It was the twilight of summer when Grace McKenzie Clark finally pulled onto the dirt road leading to her family’s summer home. Only a few miles northwest of Ithaca, and nestled on little over an acre in Trumansburg, the small cottage had provided 250 feet of lake shore rest and relaxation for the entire McKenzie family for more than forty summers. Something Grace really needed now, a little R&R, she thought, as she parked her late model Land Rover in the familiar gravel driveway and turned off the ignition.

It was Friday, Labor Day weekend 2018, 6:30 a.m. Exactly the time and date she had planned to arrive.

Confident she was doing the right thing by coming home for the holiday weekend, she lowered the car window and closed her eyes. Her thoughts began to drift, peacefully, as she listened to the familiar sounds of dawn over the lake: small waves rolling gently to the shore, a half dozen or so squirrels scurrying over dried, crumbled leaves, several birds chirping all around her—the breeds of which she could easily identify thanks to her father’s excellent tutelage—and ripe acorns dropping to the ground from century-old tall trees, one by one.

Remembering her father, Shay McKenzie, she smiled, took in a long, deep breath and slowly exhaled. It was here at the summer cottage, just as she had hoped, that her fondest memories of the days spent alone with him would come back to her. Although these memories would surely spark the fire within her heart, reigniting her recently-acquired depressed emotional state, she was willing to endure a little more pain in order to accomplish her goal of learning the truth.

Exhaling once more, she relaxed, realizing she still had a few critical hours to collect herself before her older two brothers, Jack and Matthew, arrived; something else she had carefully planned. She’d use the additional time to re-rehearse what she would finally say to them, once given the chance. How, exactly, she would form the questions she needed to ask she had no idea, but decided she’d figure it all out later. She usually did.

She opened the front door and stepped outside into the brisk, autumn air. Trails of smoke from the neighbor’s nightly bonfires lingered in the air mimicking the fog over the lake. When she opened the back door, Bailey, her four-year-old Golden Retriever, eagerly jumped down from the bench seat and took off running straight towards the lake. “Okay, boy, but just a quick one.” The sound of her voice faded into oblivion as Bailey jumped into the chilly water with a loud ‘plop’ and began swimming towards the little island of trees one hundred feet out from the shore. “Crazy dog,” Grace said, as she gathered her two leather overnight bags off the backseat and flung one over each shoulder. As she followed the slate stepping stones leading to the front of the cottage, bright yellow and orange leaves scuttled alongside her feet and swirled around her ankles.

It wasn’t much; simply a modest, three-bedroom bungalow approximately 1,500 square feet in total, but it was paid off and one-third hers. Hardie board siding, once painted a brilliant inky blue—a custom color that she and Shay had finally selected after staring at dozens of tiny paint chips for weeks—was badly weathered and beginning to chip underneath the eaves. Grace made a mental note to remind Jack and Matthew it was time to repaint. But the wrap around porch, she soon discovered, was as strong as ever. Something else that reminded her of her father. She paused near the front door and dropped her bags.

They had built the porch in 1999, she and her brothers, with their father’s help the year after their mother, Audrey, had died, mercifully, following a sixteen-year stint battling early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease. Upon receiving the news of her mother’s death, then twenty-nine-year-old Grace reported for work the very next morning—much to everyone’s surprise—to explain that although her mother had indeed just passed away, she actually died in her mind when she was sixteen; when her mother could no longer remember her name.

“Oh, Grace, I never knew,” her boss, Dr. Margaret Liu, had replied. Grace shrugged her shoulders and returned to her desk. A few tense moments later, after Margaret had formed a story in her head regarding what Grace’s life must have been like growing up, she added, “This must mean you never really knew your mom, as an adult I mean.”

“Yeah,” Grace said between clenched teeth. She had a hard and fast rule: never share too much of yourself at work. “The funeral is on Saturday, so I won’t need any time off.” With that, their brief conversation regarding her mother and her recent death was concluded, never to be spoken between the two women again.

When Grace returned home the following summer in order to help build the enormous porch, she was anxious to get away from the hustle and bustle of big-city life for a little while, too. Although Central New York never really felt like home to her, at least not the small town of Cincinnatus where she and her brothers had been raised, it was always nice to return home for a visit. Especially to the cottage.

This year was no exception.

Growing up, Grace had always remained extremely focused, working very hard in order to secure a future for herself anywhere else than in Cincinnatus. The mere thought of never leaving town had often made her feel ill. There was so much more, elsewhere—she was certain—waiting for her. According to plan, after completing her bachelor’s degree at SUNY Cortland and earning a master’s from Upstate Medical in Syracuse, she quickly landed a job as a Physician’s Assistant in Philadelphia where she still works today. Jack and Matthew, on the other hand, never left New York state and chose to raise their nine children; Jack, four and Matthew, five, in their hometown.

