we wanted to talk something through with the other. We had a sense, too, I think, of when the right time was to ask deeply about what was happening in the life of the other. We knew each other down to the hurts and victories of childhood, and we had been fused by painful events: shouting matches between our parents, the foreclosure of the house down the shore, our stepfather’s sudden departure and the decision we had reached together to end our mother’s care when she had been on life support in a hospital bed. I tended to be more of the talker and prober than Paul, who tended to quietly work things out himself.
There was no doubt: he was emotionally tougher than I was—or maybe he was just more able to carry his pain and problems without expressing them. Our mother had valued this quality of emotional toughness, and encouraged it, and I knew her one concern with me was emotional weakness—my inability to hold up to disappointment in relationships in particular. “Louis, you see the world through rose-colored glasses.” Case in point: she had treated the absence of our real father from our lives as a nonevent. It was a fact, and the fact should be treated with indifference. This theme of being strong through tough times was an essential part of her mothering.
I remember a night when I was in high school—I was probably seventeen years old; we had