We called ourselves the Cupboard Club because we'd claimed the old boathouse as ours and stashed our treasures in a broken cedar cabinet: a stack of comics, a cross-stitched handkerchief June's grandmother had given her, a harmonica that squealed in sympathy when someone laughed too hard. The boathouse smelled like lemon oil and wet wood, and when the door stuck, you had to slide the key across the grain just so to free it. That sticky ritual felt like a promise.
Years later, I would find the harmonica under a floorboard in my parents' attic. It was battered but playable. When I breathed into it, the notes came out crooked and tender—like apologies that don't know the words to say. I kept it in a drawer, next to a pack of old tickets and a photograph of the four of us, all of us caught in a single, sunlit frame—faces softened by blowback glare, eyes half closed against the light. We called ourselves the Cupboard Club because we'd
Once, as the season thinned and the mosquitoes grew fat, I thought I saw June across the water. She stood where the boathouse used to cast its shadow, a silhouette that fit into the memory like a missing puzzle piece. She lifted a hand, not quite an apology, not quite a wave. I lifted my harmonica and played something that was neither accusatory nor forgiving. It was simply true. Years later, I would find the harmonica under
We were children who had stubbed our toes on a larger world. June left with a key and a handkerchief and a quiet that could be traced to the way she'd started locking her journal. Lyle left not long after, the town a little less dangerous without him. Riley married someone with three cats and a mortgage; he would later tell me, in an embarrassed, rueful voice, that he thought he’d been protecting June when all he’d been protecting was his own idea of her. Mark moved to a place where no one asked about the lake. He sent one postcard with a line: "I learned how not to drown. I don't know if that's the same as learning how to swim." I kept it in a drawer, next to