Autumn

     The carabiner holding a dozen keys on Violet’s belt loop knocked against her hip bone.  The sound pleased her in a way it did each night as she walked the narrow gravel path, locking up the laundromat, the activity hall, and the gate leading to the pool.  At the soda machine that drew the last of the season’s moths to its humming lights, Violet searched for the small silver key that opened the change box.  She slid coins into a cloth bag and wondered who might be watching.  The splayed, yellow glow of streetlamps made it easy to spot folks—easier than it was during the day when cars, bicycles, and golf carts weaved slowly through the trailer park.

     Bob Lawrence stepped from the shadows of a giant oak tree and stood in the O’Sullivan’s carport.  His hands stuffed in his pockets and his head cocked to one side, he appeared to be contemplating his options.  He’d been sneaking over to Lucy O’Sullivan’s trailer for months while her husband was on tour in Afghanistan.  Troy O’Sullivan was home now, which literally left Bob out in the cold.

     Tommy approached in a golf cart and waved before she could turn away.  Not this year, she thought and hated herself for waving back and for standing there.  Waiting for him.

     He produced a Coke from his jacket pocket when he reached her.  “Want one?” he asked.

     She raised the coin bag and shook it.  “If I wanted a Coke, I’d just take one.”

     “Who bit you in the ass?”

     “You’re going to be the death of me,” she said.

     He tugged at the top button of her cardigan.  “Come on, you don’t mean it.”

     At twenty-eight, Tommy had managed to hold onto his boyish good looks.  But it was his dimpled smile and the small gestures of kindness that drew the lonely moms to him.  The same moms who waited hand and foot on their husbands and kids in the twenty-one vacation rental trailers lined up in rows like soldiers throughout the park.  Tommy had spent many nights out beyond the lights of the park on a blanket under the stars with the desperate women.  He was also the reason the moms sulked as they packed up their minivans to head back to the city.

     Tommy was nineteen the first time Violet caught him with the teenage daughter of one the guest families.  Violet was out in the woods after dark searching for her cat and nearly stepped on the girl as Tommy scrambled to his feet.  The girl held a t-shirt across her bare chest while Tommy made introductions like one might at a party or at the grocery store.  It had struck her how calm he acted.  Like he’d done that kind of thing before.

     Violet was thirty-one at the time, but she had felt like an awkward teenager standing in front of Tommy and the girl.  Nine summers had passed since then.  She looked down at her feet.  Walk away, she willed them.

     Tommy bent down and kissed her cheek. “It’s cold out here. You should go home,” he said.

     “I have work to do.”

     “Suit yourself, boss.”

     He veered off the gravel path and scooted across the grass in the golf cart—something he didn’t get away with during the summer season.

     Violet locked the change box into position and leaned against the soda machine.  Bob hadn’t moved.  Earlier in the week, he had sought her out while she stacked towels in the cabinet next to the pool.  She’d listened to him go on about Lucy because it was on the park’s List of Golden Rules: # 2 Always be courteous to guests.

     Rosa Coachman was responsible for the List of Golden Rules, just like she was for the periwinkle trim on the laundromat and the little, steamy Tootsie Rolls scattered throughout the park left by her dog, Precious, an ancient Yorkshire terrier.  Rosa was Larry Coachman’s third wife.  Larry owned The Pony Lake Trailer Park.  For the past three years, he’d taken Rosa to Boca Raton for the winter, where she had family.  They’d left in early October, leaving Violet with instructions to keep an eye on things.

     Buttoning up her cardigan, Violet waited impatiently for Bob to head on home.  She still needed to empty the garbage cans over in the activity hall and risked being spotted by him if she used the walking path.

     The Golden Rules for summer guests didn’t really apply to Bob.  He owned one of thirteen trailers that were occupied year-round.  Last year he had spent the winter with his brother in North Carolina, but it was clear this thing he had going on with Lucy wasn’t over for him.  Violet hadn’t called Larry yet, but she would need to if Bob did anything other than lurk around the O’Sullivan’s after dark.

     Violet oversaw delegating odd jobs to Bob, so he would stay out of the other year-round tenants’ hair.  Tommy had a list of things he would need to do before Larry returned, but he’d wait until the end of March to get any of it done.  She knew all the outward things about Tommy: his lazy habits, the kind of beer he drank, the musky scent of his t-shirts.  What she didn’t know could fill the lake.

