Mr. Waldon lives outside of town about fifteen minutes, but it always seems to take half a day to drive there. He has an open invitation for your family for weekend cookouts all summer long. He lives in a small cottage on the edge of a large green lake.

Mr. Waldon was a friend of your grandfather. When you Dad was a child, they’d visit every weekend. After a bottle of wine or so, Mr. Waldon will get out the old photographs, pastel photographs of your grandparents and your father as a fat blonde kid with a buzzcut. “I used to run down the entire path – along the cottage, through the backyard and down to length of the pier – as soon as my father parked the car,” says your Dad. He’d be a cannonball in the lake before your grandparents’ even rung the doorbell.

The lake isn’t safe for swimming anymore and the pier has long since rotted through. The view is still there, though, along with lounge chairs, a large above ground pool, and a hot tub. You spend the afternoon switching between the cold swimming water and the searing steam in the hot tub. You stuff yourself with nut mix and hamburgers and mustard-based potato salad. Mr. Waldon plays an oldies station on the radio.

Later you shiver in your wet swimsuit as you walk through his dim air-conditioned cottage to use the toilet. One entire wall of the bathroom is a picture of a sun setting off a tropical island. There’s so much to look at in Mr. Waldon’s house. This time you notice a picture of a pale woman with short brown hair in a poka-dot bikini. She’s smiling from the deck of a boat. You imagine that she was Mrs. Waldon.