Saving Jack. Chapter One

Jack Rigsby’s pickup truck bumped and rocked as he navigated the dirt fire lane that meandered for over a mile through the Maine woods to his lake house. The path was peppered with cavernous holes and trenches that could only be safely negotiated at idling speed. Each year he vowed to put new gravel down, but each year something would happen to distract him, so it remained a slow mile. It was his first time up since last fall when he had closed the house up for the season. The winter had been unusually cold and snowy, even for Maine, and his caretaker, a local busybody whose only qualifications for the job had been possession of a working snowmobile and lots of time on his hands, had called Jack several times over the winter to inform him all about the vicissitudes of New England winters.

“Yes, Bobby, I’m aware that it’s cold up there and there’s lots of snow,” Jack would answer. “That’s why I hired you. You really don’t have to call me every time there’s a storm. We’ve gone over this a hundred times.”

“This last storm brought some trees down on the path, I imagine,” continued Bobby, undeterred. “Suppose I’ll go up in the morning.”

“You do that.” 

Jack had learned over the years that the only way to end any conversation with his caretaker was simply to hang up. Despite years of trying, it seemed impossible to hurt the man’s feelings. 

Now, as Jack made the year’s maiden drive to the lake, he found no evidence of any cleared trees, no fresh piles of chopped wood, no evidence that he even had a caretaker. But each year, in spite of little proof that he ever actually showed up, Jack had retained Bobby Landry’s services. It was mostly out of guilt. Part of the price of owning a lake house in Maine was participation in the great caretaker scam, whereby wealthy people from away employed the unemployable local jackleg who needed to supplement his fraudulent disability claim check with a reliable side hustle. Who better to hustle than some rich guy from Virginia who was only in town for a couple of months every summer? 

However unreliable and unskilled Bobby might have been as a caretaker, he made up for it with his insider’s knowledge of every property owner on the lake. If anyone on Quantabacook had suffered a financial setback, gone through a divorce, or had a kid in rehab, Bobby could be relied upon to keep Jack fully informed. It was part of the reason that he hadn’t told Bobby of his plans to open the house up in April this year. Jack Rigsby wasn’t in the mood for salacious gossip. Not this year. He preferred to slip in unnoticed while it was still cold and the smell of snow hung in the air.

As the truck trudged up the last hill before the long sweeping curve down to the house, Jack felt his heart beating quicker, the odd tingle of expectation rising in his chest. Every year it was the same. He turned to Evelyn and gave her a smile. 

“Gets us every time, Evie.”

It had been Evelyn Rigsby who had begged him to buy the place. Jack enjoyed the lake, was fond of Maine. Evelyn was enchanted. There was no place on earth where she was more beautiful, thought Jack as he watched the tears well in her eyes, her hand raised to her lips. The truck came to a stop by the front gate, right alongside Bobby Landry’s F-150.

“Isn’t that Bobby’s truck?” Evelyn asked with a bemused smile.

“You can’t keep a secret from that man.” 

Jack got out of the truck slowly, his back tight and his hamstrings aching from two days of driving. Stretching to his full six feet, he felt all of his 60 years. He noticed some lumber in the back of Bobby’s truck and then heard hammering echoing from the deck side of the 70-year-old A-frame cottage he’d bought during a whirlwind weekend ten summers earlier. That summer, thanks to a tip from a neighbor’s omniscient caretaker, he and Evelyn had learned that Beatrice Deveraux was grieving her husband’s death and entertaining the idea of selling the lakehouse that had been in her family since its construction in the late 1940s.

“My kids have all moved away and can’t afford to pay the taxes on the place,” she had explained to Jack and Evelyn, sitting expectantly at her kitchen table. “And even if they could, they couldn’t be bothered to drive up all the way from Tennessee.”

Evelyn had always loved the Deveraux place because it sat so close to the water’s edge. She would kayak past it in the morning and see Mrs. Deveraux reading her newspaper under the umbrella on the deck. The only words that had ever passed between them for ten years had been Evelyn’s “beautiful morning, Mrs. Deveraux!” and her curt reply: “maunnin.” But now, on this afternoon, Jack and Evelyn listened patiently while Beatrice Deveraux heaped full-throated scorn on her worthless children. Instead of negotiating a sales price for the cottage, she seemed more interested in describing the depths of ingratitude into which her spawn had descended. As she rambled on about the sinful distractions ensnaring her children in the Volunteer State, Jack glanced across the table and noticed the glow of delight in his wife’s eyes. While Jack was tallying up week after week of work and expense, Evelyn was imagining how beautiful this place would be after just a few creative graces. The large family room looked out at the lake through a wall of windows. The two upstairs bedrooms were only semi-private and oddly shaped by the steep pitch of the roof. But there was plenty of room for a bathroom to be added somehow—she was convinced of it! And the master bedroom just off the kitchen on the main level of the house was begging for a French door and a little imagination. 

