What did Hannah do the summer she lived with us?

The bunkhouse is finished. It was the shed. Nate's crew gutted it, insulated it, paneled it in pine, cut in two windows, and built four bunks into the walls. A wall heater, lights, no plumbing; the occupants will walk forty feet in the dark to the cabin. R. inspected the bunk rails and asked for one more screw in each, and got it.

It has its first tenant as of yesterday. Hannah has come for the summer. She is sixteen, and she has a job in Minocqua at the Paddle & Easel, Tuesday through Saturday, minding the counter and cutting mats. She is to have the RAV4 for work, and has been taken round it by her grandfather as if it were an aircraft. She asked us in March, by letter, on paper, whether she might live here and do it. Ellen says it was entirely her own idea. I have the letter.

She brought the duck quilt from home, and it no longer reaches her ankles. She has taken the lower bunk on the lake side and put her paints on the upper.

Hannah's first week. She is up at six, before either of us, and out on the dock with a sketchbook. I find her there when I bring my coffee down, and we do not talk, which suits us both. She leaves for the gallery at 9:20 and is back at 5:40 smelling of mat board and glue.

She does not eat fish. She does not eat anything that had a face, she says, which in this house in July removes most of the menu. R. considered this for a day and then drove to Northgate and came back with four kinds of beans and a block of something pressed, and has grilled it for her beside the walleye, on its own side of the grate, with its own tongs. She says it is good. It is not good.

Bev brought the last of the rhubarb on Tuesday, and Hannah and I made jam on Thursday evening, three batches. She had never seen a jar seal. She sat on the porch afterward and counted the lids going down, ping, ping.

The association met yesterday at the town hall; R. reported the balance.

The house emptied on Tuesday, and it is the three of us again and the dog. Hannah stays in the bunkhouse by choice; she says it is the first room she has ever had that nobody walks through.

We sit on the porch after supper. She asks me things. What her mother was like at sixteen (exactly as she is now, with worse hair). Whether I minded being called Peg. What Great-Grandma Dorothy thought of Grandpa. Why I stopped working. I answer as truly as I can.

Last night she asked whether I believe in God. I said that I go to church, that I set the altar, that I have sat with people I loved while they died, and that I still do not know how to answer in one word. She said, "That's sort of what I thought you'd say."

She is reading my copy of "The Correspondent."

Back last night from two days in Madison for R.'s eyes. No harm from the sugar; cataracts beginning in both, not ready. He asked Dr. Okonjo for a date, and she said two or three years.

We left Hannah in charge of the cabin and the dog. Sixteen, alone on a lake. I telephoned twice the first evening, and R. told me to stop. Bev looked in, she says, "without looking in." We came back to find the porch swept, the dog fed, a new painting drying on the bunkhouse steps, and a note on the counter listing what she had eaten, with times, for my peace of mind.

Arnie Gustafson had a stroke this morning.

Bev telephoned at twenty to seven. I knew from the first syllable; she did not say hello. He had come to the table for his coffee and could not lift the cup. His left hand lay on the cloth, she said, as if it belonged to someone else, and the left side of his face had come loose.

R. was across the yards before I had put down the receiver. Hannah went after him. I did not send her. She was on the porch with her sketchbook and heard my side of it, and she ran, barefoot, the forty yards, and by the time I got there with my shoes on she was kneeling beside Arnie's chair holding his good hand and asking Bev, in a perfectly level voice, when he had last seemed like himself. Bev said ten past six, when he went out for the paper. Hannah wrote 6:10 on the back of her own hand with a pen from the telephone table. Then she asked him to smile, and to lift both arms, and to say his name, and he did the first two badly and the third quite well.

I asked her afterward where she learned that. From her mother, at the dinner table, apparently for years.

The ambulance from Woodruff took nineteen minutes, which on this road is fast. The first thing the paramedic asked was when he was last normal, and Hannah held up her hand.

They took him to Woodruff and then on to Wausau by helicopter, where there are people who do this. Bev rode in the ambulance, and R. followed in the truck and has been gone all day. He telephoned at four. Arnie had the clot drug inside the time allowed for it. He can speak; he knew R.; the left arm and leg are weak, and nobody will say yet how much of that will come back. Their daughter is driving down from Duluth.

Arnie is seventy-six. He and R. have fished together every week of every summer for twenty years, and I do not think they have had ten conversations that were not about fish. R. said on the telephone, "He asked me if I'd pulled the minnow bucket." Then he could not go on, and said he would call later.

Hannah has gone to work; she said she would rather. Before she left she washed the pen off her hand at the kitchen sink, slowly, and I watched her look at it first.

I went over at noon and fed Bev's cat and wiped up the coffee.

Hannah told me on the dock tonight that she is not going to art school.

I had not known that she was thinking of it, exactly, but Ellen had, and has been careful to say nothing. The people at the gallery have told her she is good, and she is.

She said, "I liked last Saturday better than I've ever liked painting anything." Then she was horrified at herself and said she did not mean she liked that it happened to Arnie. I said I knew what she meant.

She is going to be a nurse, she says, like her mother, and paint on her days off. She wanted to know whether I thought that was a waste. I said I had been a librarian for more than thirty years and had made forty-nine quilts on the side, and did not consider either one a waste of the other.

She is sixteen. It may all change by Christmas.

Hannah went home today. Ellen and Mark drove up yesterday, stayed the night, and took her and seven canvases back in a car that smelled of turpentine before it reached the road. R. carried her bag to the car, shook hands with her, and then thought better of it. The dog keeps going out to the bunkhouse and coming back.

Seven weeks. She sold two small paintings of her own off the gallery wall to strangers, and was at Bev's every evening for the first week after the stroke, doing dishes, not asked.

She had stripped the bunk and folded the blankets the way I do, in thirds. On the pillow was a card, a loon in ink, her own. Inside: "Thank you for not making it a big deal that I was here." I have put it in the box.