     She hadn’t spoken to Bob about painting the laundromat or replacing the washing machine belts that squeaked.  She took the small, black spiral notebook from her back pocket and the pencil from just above the hair tie that held her ponytail in place and wrote a note: Buy paint for the laundromat.  She looked up from her notebook; Bob still stood in O’Sullivan’s carport. She pitied him.  His feet were rooted like her own.

Winter

     Violet stood on the porch outside the activity hall looking out over the frozen lake as an ice shanty she didn’t recognize tipped off the skids and landed on its side—rookie mistake.  The ice had frozen like little waves on that side of the lake.  Anyone driving more than five miles an hour was bound to get in trouble.  The owner of the shanty stepped out of his truck shouting obscenities that ricocheted off every bare tree for half a mile.  Violet turned around and went inside.

     The men who fished the lake in winter were of no interest to her.  Smelling of fish and stale smoke from their wood stoves, they usually drove onto the ice before sunrise, and most were half in the bag before anyone caught a fish.  By noon they were in the activity hall chilled to the bone, drunk, and gobbling up the plate lunches Violet had carefully prepared and sold for seven dollars each, including coffee.  She was grateful for the extra money and that Larry had let her use the shoddy kitchen in the back of the activity hall to prepare the food.  As for the drunk fisherman, she’d learned how to handle them.  Anyone caught swearing, making lewd comments, or complaining about the food was banished to the porch.  Standing in the cold, waiting on friends to finish their lunches, no one made the same mistake twice.

     On the east side of the park where a sandbar made it impossible to launch boats in the summer, the ice was smooth as glass.  After cleaning the kitchen, Violet grabbed the skates that hung from a nail next to the back door.  The thermometer mounted to Larry’s boathouse read twenty-two degrees.  With the sun shining bright off the lake and only a hint of a breeze, it felt more like a spring day than the middle of January.  Earlier in the season, she dragged the bench from under the porch of the laundromat to the shore some fifty yards from the sandbar.  While lacing her skates, she reminded herself to put it back before Larry returned in April.

     She kept her hands in her pockets while skating counterclockwise along the edge of the rink Tommy had plowed for her.  He often sat on the bench to watch her skate.  She cupped a hand over her brow against the glare off the ice.  He’d be down shortly.  Part of her wished he wouldn’t show up.

     She should have walked away the night he came by on the golf cart while she waited for Bob to leave the O’Sullivan’s carport.  Each year, after the park closed for the winter, there was a moment she should have walked away.  The year before, it was the morning Tommy found her pulling her kayak out of the water and offered to help.  The year before that, she cut the palm of her hand while filleting several bluegills a retired year-round tenant had caught and given her.  Tommy had appeared out of nowhere and used a bandana he carried in his back pocket to stop the bleeding.  Back at her trailer, he had cleaned the wound then wrapped it with gauze he found in her first-aid kit.  Afterwards, they made love on the living room carpet.  And the first year, the year she started counting her mistakes, he brought over a six pack of wine coolers and a bucket of fried chicken one night when the temperature dipped below zero.  “I’m sorry,” he said.  “For everything.”

     Violet’s legs were warming up, and the slight tingle cued her body to turn direction and then to skate backwards.  It was rote and allowed her mind to wander.

     Larry had hired Tommy to keep up the grounds and to plow the park roads during the winter months.  That was November 1996.  Violet had just returned from Italy.  She was at the park to close her trailer for the winter.  In Venice she had told her sister she planned to move to Madison to attend UWM, but then she met Tommy.  During his first week on the job, he asked her out.  “I can’t.  You’re just a kid,” she told him.

     Tommy took the rejection hard but continued to pursue her.  He came to her place on Christmas Eve and presented her with a tiny black and white kitten.  He’d tied a red bow around its neck.  When Violet protested, he kissed her.

That winter they spent most evenings under a mountain of blankets talking, making love, and watching movies.  “Larry’s my dad’s best friend,” Tommy said, when she asked what he planned to do when spring came.  “I’ll probably stay on here a while.”

     “I’m nineteen,” he said, when she asked about his life.  “I don’t have a lot of stories.  Tell me about you.”  So, she told him everything.  Things she’d never spoken.

