Chapter 2
I worked for a regional engineering firm in Milwaukee and drove nearly an hour each way for years because the job paid steadily and offered enough security for Renee to work part-time while the boys were small. Later, she took a position at the Cedarville public library, where she became the unofficial keeper of every lonely teenager who needed a quiet place to sit after school.
Our boys grew into very different men.
Brad had energy from the beginning. Even as a child, he liked knowing who was winning, who owned what, whose father drove the best truck, who got the larger piece of cake. He was bright, confident, and talented at getting other people to agree with ideas they might not have considered on their own.
Tim was softer. He cried when a bird struck the living-room window. He followed Brad everywhere until he was almost twelve, even when Brad led him into trouble. Tim never wanted more than his share. His weakness was that he rarely wanted conflict badly enough to defend what he knew was right.
We were not wealthy, but we saved. Renee and I had both grown up in households where money could turn a calm week into a frightened one without warning. We bought used cars, paid credit cards off each month, and treated vacations as something earned through planning rather than charged to the future.
Then, in 1993, I found the Kerr Lake property.
Kerr Lake sat fourteen miles northwest of Cedarville, reached by an old county road that passed cornfields, two silos, and a tavern whose hand-painted sign had looked crooked for as long as anyone remembered. The lake was not glamorous. There were no luxury marinas or resort developments, only cottages, fishing boats, aging docks, and people who preferred a fire pit to a cocktail menu.
The lot had forty feet of lake frontage, a low slope safe enough for children, and a cluster of maples on the north edge. The cabin standing on it was barely a cabin at all: a rotting one-room shack with a sagging roof and mice that appeared to believe they held the deed.
The price was thirty-two thousand dollars.
Renee stared at me when I proposed we buy it.
“Jude, the building is leaning.”
“The land is good.”
“The building has mushrooms growing inside it.”
“The land does not.”
“We have two children, one bathroom needing renovation, and a washing machine that makes sounds like a farm implement.”
“I know.”
She studied my face for a full ten seconds.
“You’ve already drawn plans, haven’t you?”
I pulled folded graph paper from my jacket.
She shook her head, trying not to laugh.
“Give it twenty years,” I said.
“If this ends with us living in a damp shed while you explain load-bearing walls, I will haunt you while still alive.”
We bought the lot.
I demolished the shack with help from my father-in-law, then built the cabin over three summers, working weekends and using every favor I had accumulated among carpenters, electricians, and plumbers. Brad was nine the first summer. He spent hours carrying boards, fetching nails, and asking questions. Tim, only six, mostly gathered sticks, tracked mud into whatever section I had just cleaned, and fell asleep on piles of drop cloths.
Renee supplied sandwiches, lemonade, bandages, and commentary.
“You realize normal families buy finished vacation homes,” she said one afternoon while I measured porch supports.
“Normal families miss the education of watching me redo this railing twice.”
“An education they would gladly forgo.”
The finished cabin had two small bedrooms upstairs, a loft where the boys slept in sleeping bags when cousins visited, a stone fireplace, and a pine porch overlooking the water. I carved the date into a beam beneath the roof overhang:
LOGAN CABIN — 1996
We spent winters there too. Renee knitting scarves by the fire while the boys built snow forts that melted by March. Brad learning to bait a hook and Tim learning to skip stones. Renee’s laugh echoing across the water when a fish jumped too close to the dock. We grew old together in that cabin the way people grow old in places they built with their own hands—slowly, stubbornly, until one day the man who had once driven a construction truck with gravel under his fingernails became seventy-one and the only owner of a property his sons believed they could sell without asking.
But I had kept one secret even from them.
A secret so large it would change every plan they had made for my future.
Three weeks after the call from Brad, my attorney called me on a Thursday evening.
“Mr. Logan, I’ve got some buyers ready to close on the Kerr Lake cabin. The market is hot right now. They’re willing to pay cash if you sign tomorrow.”
