Welcome back to Glass Half Full and thanks for reading! Lost Lake finishes up today. Links to the previous chapter and the table of contents are below. If you need to catch up on the whole thing, I’ve removed the paywall on the “full novella for paid subscribers.”
I WOKE UP at seven. I’d slept like a dead man. If I’d dreamed of anything, I couldn’t tell you what. I felt awake, and eager to get home. Then I remembered, home was the one-bedroom apartment where I’d been living since the divorce. I’d moved there in a hurry when we split up, hoping it would be temporary. Never bothered to look for anything better in the years since. I guess I’d slept so hard, it had erased some of that from my memory. I decided I’d stop by the house, see Kate before she went back to UM, give Joanie those bottles of wine. Maybe the lawn would need mowing.
I was packed and ready to go when I went down for breakfast. The other guests weren’t up yet, and it was just Anne and me. “Good morning, Jim,” she said, pouring my coffee. If she’d seen me last night or been at the bonfire, she didn’t show it. “How did you sleep?”
“Like when I was a kid.”
“That’s good. You’re looking chipper, though you came in later than usual.”
I told her about my day. When it came to the bonfire, I said some of the folks at Al’s had invited me to a little get-together. Which wasn’t far off the mark.
“So you’ve made some friends in town. Can we hope you’ll be back?”
“Well, I don’t know…” Would anyone here want to see me again? Maybe only Anne. “We’ll have to see. I’m not really one for these vacations. How about you, did you go out last night?”
“Oh, I like to stay close to home when I have guests. You never know when someone will need something.”
So I must have been imagining things the night before. I was pretty sure some of the younger folks at the bonfire had been on shrooms, but I’d never heard they could provide a contact high.
“I hope you’re feeling better after our talk yesterday,” she said as she returned from the kitchen with my oatmeal on a tray.
“It put things in perspective.” By ‘perspective,’ I meant I doubted I’d ever hold a gun again. But I didn’t want to get into that with her. “Thanks again for listening. How about you? Did our talk help?”
“I do feel much lighter. And thank you for getting rid of the lamp. Now I can actually sit in the sitting room.”
The family came down, and Anne had to attend to them. I finished my breakfast, checked the room one last time, and headed back downstairs with my bag. Anne came out from the breakfast room to say a quick goodbye and to retrieve my key.
“I hope we’ll see you again next year,” she said.
I shrugged. “Maybe I’ll bring the kids up here.”
“Please do. Drive safe.”
Then I was back on the road, the Impala cruising up and down the rolling hills of northern Michigan. After an hour or two, I hit the flatlands in the middle of the state, the part that had been a vast lakebed at the time of the glaciers, or so the exhibit in Lost Lake’s history museum had told me. Corn and soy, soy and corn, the fields green and vibrant, nearly ready for harvest.
This part was monotonous, giving me plenty of time to think. I didn’t know what to make of the whole thing. Still pretty sure I don’t believe in genies, magic lamps, or curses. But the pattern of evidence was clear. Only, I couldn’t bring myself to accept the obvious conclusion: the lamp was somehow granting people their secret wishes. It was either that or just a coincidental pattern in a larger set of good and bad luck. And four people owning the lamp, that wasn’t a large sample size. Maybe Marjorie was right about that pareidolia thing.
Either way, it was going to stay a mystery. I tried to tell myself I was fine with that.
I was more preoccupied with my future. Which there wasn’t much of one, at least as a cop, if I couldn’t bring myself to carry a gun again. But I knew what happened to reaction times as you got older. If my synapses had fired a tad slower that day, things would have gone a whole different, tragic direction. But that wasn’t the only problem. I doubted I’d be able to hold a gun again without my hands shaking.
There was no future for a cop who couldn’t carry a gun, unless I got some major promotions, and that didn’t look likely. I was eligible for early retirement in six months. I was sure the chief would let me spend that time on desk duty. But after that? I didn’t have a fucking clue.
Still, I felt pretty peaceful about it as I drove past Flint and got into the parts of the state I knew better. My mind wasn’t racing from one thing to the other the way it had on the drive up. Maybe there really was something to this vacation thing.
— The End —
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