     She had skated her whole life.  Her parents sacrificed everything for coaches, costumes, and travel.  She’d been an Olympic hopeful until she took a dare from a friend out at Snider Quarry the summer between her junior and senior year of high school and jumped feet first from a cliff, striking a boulder.  The pain didn’t register until someone pulled her to shore.  She had suffered a compound fracture in her ankle and a shattered tibia.  Propped up against an oak tree writhing in agony, she knew her skating career was over.

     Laying in the crook of Tommy’s arm, he stroked her hair while she cried.  He’d been to Snider Quarry.  “You’re the bravest girl I know,” he whispered.

     She wiped away tears.  “I’m not a girl.”

     He kissed the top of her head.  “You are to me.”

     Violet looked up from the ice.  Tommy was sitting on the bench, and she skated over to him.  “I’m almost finished,” she said.

     “I’m going to town to pick up some lumber.  Larry wants me to repair the rot in the boathouse,” he said.

     She waited, and when he didn’t invite her to go with him, thoughts of another woman filled her belly with a swishing sensation.  She flopped down in a snowbank.

     He kneeled beside her and kissed her cheek.  “I’ll be back before dark.”

    At home, she tried reading a book someone had left behind in the activity hall.  It was a romance novel, and she wondered if it was left by one of the young moms.  Even though the teenage girls still giggled when Tommy shed his t-shirt before diving off the pier, he only nodded in their direction.  He may have longed for their taut bellies and sinewy limbs wrapped around his waist, but he wasn’t stupid.  He told Violet so the summer before when she had too much wine and begged him to stop sleeping with the girls.

     Are you kidding me?”  He’d had a lot to drink too, and his tone scared her.  “I don’t do that anymore. Jesus, I could go to jail.”

     “Who then? Who are you taking to the woods?” she asked, hating herself for it.

     Tommy had laughed at her.  “You’re pathetic when you act like this,” he said, before slamming her front door.  Staying in the shadows of the trailers, she had followed him.  At the edge of the woods, a voluptuous brunette waited for Tommy.  Violet recognized her as the young mom of a family staying in the two-bedroom trailer in Lot 26.  Tommy took her hand and they disappeared into the darkness.  She imagined telling the husband where his wife had disappeared to.  She had imagined dozens of ways to hurt Tommy over the years.  That night she went home, turned on the TV, and finished off a bottle of wine.  Alone.

     Violet inherited her trailer from her grandparents.  After the accident, she moved in with them.  She was still on crutches, so her grandpa had built a ramp off the back door.  Though her parents never said anything about what had happened at the quarry, the guilt ate at Violet like a virus.  Swimming in the lake had been the therapy she needed for both her mind and body to heal.  When the nights turned cool and the new school year was about to begin, she asked her parents if she could stay at the lake.  Her mother had cried, and her father set his jaw in the way he sometimes did.  Her grandparents were gone now.  Her parents visited occasionally, but it had been months since she’d seen them.

     Tommy bought the trailer in Lot 19 across the road and two lots up from Violet’s.  He had moved in two years earlier, and Violet spent countless hours in the spare room peering out the window watching Tommy come and go.  It made her sick.  Sometimes she worried she’d get stomach cancer spying and waiting like she did.

     She heard Tommy’s truck and used a napkin to mark her place in the book before going to the window.  Oreo, the cat Tommy had given her, jumped up on the narrow windowsill.  Violet let out a long sigh while tickling the cat under her chin.  “He’s home,” she whispered.

     Tommy stepped out of his truck and walked toward her place carrying a pizza box.  Violet sprinted to the bathroom where she gargled with mouthwash and ran a comb through her hair.  He didn’t bother to knock before coming in from the cold.  Setting a takeout pizza and six-pack of beer on the counter, he smiled, displaying his dimples like a gift.

     Later, under blankets, he nuzzled his cheek against her breast.  “I could watch you skate forever,” he said.

     She wished the ice would never melt and summer, with its pretty moms, would never come.

