He went on a Thursday night and stayed until Sunday afternoon. While he was there, Dave took down the storm windows and put up the screens. He turned the garden, raked the twigs off the lawn and cleaned out the eaves. In the evenings, he walked with his mother into town to buy ice cream. He stopped in at the Maple Leaf Restaurant on Saturday morning and had breakfast with some childhood friends. And each night, he stretched out on his childhood bed in his old room at the top of the stairs, and he slept like a boy, deep and far away. When he left that Sunday, he left thinking that this was something he should have been doing for years. Since that spring, Dave has made the flight home twice a year, once every April to lay things out, and then again in October to pack them away. It makes him feel useful; connected to things gone by and to the swing of the seasons. He knows his mother looks forward to these visits. He likes that too. So Dave was surprised, to say the least, the spring he stepped out of his rented car onto his mother’s gravel driveway in the little town of Big Narrows, to see she had hired a man, and the two of them were working away at the windows without him.
