Between no job, little hope of money coming in, and a nude man jumping off my dock to chase the moon across the lake, I felt like I had my quota of problems. The lake house hadn’t been what I’d hoped for in Garrison D. Walker’s letter, but then nothing in my life ever measured up to the mountain of hope I always managed to come up with. If they gave awards for pointless dreaming, I’d have a room full of trophies.

Opening one eye, I noticed Nana had raised all the windows in our two-room apartment. The morning had a chill to it that the bright sunshine would burn away long before noon. The breeze smelled of the lake. Nothing bad. Just that earthy odor of fish and water.

I stood, pulled on my grandpa’s old flannel shirt I’d used as a robe since college, and headed downstairs following the hope of biscuits. The main room at the bottom of the steps smelled cellarlike with the windows still boarded up. To my left were the empty shelves that had once been a tiny store. To my right sat the little café with round tables, wire chairs, and a long bar. I’d passed the rooms too many times yesterday for them not to feel familiar to me.

Tiptoeing across the floor, I forced myself not to look at the dead animal heads on the wall, but their shadows crossed my path. Deer, antelope, wild sheep, and some kind of ugly pig I’d glanced at yesterday and been afraid to face again. When I pushed open the swinging door to the kitchen, I let out a breath as if I’d just run the gauntlet.

Nana swayed as she hummed “Amazing Grace.” I slipped into the sunny little room that already looked like it belonged to her. My grandmother must have been up for hours, for she’d removed the burlap curtains and polished the two windows over the sink. She’d stacked her rooster-painted tins of staples along the sill. She’d also opened the back door, letting in long beams of sunlight to dance over a worn brick floor. Her gray hair bounced slightly as she kept time to her humming with little nods of her head.

A cookie sheet of fresh biscuits cooled on the table. “Where?” was all I managed to mumble. I raked one hand through my tangled hair and tried again. “Where did these biscuits come from?”

Nana turned and winked at me. “A nice man in a white truck stopped by about an hour ago. He said he always delivered dairy to Jefferson and wondered if I wanted any. I told him I needed pretty near one of everything.”

I opened the old refrigerator. Milk, butter, cheese, and eggs filled the top shelves.

“I got you something in the freezer.” She turned back to the gravy she’d been stirring.

“Cherry Popsicles.” I laughed and pulled one out. Slamming the middle of the treat on the edge of the counter, I broke it in half and slid an icicle into my mouth.

I hadn’t had a Popsicle since I’d been in grade school and was surprised my grandmother remembered how dearly I once loved them. I curled into one of the wingback chairs and let the icy treat freeze my tongue while I waited for the frozen juice to melt just enough to bite into.

Pulling my feet up to the seat of the chair, I hugged my legs, trying to keep warm as I ate. The sweet flavor sliding down my throat was worth every shiver.

Finally, I asked, “How’d you pay the man in the white truck?” I’d stashed my purse, with the last of the traveling money, under my bed, but I knew Nana wouldn’t have opened it even if I’d left it in the kitchen.

Nana shrugged. “He said he’d put it on the account and that he’d see me next week.” She never worried about money, probably because she’d never had any.

Shoving the warm pan toward me, she laughed. “I put a little cheese in the biscuits just like we used to do when I cooked at the grade school. Those kids always loved my recipes. I had one boy ask if his mother could come up and watch me cook. Another wanted to take me home for show-and-tell.”

Picking at one biscuit, I worried. We had enough to pay for the groceries and the bills on this place for a few months, but the money would run out soon. The money always ran out. I thought of telling Nana to be careful, but she was having so much fun cooking with real supplies and remembering and, I didn’t want to spoil it. Besides, there was a good chance I’d find a job before we got down to zero.

The problem was, any work would be back in Lubbock and that would mean leaving Nana out here alone for long hours.

She handed me a cup of coffee and I pushed aside problems with a smile. “What do you think we should do first?”

Nana frowned. “I’d like to get rid of all those heads in the front room. I think one of them winked at me.”

I couldn’t agree more. An hour later, we’d managed to take them down and line all the animal heads and stuffed fish up on the fence by the road. Nana wanted to put a FOR SALE sign out, but I just hoped someone would take them.

She shrugged her thin shoulders almost to her ears. “Maybe someone will steal them if we don’t watch too close.”

“That’s about as likely as one of these critters running off. But we can always hope.”

We went back to the house and started cleaning the area that had been a store. To my surprise, beneath the cash register I found a wide ledger filled with neat entries, each dated and balanced to the right. The totals showed Uncle Jefferson made a small profit most days. If so, what did he spend his money on? The lawyer said he had none at the time of his death except for what he wanted mailed to me for traveling expenses and lawyer’s fees. There was no sign he’d bought anything, from clothes to furnishings, for thirty years. But if there was income, somewhere there had to be money going out. The only thing on the place that looked younger than me was the final ten feet of dock planks.

I shoved the ledger back under the register and pushed the “no sale” button. The drawer sprang open. Empty except for ten pennies and two nickels. I returned to dusting, plugging in the twinkle lights along the back wall.

Next to a potbelly stove old enough for Ben Franklin himself to have delivered, I found a small safe covered in dust. Most of the lettering on the two-by-two door had worn off and mud was caked to the sides. I rattled the handle, but it didn’t open. If I strained, I could push it a few inches, but after a few minutes of effort I decided the safe would make a fine footstool to sit on when winter came and I lit the stove.

