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You despised foolish women and if you paid more attention to me the summer I was seventeen you would have abhorred my increased association with Petra and her two out-of-control young children. Remember Petra? She came up from the lower mainland, always rented trailer site Number 6 and kept her camper fully stocked with cigarettes and gin. She'd hourly douse herself in the lake, pat dry and rub Brylcream shaving lotion into her bronzed skin. Her idea of a day's work was cultivating her tan and obtaining a baby sitter, not necessarily achieved in that order. Neither did you pay much notice to her husband Jerry, who always came up for the last week of August. Jerry didn't like to fish, which you never could fathom in a man.

That was the summer I spent down the beach painting Eriksen's rental cabins brown with turquoise trim. I remember the drips of brown and blue tattooing my skin. The blotches were unlike your hardened looks that, by then, I would not allow to graze me. Did you come over to be with me or just to detail my mistakes? I've forgotten now, but I can hear your voice whether you were there or not. That's not the way I showed you to stir up paint. What the devil were you thinking Danny-boy, starting when it ain't good and mixed? You see, despite my efforts, your words have hung on.

The painting job interfered with helping Mom at the trailer park. Since you spent most of the summer living at home while working your shifts at the mill, she depended on me for taking out the garbage, cutting the lawns, repairing the steps, cleaning up the beach from the squatting geese and, from age ten, monkeying around with a monkey-wrench and drill as if I were a real handyman. Yes, you chose to take the bulk of your holidays in October, during hunting season. Your idea of a holiday was to rise at four in the morning and retreat to your blind or your stand in the trees, away from the guys at the mill, away from us.

I'm not sure how Mom managed that summer. I was preoccupied with adding each hour's wage and tallying how many cabins I'd finished and how many I had left to paint, the red '72 Firebird at Updike's used car lot never far from my mind. I didn't have a plan for after summer, after buying the car. Painting was a real job to me, although I know you didn't think of it as one. Still, I was working seven days a week, taking Friday nights off to go to the barn dances.

Barn dance — a summary of teenage life in two words. All the guys and girls from Christina Lake and the Kettle River drainage flocked to the barn dances every Friday night, all summer long. It takes only a moment's thought and I hear the Who's American Woman; I smell the old hay on the dusty floorboards and all of us kids coy and uneasy, who after a few sneaked beers and joints could become cool and daring until a fight broke out or some girl started crying. Barn dances were different from a dance at your school where everybody knew which pigeonhole to put you in. If you didn't know yet who you were or who you might be after, it was the place to find out. The place to find out how much beer you could drink, or how well you could avoid the lips on the skinny girl from across the lake while dancing with her and shifting your hips back and forth, trying your hardest not to get hard because earlier that day you had told all the guys she was a dog.

Petra went to the barn dances that summer. I remember how strange I thought it was of her to seek out teenagers drunk and giddy with alcohol and youth. She'd arrive late, teeter over to our gang, tug my arm and I'd shuffle along behind her to the dance floor to the sounds of the guys whistling and hooting out from our corner. It was only at the barn dance in front of the guys I felt uncomfortable in her presence, almost sorry for her with her babies back at the trailer, her breath of gin, lipstick on experienced lips.

Just take a look at that no-good-Petra-woman, you would have said if you had stepped just one foot into that barn. I figured she was simply bored and lonesome. I know now she was saddened to know she couldn't go back. Like the lap of waves licking bare feet washes away the sand, her youth was dissolving.

Don't get me wrong. I was never in love with her. Not even that summer when she came to the barn dances. How could I love someone I had known from when my body was hairless and my voice high-pitched, giving the picnic table a coat of paint while she lay on her lawn chair nursing her first born from her golden breasts? It wasn't love, but Petra had stopped me from any other love because I had told only her about my dream. My dream of just picking up and going cruising and leaving behind all the stuff you carry. At the time she seemed the only person to tell. The guys would have laughed. You would have said, What'd make you go and do a crazy thing like that for?

"Coos Bay, Cape Mendocino, Monterey, Big Sur, Long Beach, maybe right on down the Baja," I listed off to her one evening when the heat had gone, her children were asleep and she had called me over from chasing the geese off the beach, from hooting and hollering, from flapping my arms like a kid.

Were her intense green eyes yearning the same dream? I shrugged. She smiled back, although I had already imagined the streak of tears that were going to come to her that night while tossing alone in the pull-down bed. Was this my adolescent perception of Petra? A notion of how dreams can slip by? A notion that arrived with her tender kiss on my bare shoulder that one last day in July, when the whole half of summer was ahead of us, another half a dozen cabins left to paint, another case of tonic for her to mix.

Yet the number of dances left was few. Jerry was coming and she wouldn't be calling me over from the horseshoe pit to talk at her picnic table and drink a beer in the moonlight. I was too slow and careful, as if I were hesitating a shot. You know it; the doe flashes and is gone. Jerry arrived and they went home together. The season was over.

Then remember? The end of September I bought the Firebird. Mom hired me instead of the local guy to shut down the trailer park for the winter and you gave me three hundred bucks, which I said I'd pay you back. You said it was a bonus for my hard work and for not getting into too much trouble. I guess that meant no pregnant girls had shown up at the door — your worst nightmare; one I'd known for a long time. Little did you know that, technically, I was still a virgin.

