Betsy Morganthaw, my fiancée, was employed by a public relations firm at a wage half again as much as her future husband. I, Ben Gustefson, collated boring statistical figures while locked in a cramped cubical of a company that offered me no future potential. Betsy toured the country, staying in plush hotels and dining in fine restaurants, all paid for by a boss who thought she was God's eldest daughter. To this day I wonder why she took a step backwards on the alter steps by marrying me.

Be patient as I identify the other participants in this saga. While my relationship with Martha LeBlanc, nee Rossi, dated back to our play pen years and kindergarten days, lately we've hiked different paths, reducing our contact to Christmas cards and once a month phone calls. Martha is a trauma nurse in a large Boston hospital. Her husband Quinn, a scientist, who attended our childhood school but I know him only later through her. He does something weird with computers, electricity and maybe death rays. Only a handful of human minds can comprehend his work.

The goal of our offered summer sojourn was described as a seasonal cabin on a small lake in near Wolfboro, New Hampshire. Martha inherited the property from her grandfather. According to the hurried phone call Quinn has spent the last three months at this water side retreat writing a paper on some obscure theoretical principal. He tried to explain his project to me on the phone call of his wife's invitation, but I was lost in the first sentence. Quinn is our age but he jumped two school grades on academic excellence. I vaguely remember him as the resident nerd. A dozen years have passed and we're now all pushing thirty, like a scene from an eighties classic movie. Why Quinn wasn't voted the least likely to land the school's prom queen beauty, I'll never know. He was a foster kid and didn't travel in our circles. Never the less he and Martha have four married years under their belts and are expecting their first child. While Martha is my kindred spirit, Quinn and I always got along fairly well the few times we're all gotten together.

I filled Betsy in on our hosts as we maneuvered the country roads of New England. We were directed by a friendly voice on our GPS, a previously unused present from my retired parents.

"Do they live in the cabin?" Betsy asked, probably visualizing Abe Lincoln's birth place, with outside toilet and stream-carried water.

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"It's a seasonal place, according to Martha's description," I answered. "Quinn has a sabbatical from teaching and is using it all summer for a college project. Martha commutes weekends a hundred miles from their home."




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