Cover of Snow (5 page)

I made my way through empty streets, still but for the snow, toward the outskirts of town. They had turned slushy with salt and as I glanced in my rearview mirror, half expecting to see the police chief still behind me, I saw caramel-colored splashes instead.

Stopping at a red light, I peered through the foggy windshield.

A bait and ammo store sat directly in front of me, and just beyond it, my destination. Al's Gas & Service occupied one corner of Water Street, across from a new Mobil. I favored the latter, where I could grab a cup of coffee after pumping my gas, but Al Meter serviced the cop cars and so I obeyed Vern's order. For all I knew, he might check.

Things like the two stations could make Wedeskyull a tough place sometimes. The town—whose ominous-sounding name, spoken as if someone were killing weeds, stood in stark contrast to its physical beauty—was not an entirely peaceful place. It was divided between newcomers and natives, the Mobil half and the Al's half. As the émigré bride of a man whose family had lived here for a hundred years, and elsewhere in the Adirondacks for a hundred before that, I didn't fit into either group.

But I loved Wedeskyull—and not only because of Brendan. There was a wealth of antique houses for me to pore over, all in differing degrees of dilapidation. Even if I'd never made many friends of my own here—
any,
came Teggie's voice, any
friends of your own
—the architecture made a surprisingly rich substitute.

It was Brendan who'd pointed out how many city expats poured fortunes into those places, and soon after that observation was made, my business was born.
You can do it, Chestnut
.
Ask for twenty percent commission
.

Memories. Reams of memories assailed me.

Like
Chestnut.

I'd once asked Brendan why he called me that, and he answered dreamily, “Because you're my Christmas treat.” But his face held something more.

It was true that we met during finals back in school in the city, just before winter break. Brendan had bought me a bag of nuts off a cart to celebrate the end of exams.

“One step closer to lawyerdom,” he announced.

Brendan had settled on the profession because he wanted to deal with all the people who played games with the law. At least that's what he'd told me when we started dating, and he'd been filling out applications, and taking the LSATs. But when the time came to choose between law schools, something had radically changed. Brendan proposed. And then he suggested we return to his hometown, where he had gotten an offer to join the force. Being a cop gave Brendan good benefits, long-term security, and something else. A call to his heritage.

I stared up at the traffic light. It was the only one in town. Chance Carson, the owner of the bait and ammo store, had paid for that light. Made access to his parking lot easier.

Wedeskyull was a big small town, if that made sense. It had its own schools, jail, police force, and there were enough residents—especially with the newcomers coursing in—that no one could really claim to know or even recognize everybody. You could drive twenty miles and still be contained by the borders of Wedeskyull, but within its spread-out confines stood one central stalk, a deeply rooted tree, the branches of which went back to the town's inception and had witnessed its growth.

The now green light blurred before my eyes.

An engine gunned behind me.

I jolted forward, putting my hand up in apology, and turned into Al's lot.

Grimacing at the salt chunks that broke beneath my boots as I got out, I tugged open a smeared glass door. The temperature inside and out differed by about sixty degrees, which led to condensation. Across the empty street, the Mobil lot was clear beneath a brightly lit overhang.

Now that I was inside, I could see that this place was more modern than its age and position in town would suggest. I'd been expecting something out of
Andy Griffith
. Instead there was a high bank of gleaming machines with buttons that lit up, tools that more closely resembled thermostats or telephones than wrenches, and some blue thing on wheels that looked like a friendly robot.

But no one to use all of this equipment. I was alone except for a crackling radio, set to the police channel. I backed away from its buzz of familiar voices.

“Can I help you, Missus?”

I had no idea where the voice had come from.

“Um, yes,” I began.

The sole occupant of the dim interior showed himself. He was dressed in camouflage, the white kind for winter, and as I studied him, I realized he couldn't possibly help me. He was just a kid.

He moved out from behind a grimy desk, blue eyes squinting.

I tried a smile.

“What can I do you for?”

The boy had a dazzling smile to go along with those bright eyes. He was on the small side—not much taller than I was—and his light hair was tangled. The smile faltered when I didn't say anything. “
What can I do you for
. That's what my boss always says.”

Now that he was standing in the open, I thought he looked vaguely familiar, like someone I might've seen around but never really met.

“Well,” I began, “my car's outside and it's got a light out?”

The boy's smile broadened. “Let's have a look.”

I found myself smiling back as we walked across the slushy lot.

“Messy out here,” he said. And then to my amazement, the boy drew his camouflage-patterned sweatshirt over his head, and laid it on the asphalt. He hadn't bothered with a jacket back in the shop; now he stood unflinching in the air, which was cold enough to shatter, wearing only shirtsleeves.

I glanced down at the cloth.

“Stand on that, why don't you? Then your feet won't get as wet.”

“Um,” I mumbled. “No, that's all right …”

The boy turned an injured gaze on me, and I saw in that moment that I'd been wrong. He wasn't a child, he might be as old as twenty, twenty-five even. A faint scruff of beard on his jaw showed in the light, and his eyes also held more than someone very young could've seen.

I stepped onto the white cloth, rapidly liquefying in the slush, and the boy's chunks of teeth showed again. “Think I got this one in stock. You stay right here.”

I was trying to tease out the branches of his mind. Kindness paired with a lack of understanding about basic physical realities, such as what happens when cotton gets wet, or the fact that my boots would've protected me much better than his flimsy shirt.

The temperature was starting to wear on me by the time he returned with a small box. He crouched by my car, fiddling while I wrapped my arms around myself, wondering at his lack of response to the burning cold.

Why was I standing out here? It wasn't as if my help was needed. I started to turn and go inside—deliberating over whether to provide any explanation or excuse—when he spoke up.

“I'm awful sad about Brendan.”