Jack, the eldest, had enlisted in the Air Force towards the end of the Vietnam War in early ’73. After serving two years of active duty, he returned home, moved back in with the family and settled into civilian life working odd jobs while attending college on the GI bill. After completing his degree and passing the CPA exam, he opened a small tax firm in Cincinnatus catering mainly to farmers and other small business owners like himself. Jack had always had a good head on his shoulders in regards to managing money, so serving as the town’s chief tax and financial advisor matched his skillset nicely. Jack’s wife, Chelsea, whom he met while attending SU was also from western New York state (same as Shay and Audrey) and settled into small-town life in Cincinnatus, effortlessly. Chelsea held a particular fondness for animals, especially those no one else wanted, and (quite unintentionally) had managed to fill her and Jack’s first, one-bedroom apartment in town with five feral cats, two dogs—one with only three legs—and a very plump potbelly pig. With the addition of the pig, Mr. Houck, their landlord, made it clear that either the pig goes or they do. Three weeks later, Jack purchased ten acres of farmland near the town of Pitcher where the Mud Creek meets the Otselic River and dropped two double wides smack dab in the center of his land; one for humans and one for Chelsea’s ever-growing collection of critters until which time a proper house and barn could be built for each. It took more than six years, but to this day the Jack & Chelsea McKenzie Farm is one of the nicest in Cortland County.

Matthew, on the other hand, chose not to attend college and followed in Shay’s footsteps, more or less, working a blue-collar job driving truck for Sysco, a multinational food distribution company. During his first five years of employment, Matthew never missed a single day of work, other than previously scheduled vacation days, and this caught the attention of upper management. Before long, due to nothing more than his grit, ambition and God-given smarts, he settled into a desk job as an area sales manager and began earning upwards of six figures years before Jack had done the same. A luxury that funded Sandy (his high school sweetheart and wife) her weekly manicures, pedicures and monthly trips to NYC to go shopping in Manhattan with her many friends, not to mention practically anything else her heart desired.

Each man and his wife now enjoy a quiet, well-funded retirement thanks to Jack’s ability and willingness to conservatively, but successfully, plan and handle all important financial matters for both of his siblings and their families. But, Paul Clark, Grace’s ex-husband, had made his fortune building custom homes as the suburbs of southeastern Pennsylvania, where they lived, continued to boom and refused to accept his brother-in-law’s free advice. Private wine cellars? Expansive great rooms? Carrara Marble, Soapstone or Vermont granite throughout? Pools indoors and out? Designer kitchens and baths including gold-plated toilet seats if you’d like? No problem, was Paul’s motto. He continued to make millions on real estate investments and ignored Jack’s many warnings to dump his overpriced luxury homes, fast. Paul, thinking Jack foolish and nothing more than a country bumpkin, did nothing of the sort and continued to build million-dollar homes, one after the other in rapid succession. Grace, not really understanding money matters as well as either her husband or brother, remained neutral; uncertain which man had the correct answer. When the real estate market finally did crash is 2008, just as Jack had predicted it would, Paul and Grace lost everything and their marriage was on rockier ground that it had ever been before and they never were able to amend their differences.

In hindsight, there were other ways that Grace felt she differed from her older siblings besides the large age gap between them—fourteen years between she and Matthew—and their successful marriages and money-making talents. Little things, mainly, like the fact that they had blue eyes and hers were dark brown. But she also had some sort of feeling, a type of six sense, that something was amiss between them, just never anything she could actually explain to anyone, like her mother or father. Besides, growing up in the McKenzie household one didn’t speak of things that would be considered uncomfortable. A lesson she learned early in life, at the age of five, when her mother suddenly stopped attending weekly Mass with them. “Why doesn’t Mommy go to church anymore?” Grace had asked her father one Sunday morning as they walked the three short blocks from their home to Our Lady of Perpetual Hope. Her father’s immediate and booming silence signaled that he wasn’t about to answer her insensitive question and, furthermore, she shouldn’t have asked him in the first place. Lesson learned.

Shaking it off, Grace followed the porch around to the back of the cottage to check on Bailey. The days were turning chilly, much earlier than in Philadelphia, and she wrapped her wool sweater a little tighter around her small frame. The porch, she recalled with each additional step, was originally designed so that all four Adirondack chairs that her father had built to adorn it could easily be moved from front to back. The front of the cottage faced west where one could sit and watch the sun set over the distant hills, something her father especially enjoyed. The back of the cottage, Grace’s favorite, was where the sun rose each morning and sparkled brightly on cloudless days over the lake. But, eventually, it seemed silly to everyone involved to keep moving the heavy chairs from front to back and vice versa. Therefore, and for the last six years since their father’s death, all four sturdy chairs now rest permanently on the front of the porch like Dad would have preferred. Their replacements in the back: four new, but cheap, vinyl white knock-offs that Sandy purchased two months earlier, were scattered haphazardly around the yard. Strong wind, Grace surmised, as she stepped down off of the porch and began collecting them. Once all four chairs where back where they belonged, she pressed her finger and thumb into the corners of her mouth and let out a loud whistle. “Bailey, come.”

