The Banks of Certain Rivers by Jon Harrison Read Free Book Online Page A

her. Her mother gasped, and cried. Lauren
thought this was an overreaction at the time, but she hadn’t
known her little brother had been busted earlier that week for
selling shaky marijuana in their school parking lot. That was his rebellion. There were raw feelings all around.
    Her father came back home at the beginning of her senior year. Not
that he’d really ever been entirely away; he’d been
around every weekend for the duration of their separation to mow the
yard and ensure that the systems of the house were in good
functioning order. It was just a trial, her parents said later. They
needed some space. In the end, they decided they liked being together
more than they liked being apart.
    Before all that, though, before parental separations and otter fur
haircuts, there were pig-tailed summers with a two-week vacation
spent each July in Port Manitou, Michigan. Their family had no real
ties to the place; Lauren’s father read about it in some travel
magazine, they visited for two weeks, and they liked it so much they
came back every summer after that (on the year of their separation,
her parents split their visits over the first and second weeks of the
trip). Lauren came to love it. My family was visiting then too, and
we’ve tried to figure out if our trips ever overlapped. I’d
wager they did, even though we can’t pin down the dates. I
wonder sometimes if I ever would have recalled seeing her and her
brother out of the thousand or so kids I ever saw building sand
castles on the beach. I have no memory of it. I was focused on other
things.
    Port Manitou figured into Lauren’s choice of colleges. She
wanted to be close, relatively, and ended up studying nursing at
University of Michigan. She would make the drive up north to stay
with her family on their summer trips, and after a while she started
coming up on her own. She made friends here. She met a guy. After
graduation, Lauren went back to Pennsylvania to work in a hospital
near her hometown for a few years, but when she learned of an opening
for a nurse at Port Manitou’s Urgent Care Clinic, she moved up
and stayed. It didn’t take her long to discover that the
clinic, a satellite operation of one of Northern Michigan’s big
hospital systems, was mired in operational politics and general staff
misery, and as soon as she found work elsewhere at a little hospice
and home healthcare business, she left.
    Lauren was one of Carol’s first nurses when my mother-in-law
returned from her hospital stay. I worked pretty closely with all of
the nursing staff then; I was over at the house frequently, moving
Carol’s things to her new bedroom downstairs, building a ramp
for the step down into the living room, doing all of those projects
that needed to be done for her to live comfortably in her new
situation. Downtime was frequent. Carol was pretty medicated, and the
nurses stayed a lot, Lauren most of all. I couldn’t do loud
work while Carol was sleeping, so Lauren and I would chat.
Insignificant topics were discussed at first: what movies had we seen
recently, funny stories about my students or her patients. Little
things.
    I found myself over at the farmhouse more and more. I didn’t
even realize I was doing it, I don’t think; Lauren was easy to
talk to, and quick to laugh at my stupid jokes. I liked being with
her. Over time, our conversations began to dip into more personal
territory. She learned where I was from, about my siblings, and the
circumstances of Wendy’s accident and current state. She told
me about growing up, going to school, visiting Port Manitou with her
family as a kid like I had.
    She was dating a bicycle mechanic-slash-multimedia artist at the
time. They’d hung out when she was in college, and kept in
touch when she was back in Pennsylvania. He loved painting and music
and bikes, and he seemed to love her too, somewhere along with his
other passions. She hinted to me at times that the relationship
wasn’t going anywhere, but I never