“I never thought about a lake having a beach. Back home it’s just…a shore, I guess.”

“We should have taken you to see the Great Lakes when you were little.” And here it is again, that sense of things left undone, unfinished. What else have I forgotten to show her, to teach her?

She glances over at me. “You took me to Mount Rushmore and Yosemite and the Grand Canyon and the Everglades. You can’t show me everything.”

“I wish I had, though. We always had such fun on those summer driving trips, didn’t we?”

There is a heartbeat of hesitation. And in that heartbeat, I hear a contradiction. Could be, she has memories of being hot, carsick, bored. Sometimes Dan and I were short-tempered and we were terrible at picking out places to stay. Bad motel karma became a family joke. Remembrances of summers past are marred by nonfunctioning swimming pools, moldy smells, shag carpets.

“Sure,” Molly says. “We had a blast.”

“But the Great Lakes—I remember going to Mackinac Island on my high school senior trip. I saved up for months in order to go. It was so beautiful, like stepping back in time. I wish we’d taken you there.”

“You can’t take me everywhere,” she repeats.

New adventures lie ahead of her, a vast stretch of unexplored terrain. She’ll be taking trips without me, seeing and experiencing things I’ll never share. Which is as it should be, I remind myself.

Without further debate, she takes the next exit and wends her way through a threadbare town of redbrick buildings and convenience stores plastered with fading advertising posters. The route to Bubba’s is well-marked, and within a few minutes we enter Tanaka State Park in western New York, a quiet oasis on a weekday afternoon. As we head toward the water, I notice that the colors of summer are fading here, the greens subtly shifting to yellow, the wildflowers casting their petals to the breeze.

The beach shack is adorable, and I’m instantly glad we’ve come. It has a huge deck with picnic tables covered in red-and-white-checkered oilcloth, and a long dock reaching out to the deep, wind-crested waters of the lake. And it truly is a beach, fringed by sand and weathered by wave action. From this perspective, the lake looks as infinite as the sea itself. There are even herring gulls here, and I wonder if they lost their way and became landlocked, and if that would matter to a bird.

The waiter is the sort of gorgeous teenage boy who makes me feel like an urban cougar as I check him out. I can check him out as much as I want, because he has not even noticed me. He’s eyeing Molly. Who wouldn’t? Boys have always been drawn in by her pretty eyes, her smile that hints that she knows a secret.

We order the fish fry lunch, and it arrives in paper-lined baskets with French fries and coleslaw. It’s beautiful here, and graceful boats skim across the water in the distance, the sails puffed out in the breeze.