In a closet behind the twinkle lights, I found a bucket of cane fishing poles and a stack of dusty, but never used, blankets. I spread the blankets inside the display case and put the bucket in a corner. The place still didn’t look like much of a store, but it was a start.

An hour later, the old fisherman I’d seen in the boat the day before stepped up on my porch as I was testing out one of the wicker chairs. “Morning,” he muttered around a wad of tobacco, sticking out his hand. “I’m Willie Dowman. Got a fishing shack on the other end, close to the dam.” He pointed with his head. “I was admiring that bass you got out by the road.”

I fought down the need to question his taste. “Good morning, I’m Allie.” I put my hand out to shake his.

He nodded, small little nods in rapid succession like his head was loose and we’d just hit a bump in the road. “I know. Jefferson told us you’d be coming.”

Tugging my hand out of his sandpaper grip, I took a step backward, disturbed by the fact he must have known I was coming long before I did.

Nothing about Willie was the least bit threatening, but the short, square-built man smelled like a neglected aquarium. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see algae growing out his ears.

“I used to come out on weekends to get away from my wife.” His bushy eyebrows wiggled, doing the wave across his forehead. “Since I retired, I come out most every day.”

“Why don’t you leave her and move out here?” I asked just to see what he’d say.

Willie looked like he thought about it for a minute, then shook his head. “Who’d cook all the fish I catch if I left her?”

I asked him who Mrs. Deals was since he’d yelled that he planned to tell her I had arrived. But talking to Willie wasn’t easy. We might be standing eye to eye, but somehow I got the feeling he was having a different conversation than I was. He never answered the questions I asked, but rambled on about people I didn’t know as if they were family. Talking to Willie made my head hurt.

I moved inside out of the sun and he followed, taking the third stool at the bar as if it were his assigned seat. I introduced him to Nana and they both nodded at each other in greeting.

After haggling for a while, he finally agreed to pay me three dollars and a bushel of apples for the mounted fish. The money smelled of bait and the apples he brought in looked like he’d picked them off the ground by a wild apple tree. I wondered if I’d been had, but he was hauling off a stuffed bass so the deal couldn’t be all bad. We shook on it.

“What did you do for a living before you retired?” I asked just out of curiosity.

He grinned. “As little as possible.”

Then, without a hint of barter, he offered a buck for two of Nana’s biscuits. She wrapped them in waxed paper and handed them to him across the pass-through.

Ten minutes later, the mailman drove up in a battered, blue hatchback and delivered a sack of mail.

“I’ve been holding this till you got here,” he grumbled as though angry that it took me so long to show up. “All you got to do is put it in order and the folks around will pick it up. You’re the one drop I’m allowed in this area.”

I peeked in the bag. Most of it looked like catalogues for fishing equipment.

The mailman nodded his good-bye as if he were in a hurry, but stopped at the road to talk to Willie, who was hauling the bass to his truck.

Wondering why the mailman had been so unfriendly, I studied him from the porch. He was a tall, thin guy in his forties with thinning hair and fingers so long they must have had an extra knuckle in there somewhere. Alien hands, I decided, like E.T.

I laughed suddenly. So far all the men I’d met in Texas seemed strange. Luke, my under-the-bed monster, was turning out to be the best of the lot. Though he wasn’t exactly handsome, he was a lot easier on the eyes and nose than the other two.

Almost as if he heard me thinking of him, Luke stepped from the side of the house.

“Morning,” he managed.

“Morning,” I answered.

When the mailman crunched back across the gravel in front of the porch, Luke slipped into the shadows.

“Sorry, miss,” the mailman began. “But I have to have the bag back. It’s U.S. Postal property.” The spider of a man looked as if he thought I might make a run for it with his official bag.

I dumped the rest of the mail out on the porch.

As the mailman watched me, I asked, “Want to buy one of the heads out by the fence?”

“Nope,” he answered, “but you got any more of those biscuits? Willie said you were selling them. Jefferson never had anything worth eating to sell with his coffee.”

I led him to the pass-through window.

Nana wrapped two more biscuits and passed them along with a small paper cup of coffee. “The coffee’s free to uniformed men,” she said, “but the biscuits will cost you.”

While the mailman folded back into his hatchback, a dented Mustang rattled down my road, pulling a flatbed trailer with two canoes. Boys, so young they must have been skipping school, asked if they could set their boats off from the dock.

I couldn’t think of a reason to say no. While Nana wrapped more biscuits, I helped them unload.

When I walked back from the dock, I noticed Luke standing by the side of the house watching. “Did you mean it about helping out?” I yelled.

“Yep,” he answered without looking overly interested.

I decided to spend a few more dollars of my traveling money. “I could pay you ten bucks an hour, plus meals, if you’d help me get this place in shape.”

He nodded once. “What’ll we do first?”

I looked around. The list was endless. “How about we clean out the rest of Jefferson’s things from upstairs?”

He followed me up and we worked without talking.

By noon, Nana had made twelve dollars in biscuit sales and I’d made another three off a deer head.

After a lunch of soup and sugar cookies-left over from our dollar-store raid-Nana decided to cut the good parts out of the pitiful apples I’d traded with Willie and make fried apple pies. While she baked, I tackled the boards covering the front windows.

I didn’t think it would be hard. I’d seen men put the hook of a hammer between a board and a wall, then pop it off. Only problem was whoever nailed the planks over the windows forgot to leave any room for the hook. After five minutes of struggling, I had splinters in my palm and had managed to hit myself in the knee with the hammer. All the boards were still in place.