His smile approved her attempt at humor. It was a start. Your truck or mine?

The flowers on Old Sam‘s roof had long gone to seed, but the cabin was surrounded by a field of topped-out fireweed, their stalks a deep red bank of color. Old Sam got out the weed-whacker so that the area around the barbecue was clear. The moose haunch was revolving slowly over a bed of red-hot coals. There was a trestle table laden with bowls of potato salad and coleslaw and a platter of deviled eggs, the latter Auntie Joy‘s annual offering and Old Sam‘s particular weakness. Another trestle table served as the bar, over which Old Sam dispensed beer from a keg, wine from a box, and single-malt to the select few who could be counted on to appreciate it with the reverence it deserved. He pulled Jim a beer with a fine head of foam and broke out one of a lone six-pack of Diet 7UP for Kate, rolling his eyes as he did so. Where my rhubarb sorbet, girl?

Kate gaped at him. In the press of other business she‘d forgotten all about it. That was good for a five-minute peroration on the shiftless ways of the younger generation, too lazy to wipe the oil off a dipstick, no respect for the wishes of their elders, too ignorant to know how to mash up a couple of sticks of rhubarb and dump in some sugar and probably too dumb to stick it in the freezer afterward anyway. Jim sidled off in what he imagined to be surreptitious fashion, and she was left to stand against the flood as best she could. She bent her head and hoped she looked meek enough to inspire pity. Mercy would have been too much to ask for. It made her feel a little better to be yelled at so comprehensively.

It was a real Indian summer kind of evening, warm, windless, no mosquitoes, and in the affectionate presence of family and friends Kate began at last to relax. By mutual unspoken agreement she and Jim said nothing of what had happened out at the mine that day or of the prisoner incarcerated in the cell at the post. No way this evening, a stellar event in the Park year, should be eclipsed by anything so mundane as murder.

Johnny and Van were already there, playing red rover with Katya. Kate was glad to see it because Katya was very proprietary of Johnny, and it had taken her some time to learn to share him with Van.

Katya‘s father was holding forth to the circle surrounding his wheelchair on the comparative merits of Creedence Clearwater Revival and Paul Revere & the Raiders, with some commentary on the side about the Smothers Brothers. A few steps away Bernie Koslowski, showing more life than he had in a while, was refighting the Vietnam War with Demetri Totemoff and George Perry, although Bernie had been a campus commando and Demetri and George had run through the jungle. Dinah was taping the conversation for that documentary on Vietnam War vets she‘d been working on ever since her first experience of Bobby‘s annual Tet Vet celebration. The four aunties were lined up on the bench in front of the cabin with Annie Mike, the five of them sipping paper cups full of bad box chardonnay and chattering away like four round plump brown wrens and one hot pink cockatoo. Hi, Aunties, Kate said, and was surprised at her own relief when all four faces lit up at the sight of her.