Signs lead us to the lodge. I wait in the car while she checks us in, and five minutes later she returns with papers in hand. She gives me the map, tells me the lot number, and asks me to navigate the way. There are over two hundred numbered lots but we find ours without trouble. It’s a circular clearing tucked within a thicket of trees some twenty yards off the road. A fire pit sits in the very center, and beside that stands a metal charcoal grill.

In the trunk I find a packed cooler, a four-man tent, four pillows, two sleeping bags, a grocery bag full of dry goods. I pull it all out and set it beside the flattest spot of land I’ve judged to be the best place for the tent. As I’m doing so, my mom sits on a log with her legs crossed, staring past the campground and into the far trees on the opposite side of the road. She looks as though she’s pondering the fate she’s created for us. Just the two of us, alone, sleeping in a tent because there’s no other place for us to go. I’ve come to think of my mother as a fighter, a drinker, a lover, a nurturer. She’s short and thin but has the biggest heart of any person I’ve known. But now she looks lost, and the pain in her eyes makes me wish I had something I could offer to take it away. But I have no soothing words, no money, no home in which we could hide. Nothing more than a son’s love, and even though I know she’d say that is all she wants, to me it seems terribly insufficient. I walk to her and hug her tightly. Because she’s sitting, her head only comes to my chest. When I pull away she says thank you.

Together we build the tent. It’s the domed kind with fiberglass poles that slide into polyester sleeves. When it’s up I hammer the stakes into the ground while my mother starts dinner, dumping charcoal bricks into the grill. She douses them with fluid and lets me light it with a match. Fire sweeps across the bricks with a whoosh. We grill hamburgers and eat potato salad scooped with our fingers from a grocery store container.

“I like it here,” I say.

She nods. “It sure is peaceful, isn’t it?”

2

I wake in the middle of the night, sweating, out of breath. I reach over, terrified that my mother isn’t there, but my hand brushes her shoulder. I go to the front of the tent and poke my head out. Silence, the lot numbers bathed in soft light at the front of each plot.

“What’s the matter?” she asks behind me.