Spring

     Larry and Rosa returned the second week of April.  With still plenty of snow on the ground and the forecast predicting more to come later in the week, the frenzied energy around the work that needed to be done before families arrived was put on hold.  Larry and Tommy were at the hardware store.  They’d be gone most of the day.  It was too early in the season to set up trailers for guests and too cold to clean out the flower gardens Rosa insisted on planting.  In the metal shed out behind her trailer, Violet rummaged through boxes looking for the sterling silver charm bracelet her sister gave her while they were in Italy.  The night before she dreamt the bracelet had fallen into a deep well.  She knew it was ridiculous, but until she found it, she wouldn’t be able to focus her attention on the countless little things she needed to do to her own trailer before the season picked up.

     In a box marked Bedroom she found the bracelet in a small plastic container that held her expired passport and the label from a bottle of wine she and her sister had ordered at a restaurant in Florence where a gorgeous Italian man brushed his fingertips over the palm of Violet’s hand.  “Exquisite,” he’d said, his accent barely noticeable.  “Do you play piano?”

     Her sister had excused herself when the handsome stranger ordered a second bottle of wine.  She closed her eyes and saw his face, his dark eyebrows lifting, curious to know her, but she could not remember his name.  She held the bracelet to the light coming in through the door.  Two tiny mosaic charms depicting the Italian countryside hung from the chain.

     She had plans back then.  All those years on the ice, she’d missed out on her adolescence.  The discipline it took to juggle school and practice made having a social life impossible.  Like skating, the trailer park had isolated her from all the trappings and milestones of life.  She’d always known this and blamed her regrets on Tommy like she blamed herself for taking that dare at Snider Quarry.

     Her older sister, Katherine, had planned the trip to Italy the summer she and her husband separated.  “Come with me,” she’d pleaded.

     Italy was another world.  Katherine was beautiful and sophisticated.  Italian men followed the two women like a flock of birds.  Thoughts of leaving the trailer park and going to college had grown out of conversations over long dinners and bottles of chianti under the outdoor awnings of quaint ristorantes.

     Violet put the bracelet back where she had found it and promised to call Kathrine before Tommy returned from town.

     Though ice shanties still spotted the lake, the place Tommy had plowed out for her had turned rough with the warmer daytime temperatures.  She could no longer skate.  Tommy had come by the day before but didn’t stay the night.  He’d had that distant look in his eyes.  The look her grandfather had warned her about when she first moved to the park.  “These young bucks are looking for one thing,” he said.  “All the pretty girls and sunshine make them crazy.”

     Tommy would stop coming by altogether soon enough, and her body ached with the knowledge he would ignore her until the lake froze again in January.  A new year, she thought as she dug through boxes to take her mind off him.

Tommy returned before dark.  When he didn’t come by, she called her sister.

     Kathrine lived in Tucson with her second husband.  “With the girls away at college, I’m lonely,” she said.  “You can live in the guest house.  There’s a community pool.  You won’t miss the lake, I promise.”  She had been asking for years.

     “Tucson is too hot in the summer.  Maybe in fall when the leaves change,” Violet said.

     Her sister sighed.  “You say that every year.”

Summer

     Violet stood on the dock wrapped in a towel, shivering.  It was after midnight; the crescent moon shot a single beam of light on the shore of Couch Island.  The water lapped at the pilings, gently rocking the dock.  The movement matched her heartbeat.  She closed her eyes.

     That morning she’d run into Tommy outside the laundromat.  He was with someone, a young single mom he introduced as Julie.  His smile was bright.  Her little boy stood between them.  Tommy had reached down and tousled the boy’s hair.  The gesture so kind and genuine, Violet looked up past this newly formed family to the boathouse where someone sat outside on a lawn chair reading a magazine.  She had craved the quiet of the lake to escape Tommy’s voice and the sight of the pretty mom who stood nearly as tall as Tommy in a turquoise bikini, engulfing them in a cloud of patchouli.

     It was late August. Violet had almost made it through another summer.  Tommy’s adventures into the woods with women had always been discreet.  His way of sparing her feelings, she’d told herself for so long, she’d come to believe it.  What he’d found with Julie was different.  He would no longer come to the edge of the lake to watch her skate.

     Violet dropped the towel at her feet; her teeth chattered against the cool night air.  She drew her arms tight across her belly to quiet the shaking.  Last October, Guy Dieter, an avid fisherman and longtime tenant, had drowned out near Cider Point where the water was deep.  Guy’s wife had left him the previous spring for a bartender she’d met on a cruise she’d taken with her cousin.  Guy’s death was ruled an accident, but everyone knew better.