Duty-bound, Bailey quickly swam to the shore pausing only to shake himself, vigorously—as dogs often do—before returning to her side. Grace couldn’t image her life, at the age of forty-eight, without her constant companion, Bailey. After she and Paul had finally divorced last year, Grace decided she needed to find a good dog and Bailey has always fit the bill, perfectly. Ever since she first laid eyes on him sitting at the front of his cage in the local shelter waiting patiently to be adored, she knew he was the one of her. “It was love at first sight,” Grace has said on several occasions to anyone bothering to take the time to ask her about her best friend.

After wiping Bailey down with an old towel she found hanging on a hook near the back door, she walked around to the front of the cottage, inserted her key into the heavy brass lock and pushed open the front door. Bailey followed.

Inside, the stagnant, dank smell of the friendless cottage—it had been far too long since anyone has spent a vacation there—mixed with the undeniable spell of kerosene accosting her senses. Quickly, she spotted two offending oil lamps—something else her sister-in-law had probably recently purchased—on top of the mantel and took them outside to rest on the front porch. Back inside, the stale air thick with dust was illuminated by shafts of light streaming through the windows. Old cobwebs on the ceiling and walls billowed from the draft coming through the opened door. But the absolute silence, not even the hum of the refrigerator, was the worst of all. God awful silence. Nothing like the bygone summer days spent here, full of laughter, when she was a child.

She opened all of the sooty windows as far as they would go, plugged in the refrigerator and got to work. The dusty white sheets covering the sparse furniture in the main room: four comfortable chairs, ottoman and a beat-up old love seat, were pulled off and thrown into the washing machine. She then made her way to each of the three bedrooms, striping the beds to air out, one by one, as she went. Fresh linens were then collected from the hall closet and left in each bedroom. With clean sheets tumbling in the dryer, the lemon-fresh smell of furniture polish and window cleaner still lingering in the air, dry wood crackling in the fireplace and one flaming jasmine-scented candle later, the cottage was once again acceptable; smells and all.

Checking the time, she was surprised to learn that two hours had already passed. Jack and Matthew were expected in about thirty minutes and she hadn’t spent any additional time figuring out what or how she would ask the questions she had for them. Feeling her heart beginning to race, she spread a blanket out on the floor in front of the fireplace and took a seat. Instinctively, Bailey followed her and rested his head in her lap.

She watched the yellow flames dance blissfully beyond the hearth with neither thought of the oxygen they consumed, nor appreciation of what she was feeling. She stared at the happy blaze for a little while longer, envying its carefree waltz. Finally looking away, she decided she’d allow her heart to take the lead this time because all her mind knew for sure was that she wanted answers. Answers she hoped Jack and Matthew may be able to provide. Matthew, more cantankerous than ever, she feared, would probably keep tight-lipped and glare at her the entire time she spoke or simply storm out of the cottage and go back home. Especially if all of this is true and he’s always known. Family is too important to him, she thought, he wouldn’t want it to be true and would probably take a beating before admitting to any of it. But Jack, she thought, might eventually crack under the pressure she intended to apply and open up to her. Spill his guts with everything he knew, if anything at all. That was her plan.

“So, what do you think, Bailey, will it work?”

Bailey licked her face and tasted a few salty tears. Unable to sleep the night before, she made the late-night decision to drive three and a half hours in the dark for no other reason than to discover the truth. And it was here, at the cottage, that she intended to confront her older brothers: the only two people on Earth she knew who may actually be able to tell her, exactly, what that truth was.

Born to a schizophrenic mother, once married to an addict, too many failed suicide attempts, I have endured ridicule, fear and overwhelming depression, all while wearing a sweet, sweet smile intended to mask. Looking into the mirror now, past my physical flaws: nose a little too wide, lips entirely too thin, eyes commonly brown, I find the secret of true happiness—after fifty-nine years of searching for just that. I remember I was also loved by a man who wasn’t really my father, bore three remarkable children (whom I raised alone) and was generally well liked, well employed and even loved, by some. But, that’s not my secret. Perhaps it’s not even a secret at all, this truth so elusive to some. Perhaps it just takes some time, some pain, some forgiveness and, always, some well-deserved love. Especially for the one looking back inside the mirror.