Read Online Black Otter Bay by Vincent Wyckoff - Free Book Online

sometimes a person’s head and heart could have differing opinions. Last August, for her thirteenth birthday, Abby’s father took her on a thirteen-day canoe trip into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Every summer they went camping together, just the two of them, each year venturing farther into the wilderness. With every passing year they added one day to the trip in honor of another birthday. Last year, they’d traveled well up into Quetico Provincial Park in Canada. Jackie had moved out a few months prior to the trip, and Abby’s initial sadness had recently been replaced by a simmering anger.
    Looking back on last summer’s canoe trip, she had to give her father his due. He wasn’t much for talking about himselfor sharing feelings, but in his taciturn, modest sort of way he’d attempted to reach a hand out to his daughter. Sitting by a campfire next to a nameless lake in the far north country late one night, their tent in the shadows behind them and the moon reflecting off the water before them, her father explained to her how the energy of the city called to Abby’s mother.
    â€œYou know that your mother grew up in Chicago, right?” he’d said. “She’s got that big-city blood in her, just like the mysteries of these deep, cold lakes course through you.” Abby had liked that image, and the idea that she could somehow be related to this incredible wilderness.
    â€œYour mother was actually pretty excited about moving up here when we first got married. I think she had some notion about how it would be. You know, like one of those Norman Rockwell paintings. I think she looked forward to a slower pace, and raising a family far away from gangs and violence.”
    Abby sat on a rock next to the campfire, poking at the flames with a long stick. She found it thrilling, and somewhat intimidating, to be having this grown-up conversation. She’d only just become a teenager, and it seemed like a whole world of adult emotions and passions was already opening up to her. She didn’t dare speak for fear of sounding like the child she still felt herself to be.
    â€œI’d say your mother knew that Black Otter Bay wouldn’t work for her even before you were born. There’s not much privacy in a small town. But you have to give her credit. She did try. Remember how she went fishing with us? And camping, too.”
    â€œOh, sure,” Abby pouted. “It was like babysitting the whole time.”
    Her father laughed. “But think about it. What if you suddenly found yourself living in Chicago? How would you feel about riding a crowded subway with all those strangers, or going to school in the city with thousands of other kids? It would be kind of frightening, wouldn’t it?”
    â€œI guess so,” she replied.
    â€œWell, your mother did it. She thrived on it, just like you thrive on a run through the woods.”
    â€œBut she wanted to live here,” Abby argued. “And then she didn’t. It’s not fair. Once you decide, you should stick to it.”
    â€œIt’s not always that easy. Sometimes people make mistakes. You wouldn’t want her to stay here if she was unhappy, would you?”
    Abby considered her father’s words in silence for a while, until she realized that just thinking and talking about her mother made her angrier. She threw the poker stick into the fire, stood up, and stalked off down to the shoreline. Over her shoulder, she said, “Isn’t it more unfair for her to make all three of us unhappy?”
    Tears had threatened to erupt, but in the dark, gazing out over the placid lake, she managed to blink them back. Now, as she ran the Big Island Lake Trail, she let the tears roll. Letting her frustration push her even harder, she wondered aloud, “How can it be that I miss her so much when she makes me so mad?”
    It was her mother’s relationship with Randall Bengston that Abby had the