Jack, only half listening to Mrs. Deveraux’s travails, decided at that moment that his days as a renter were over. He could never say no to her, to those glistening eyes. When Mrs. Deveraux finally threw out a number, Jack added $10,000 to it to clinch the deal. A handshake served as the contract, and in less than a month, he’d delivered the purchase price in a green leather briefcase to Mrs. Deveraux.

Now, he walked down the stone sidewalk around the side of the house and spotted Bobby Landry actually doing some caretaker work, replacing a couple of rotting deck boards. Bobby didn’t look up from his work but greeted Jack with, “Hope you packed some wharm clothes. Callin’ for snow latah . . . ”

“What are you doing here, Bobby?” 

Jack was genuinely curious why he should find his caretaker caretaking on this chilly April day, when all the evidence of the past ten years would argue against such a coincidence. 

“You chose this day, of all days, to replace a couple of boards on the deck . . . the very day that I come all the way from Virginia to open my house in April for the first time ever? I give up. How did you know I would arrive today?”

Bobby looked up from his work for the first time to inform Jack that he just happened to notice on his “regular rounds” that a few rotted boards needed replacing, so he figured he would swing by and get it done before the spring snowstorm hit. 

Jack interrupted: “Let me guess, you called my office to tell me about the spring snowstorm, heard my away message, then put two and two together and decided to make sure I caught you in the act of actually doing some work . . .”

“Mr. Rigsby, you’re about the smahhtest homeowner on this entire lake. That’s what I tell everyone who asks me who my smahhtest homeowner is . . . Jack Rigsby, hands down!”

“If I’m so smart, how come I have you as my caretaker?”

“And funny, too . . . I tell them that you’re the funniest, too!”

Bobby soon lost interest in deck repairs and launched into his annual fishing expedition of probing questions about the Rigsby’s year, all the better to keep his other lake clients abreast of news from Virginia. Jack always played along, viewing it as part of Bobby’s odd charm, but this year he had a feeling that his patience would be tested.

“So, Mr. Rigsby, why exactly did you decide to open up Loon Magic in April?”

After the briefcase of cash had been delivered, Evelyn’s first order of business had been to pick a name for her new summer home. Jack provided zero input, reasoning that the person in charge of naming the place should be the person moved to tears at the closing. Even though it had taken her over a month to decide on Loon Magic, Jack had always known that Loon would wind up in the winning name, for it was this majestic bird with its mournful call that had always filled Evelyn’s heart to overflowing. On summer mornings, she loved to kayak into the lifting fog and wait for a loon to elegantly break through the water near her boat. There they would both sit, staring at each other, not a single ripple stirring the glassy void between them. Evelyn would speak softly, Good morning, friend. The bird would throw its head back and let out a plaintive song. After a few minutes, the loon would slip silkily under the surface and be gone. It was, in fact, magical. The name was perfect.

Jack was already irritated. “I suppose I needed to get away a little earlier this year than usual. Should I have asked your permission first?” 

“Are you kidding?” Bobby laughed. “I’m as happy as can be to see you, Mr. Rigsby. It’s just that you usually wait until June, after Ms. Evelyn is done with school.”

“Yes. Well, my wife is not teaching school any longer. Thirty years was enough. I hope that her decision to retire meets with your approval, Bobby. Now, if you don’t mind, we have a lot of unpacking to do.”

“But I only have a few more adjustments here and I’ll be out of your way.”

“No, Bobby. Leave it be. Just a couple boards remain, and I am perfectly capable of replacing them myself. Now, thanks for everything, but we will check in with you later.”

“Sure, Mr. Rigsby. You tell Ms. Evelyn that I said hello, okay? And . . . we will have our ‘state of the cottage’ meeting later, then?”

“I certainly will, Bobby . . . and yes, I wouldn’t miss a ‘state of the cottage’ meeting if my very life depended on it. I’ll call you . . .”

As soon as the sound of Bobby’s truck disappeared into the thickness of the woods, Jack opened the deck’s French doors and walked through the bedroom into the kitchen, where he found Evelyn in the living room, removing a dusty sheet from his favorite recliner.

“You better try it out . . . make sure Bobby hasn’t been sitting in it all winter watching football . . .” Evelyn smiled.

It was the same suggestion she made every year, an old, well-worn joke which never failed to make him smile. Jack stood in the kitchen and watched her glide gracefully among the sheets and whirling dust. This was why he opened Loon Magic in April: to be alone with her, free from distraction and the increasing judgment of his two adult children, who could never begin to understand what it felt like to carry around this crushing weight. He would always love them, but he needed some separation. They would just have to get used to it, this new normal. It was a diminished life, . . . but it was the only life he had left.