lake houseA ghost sits on a cardboard box inside the closet—knitting something, probably socks, with yarn the red color of her hair.? How convenient for her that no one but me is here at all, except for my grandmother who is smoking outside on the porch and maybe looking up at the tops of the pine trees standing all around the lake like years.My grandfather is behind the counter of his bait shop at the end of the pier, metal-roofed and gray and wobbly on stilts. And my father is fishing in a metal boat far out in the lake where it is too foggy and mossy to get a full breath, and the cypress trees have turned black around the middle from the water always licking licking, eating them down to nothing. And my mother? Is she walking at the edge of the water? Has she taken the old blue truck into town? Is she sitting in the back of the metal boat, the water in the bottom lapping at her toes like little fishes? Is she wishing for somewhere else, stuck down deep in Louisiana where the sky is always weeping, wet as an open wound? Is she dreaming of Six-Mile? Her fathers cattle wandering the hills, slow and easy. Rocks and cactus and dry heat. The Utah sky as round and smooth as a brittle gourd.Then the ghost girl sees me. She smiles and nods. She whispers something, waiting for me to tell her who I am. She knits and knits, her bare foot swinging. Hey,” she says like a puff of smoke. I watch her and she nods, her fingers turning the yarn, and then I hide beneath the covers of my grandmothers bed.My grandfathers behind the counter talking moon patterns, crinkling a beer can with his thumb. My fathers pulling in bream as big as his hand and my mother is in that metal boat deep inside the foggy guts of the lake, listening to the moans of the cypress trees, the crying sky. My grandmother is trying to find the top of the oldest pine and her cigarette is turning to ash, falling like leaves onto the dark blue fabric of her pants.