     At the time, Violet couldn’t imagine intentionally drowning.  Guy had been a big, loud man.  He didn’t seem the type to do something like that.

     She sat on a towel at the edge of the dock and let the water splash her feet.  Tommy had never introduced her to anyone—not like he had Julie.  There was no need to.  Their entire relationship had taken place inside the trailer park.  Violet had introduced Tommy to her parents on a few occasions.  Her mother still referred to him as the handyman.

     The water below was nine feet deep.  She’d dove off the dock hundreds of times, but never touched bottom.  It was too dark and too cold.  Tommy often popped out of the water waving a rock or a trinket someone had lost, showing off for the girls on the pier.  She wondered if Guy had consciously gulped the murky lake water before drowning.

     Violet remembered a friend from grade school named Julie.  A nice girl with red hair.  Skating practice had gotten in the way, and they drifted apart.  Tommy’s Julie was pretty in a California beach sort of way—no make-up, sun-bleached hair, golden tan.  The little boy was cute, too.  Violet didn’t want children until she met Tommy, and he told her that he never wanted kids.  She had always understood the deeper meaning. “I don’t want kids with you.”

     Her grandmother’s voice bubbled up from the lake.  “Don’t waste the best years of your life, kiddo.”

     She had.

     During the winter, after spending hours on the ice, Tommy would let out a catcall in the morning when Violet raced naked to the kitchen to turn on the coffee maker.  Back in bed, tangled up in each other, he’d say, “Damn woman, you’ve got the sexiest legs I’ve ever seen.”

     She squeezed the tops of her thighs and felt the muscles beneath the soft flesh that had collected over a summer of hard work and little exercise.  She wouldn’t be caught dead in a turquoise bikini.  By February her legs would be firm and muscled again from skating.  She pulled the towel up around her legs to cover them.  This year Tommy would spend the winter under blankets with Julie.

     It would be easy to slip into the water.  She could pull herself down on a piling until she touched bottom where she would wrap her arms and legs around the algae-thick, slimy surface and hold on until her mind went black.  She’d passed out once while waiting with her mother to buy an ice cream cone at Disneyland.  One minute she was holding onto her mom’s hand, the next, a strange man in a blue uniform hovered over her asking questions.  The whole ordeal had confused her, but it hadn’t hurt.

     “Hey, what are you doing out here?”

     She jumped to her feet pulling the towel around her waist.  Tommy jogged down the pier like he knew what she’d been thinking.  She hated seeing his worried eyes wide and his furrowed brow.  The look of concern.

     “You scared me,” she said, when he reached her.

     “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Julie.”

     There it was.  Her name out of his mouth again.  He smiled when he said it.  She crossed her arms over her chest to keep from slapping him.  “I don’t care,” she whispered.

     “What’s that supposed to mean?  This doesn’t change anything.”  The callousness in his voice softened.  “I mean between us.  Nothing needs to change between us.”  He took off his flannel shirt and draped it around her shoulders.  “It’s freezing out here.”

     The shirt reeked of patchouli.  Violet snatched it from her body and flung it into the water.

     “What the hell is wrong with you?”

     The lake was calm.  Tommy’s voice was too loud.  He appeared small under the dark sky.  “I have to go,” she said.

     At the end of the dock, she noticed the leaves of Rosa’s petunias beginning to curl.  The first sign of fall.  She hated tending to Rosa’s gardens with their miniature wheelbarrows, birdbaths, and the tiny picket fences she’d banged her shins on dozens of times.  She pulled the towel up over her shoulders and headed toward the gravel path leading home.

     Lucy O’Sullivan had knocked over the "For Sale" sign in Bob’s front yard with her golf cart the night her husband packed a duffle bag and left.  Violet had been out locking up for the night and watched it happen like a scene in a movie.  It didn’t matter. Bob had sold his trailer months before to a couple from North Dakota.  They were expected to come down soon to winterize the place.  Bob had included a short note to Larry with his final lot payment.  He’d bought a place next to his brother on a lake somewhere in North Carolina where the fishing was good.

     Katherine had mentioned the guest house and a community pool.  It never got cold in Tucson.  Larry had a list a mile long of people wanting to buy trailers and to rent the lots.  She would call her sister in the morning.