It was strange enough to have Wilma and the children home this summer—it was the first summer in years that she had not taken them to the family cottage on Lake Michigan in Stone Harbor. She had silenced Harry’s and Jinny’s complaints with a swift “Think of your brothers! And you think it’s too much to sacrifice a summer at the lake!” The look in her eyes, they had never brought it up again. But it wasn’t just having her home that was different. She was different.

As he approached the house towering upon the hill, as always he thought of his father. Knute had been dead more than fifteen years now, but in John’s mind the house would always be his. John wondered what Knute would think of Wilma now. Knute had always said that she was a true lady, while John was merely a frog dressed up in prince’s clothing. Perhaps Knute had noticed the way she paralyzed John, the way he had to buck himself up before facing her, lest he utterly collapse before her.

This was true although he had always done his best to assert his authority with her. It had been easiest in the first years: Whatever he demanded, she bowed to his will. Gradually, though, she had begun betraying the arrangement with snippy remarks. Then she began to argue with him openly at times, as though pressing to see how far she could go. He felt himself a perpetual boxer in the ring, struggling to maintain his footing against a wily opponent. But there had always seemed to be the understanding that both would play by certain rules—at least until the boys left. Much to John’s dismay, the rules all changed then.

The change in Wilma was enough to bring to mind the “curse” that people in town whispered about. Knute had laughed about the rumors when he’d chosen the site for his house. But then, shortly after the family moved in, John’s mother was stricken with stomach cancer. Three months later, she was gone.

At the time, John hadn’t attributed his mother’s death to any supposed “curse,” and, in the intervening years, only the occasional outburst from Wilma or the sometime loneliness he felt like a shell on his heart had caused him to ponder—though with no real seriousness—the curse’s possible veracity.