I bought the Firebird with cash the last week in September thinking about Petra and what might have been and knowing that I was the foolish one thinking there could have been something more.

I went to work at Safeway. Most of the guys had left for college or to the coast for work. I was still deciding what to do. By the middle of November I was sick of unpacking boxes and loading shelves. I'd lost touch with almost everyone; I didn't get many calls. The phone rang. It was Petra.

"Dan. Jerry's dead."

"Jesus."

"The girls and I are coming up to the lake."

"The lake?"

"Jerry loved the lake. You think you can get a boat?"

"Sure, anything … Petra?"

"Next Saturday I'll be at government dock. At eleven."

Saturday could not come any slower. I told you and Mom I was going up to Paul's on the Kettle. I remember as I drove through the dun-coloured hills toward the lake, the sweetness and lush of California seemed so far away.

I wheeled into the parking lot, parked and ran toward Petra standing alone on the pier. The once turquoise lake was like slate. Her golden skin was now pale. She clutched the jar that held Jerry's ashes to her breast. I reached for her and she lay her cheek ever so briefly against my chest.

"What happened?"

"Heart attack, day after Labour Day."

She told me that at the last minute Jerry's mother insisted the girls stay with her. She was not happy with her decision to scatter Jerry's ashes so soon and so far from home. Petra shrugged. She never got along with Jerry's mother anyway, she said, and though she was doing it without them, she needed to be alone. It was their anniversary weekend. It would have been their tenth.

I'd made arrangements to borrow one of the harbourmaster's boats. We climbed in. A now silent Petra sat in the stern allowing the icy spray to sting her face. As she had instructed me at the pier, once opposite Stony Point I cut the motor.

The silence shrouded us as the boat swayed and bobbed in the gray chop. Her face was soaking. I was unable to distinguish fresh from salt. She leaned on the gunnel and emptied the urn into the water. She moaned and I sprang to help her, to stop her from going in after him. She hunched over and vomited. I held her forehead and stroked her long hair down the length of her curved back.

We sat side by side in the stern and drifted. While I held my arm around her I thought of another November.

"Another damn-cold day, just like this," I said.

"Go on," she said robotically, staring at the faded horizon.

"You've probably already figured this, but my father isn't much of a father. Only around enough to point out your faults." Yes that's what I said. And I continued. "I don't care anymore, but I remember when I was seven he took me down to the Pend D'Orielle River. He had a bunch of camouflage duds in the back of the pick-up. He threw me the canvas bag and ordered me to put them on. He reached into his pocket and painted his face and then he stroked mine with the same thick gray crayon. We walked along the tracks. I remember wishing I could feel like a soldier, but I wasn't sure where we were headed or what exactly he expected of me once we got there. I feared my eventual mistake. I was also terrified a train might come at any moment and he wouldn't hear it in time to warn me, so I kept silent and we walked on."

"I can imagine," she said.

"We walked on until we came to an abandoned farm and orchard. The apple trees had all gone wild. Nothing left of the outbuildings but humps of foundation. It was spooky and cold. I wanted so much to hold his hand, but I knew I was too old." She squeezed my hand cupping her shoulder. "Besides, my father kept to his pace, way in front of me. He walked differently there."

"How so?"

"He walked like he so loved that ugly, good-for-nothing place. Like it was his fucking home."

"What were you doing there?"

"Oh, we were shaking the apples off the trees. Hunting season was over, but we lay hidden to watch the geese come in to feed." I curled my upper lip and flung out my jaw, "Come next fall, Danny-boy they'll all be damn good and meaty."

Petra laughed, but she was no happier after. I don't know why I had told her that stupid story there and then. Especially when you'd have no desire for a woman like Petra to know anything about you. What the devil was I thinking?

On the way back to the harbour, I wondered why Petra had chosen me to help her inter Jerry's ashes. I wondered why you were feeding the geese that you were going to kill next October. Maybe, she thought of me as just a summer kid she'd known and I'd keep what went on to myself and not judge her. Maybe taking care of things makes you think there is a future.

I was a safe bet. I never told you or anyone else about that day in the boat with Petra and she never returned to our trailer park. I'd heard from a friend of a friend that she'd gone back to Nova Scotia. You can't get much farther away from California.

Now, on the shore of the Pacific in Marina Del Ray, I look out my window on the fifteenth floor and see the scores of boats in moorage with their multicoloured sails luffing in the sea breeze. I see a swarm of street vendors below selling cultivated daffodils and stacks of freshly printed newspapers. From the east, I feel the beginning of a hot day poking through the LA smog, but my memory of us, thirty years past, slides like that far-away field sloping into the gleaming river. A sallow sky is hunkering down on the blond scrub. The apple limbs are an entangled melee in the bleak stillness. My bruised knees ache from tripping over the rounded foundation walls overrun with sorrowful ivy and exhausted weeds. Yet, I feel the greasy stick you smeared across my cheeks and my face becomes that of a warrior and I can forgive myself for betraying you and for a brief moment, I forgive you because you once took me there.

If ever I manage to come back, take me in the spring, when the blossoms are an ideal shade of pink and the geese making their way north.