Briana Maley
Last Summer at the Lake
The summer that I was 13, I became an expert on the present tense. In the thing that was happening now. Now before the second hand on my oversized Swatch lurched to the next moment, the next now. And in each moment, each now, there was nestled the almost-comforting whisper of a not yet. All the things I dreaded were inching toward me with each tick of the second hand. But they weren’t happening in this now. Not yet.
For example. My parents’ divorce wasn’t final. It would be, and I knew better than to hope otherwise, but for now they were still married.
I still lived in a big house on top of a hill, even though my father had decamped to an apartment downtown.
I still spent my summers at the lake with my mother, even if my father hadn’t come out a single weekend all season. My mother had warned me that we would be selling the lake house at the end of the summer as part of our downsizing, but for now we were still lake people.
And I wasn’t a person who had spent thirteen whole summers at the lake without ever jumping off the rope swing from Sawyer’s Rock. Not yet.
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