The legal pad had columns with names at the top, written in Renata's good pen before the highlighter gave out. Her mother's column. Her mother-in-law's column. Her sister Dana's column, which already had a line through it and the word *nevermind* in small letters.
Dottie picked up on the second ring, which meant she'd been waiting near the phone, and said she couldn't do stairs anymore - not after February, her voice going light on the word *February* the way you go light on a word when you mean something else entirely. Renata said of course, absolutely, no stairs. She set the phone face-down on the counter and pulled the pink highlighter from behind the utensil holder where it had been living since March, and drew one long line through the lake house with the wraparound porch - the one she'd already mentally put her coffee on every morning for six days. The legal pad looked like a patient someone had given up on.
The text came through while she was still holding the highlighter: *wifi or im literally dead mom* with a ghost emoji, three skull emojis, and then a fourth skull emoji that appeared a second later, as if for emphasis. Her father called on the landline she kept meaning to cancel and said the word *Phoenix* six times in twelve minutes, meaning the airport - meaning the rental car, meaning could she send the information again in an email he could print. She wrote *Dad* at the top of the new column and underneath it *airport* and then *airport?? * and then just a small dark circle where she'd pressed the pen down while listening.
The cancellation came at 11:14 p. m. , a subject line in all caps, and Renata read it twice on her phone before she carried her phone to the kitchen table and read it again on the larger screen, as if the house might be less gone that way. The replacement had a pelican on the homepage and two reviews - both five stars, both written by someone named Gary.
Dottie's ankles were in the foam, white and small, and she had her hand raised like she was hailing something out past the break. Marcus came up out of a wave with his mouth open and his arms wide and Dottie made a sound Renata had never heard her make before, a single high note - almost birdlike. The room key had the pelican on it too, small and embossed, and it had left a red rectangle in Renata's palm. She pressed her thumb into it and watched them.
The legal pad went into the blue bin on a Tuesday, under a Bed Bath & Beyond circular and the cardboard sleeve from Marcus's oat milk, and Renata didn't watch it go. The photo was between a blurry picture of a parking meter and a screenshot of someone's cookie recipe she would never make - and she had moved it there on purpose, away from the vacation folder, where she would see it by accident instead of on purpose. Dottie's feet were very white against the dark wet sand, the toes a little crooked, the right one tilted the way it had been since before Renata knew her. She showed it once to Marcus - sideways, while he was looking at something else, and put the phone back in her pocket before he could ask.
Renata found the legal pad again in February, not in the bin but underneath the passenger seat of the car, slid there during the drive to the airport and forgotten under a gas receipt and one of Marcus's lacrosse cleats. The columns were water-wrinkled from something that had spilled and dried - and Dottie's column had bloomed soft at the edges, the ink feathered out so the word *stairs* looked almost like *stars*. She sat in the driveway with the engine off and the cleat in her lap for a long time. Then she put the pad back under the seat, exactly where it had been.
Dottie sent a postcard in March, the kind with a sunset so orange it looked painted by a child, and on the back she had written *stairs are overrated* in her large looping cursive and then her name and then a small drawing of what was either a wave or a bird. Renata taped it to the inside of the cabinet above the coffee maker - where she would see it every morning and Marcus wouldn't. The legal pad was still under the seat. She knew because she'd felt it with her heel on the way to school pickup, the soft waterlogged edge of it, and hadn't reached down.
Dana called in April, ostensibly about gutters, and while she was talking Renata opened the cabinet above the coffee maker and looked at the postcard without touching it. Dana said *I still feel bad about the lake house* in the middle of a sentence about downspouts - and Renata said *the pelican place was fine* and closed the cabinet. That night she found a photo on her phone of the lake house from the rental listing - the wraparound porch, the Adirondack chairs, the particular morning light she had imagined her coffee in - and she held her thumb over it for three seconds before the delete confirmation appeared, and then she didn't press delete, and put the phone face-down on the nightstand.
She found the cleat under the seat in May when she was looking for her sunglasses - and this time she put it in the trunk with the emergency kit and the folded rain poncho Marcus had never once used, and when her hand came back it was holding the legal pad too, and she stood there in the driveway with it, the waterlogged thing, Dottie's column gone to soft blue feathers at the edges. She brought it inside and set it on the kitchen table next to the pepper grinder and didn't look at it for three days. On the fourth day she got a new legal pad from the drawer - the same brand - the same yellow - and put it on top of the old one, and the old one disappeared the way objects disappear when something else is resting on them. The new pad had nothing written on it yet.