The cold took hold of me then, and didn't let go. “Did you know Brendan?” Then I paused. “Do you know me?”

“Know,” he echoed, and I was about to pose another question when he went on, his tone making the words freeze on my lips. “Go, slow, row to hoe.”

“Rhymes,” I said senselessly, wanting to get out of there. Why hadn't I gone to the Mobil? I didn't know if this person was brain-injured or mentally retarded or some other variation of differently-abled—all deserving of equal rights and fair treatment and anything else they might want, only not by me, not right now anyway. I had to get to the pharmacy.

“Want to turn 'em on?”

“What?” It came out more of a cry. I didn't understand anything anymore.

“Your lights.” He gestured to where he'd been working.

“Oh.” My face grew hot despite the chill. “Sure.” I stepped off the sodden sweatshirt, drowned now in the lot, and went to sit down on the front seat.

“Works real well!” the boy-man said with delight. “Visible even in broad daylight.” A pause. “
Risible
is the only one.”

“What?”

“
Miserable
—no, that's cheating …”

Another rhyme, I realized belatedly. I leaned forward, but didn't close my door. “Thanks for taking care of this.”

“Ms. Hamilton …” he said, and I frowned again.

“Yes?”

“That'll be sixteen dollars. Just the cost of the light. Labor's on the house.”

“Oh,” I said, starting to reach for my bag. “Right. Thank you.”

“That was his. Long time ago,” he said, and I followed his gaze to the sack I used as both briefcase and purse, a castoff of Brendan's when he decided against law school.

So this person had indeed known my husband, in which case my uppermost guess about his age was probably closest to the truth. As I trailed him back to the garage to pay, I wondered if he knew anything else.

“I used to watch him skate,” he said, opening the cash register.

Relief, which I didn't entirely understand, sank into me, weighing me down. Brendan couldn't have known this person, then, nor vice versa. In the eight long winters we'd lived up here, Brendan had never once set foot on a lake. He wouldn't join the hockey team the cops all played on. Brendan felt clumsy on ice, a standing he couldn't abide. He liked to be good at things—taking double black diamond trails easily, expert with a pickax and ropes—and consequently had always seemed to display an aversion to skating.

“Boy, did they have fun.”

“Who?” I burst out. “Who are you?” I added, hoping my rudeness might pass unnoticed amongst all the other things this person didn't seem to understand.

He trudged over to the dirty desk, pulling open a drawer that protested with a metallic shriek. He handed me a business card, the kind torn from a perforated sheet.

Dugger Mackenzie. Al's Gas & Service. Tender, loving care for your automobile
.

“Dugger?” I said, and he grinned.

“Not like that.” The grin washed away. His face looked almost unrecognizable without it. “Rhymes with
cougar
.”

I almost missed it when his hands started to curl into fists, and had to hurry to scare up a response as he started to pummel his own hips.

“Gotcha,” I said in a deliberately easy tone. “You say your name with two ‘o's.”

The tension in his posture began to loosen.

I dropped the flimsy card into my sack. “Well, Dugger, it was nice to—”

“They kept us little guys off the lake. Not all the time then, not yet, but me they did almost always,” Dugger said, as I began to walk toward the cloudy glass door. “That didn't matter. I liked standing on the sidelines.”

I turned halfway back.

“I could make out Brendan, even way off on the bank. Red, you know, his strings. They called out from real far away. Called, lolled. Don't spell 'em the same, but they still work.”

A car drove into the lot on a wave of slush.

My reply took a moment to form. Because that last thing Dugger had said made a strange sort of sense. “Are you talking about laces? Skate laces?”

The car honked, a rude blast, and Dugger, still coatless, turned toward it.

“Dugger? Do you mean that Brendan wore red—”

“Sorry, Missus,” Dugger said breathlessly. He flung open the door. “I got to see to this customer. The boss gets mad if anyone has to wait.”

I was left to stare after him, and try to untwist his words.

The pharmacy would have to wait for another morning. Right now there was something more pressing I needed to check on at home.

Dugger's words, slow and precise, were still trickling through my head.

Go, slow, row to hoe.
Was it wrong—paranoid of me again—to take that as some kind of message? Wasn't the word
tough
usually inserted in front of the last three? It was as if Dugger had been warning me about what I might be in for.

The wipers slapped snow back and forth across the windshield, and I blinked to clear my vision, trying to make sense of the road amidst the churning flakes.

I was behaving as if I'd come in contact with some kind of seer, when in fact Dugger was probably just an eccentric character about town, compromised in intellect or sanity.

Did Vern know Dugger? He must. I could ask the Chief about him.

In the meantime, something even wackier than this morning's encounter was waiting to be resolved: the notion that once upon a time Brendan had skated.

“It's a box. A yellow flannel box,” I told Teggie when she came upon me in the bedroom, not having bothered to remove my coat and hat.

The box had been an inheritance from Brendan's father, and he always kept it in his dresser drawer. The fabric covering was worn as soft as rose petals, and the lid caught a bit as I lifted it off. My gaze skidded over the objects inside. Brendan never encouraged me in looking at these things, although he hadn't exactly stopped me either, and so even though I was wont to give his past some privacy, I had caught glimpses of certain items from time to time.

I recognized Brendan's college acceptance letter. There was a Christmas card with a picture of two boys on it, one much younger than the other, almost completely concealed by a snowsuit and hat. Brendan's little brother, who had died as a child.

I pushed some other things aside. There was a bumper sticker with a distasteful logo—a meaty, red tongue splayed out against a rock—and the word
Stonelickers
on it, as well as a slim stack of letters and a bulbous class ring that Brendan never wore.

Finally, a pair of long strands, which I lifted out, winding them around my finger.

They were red.

“What are those?” asked Teggie.

I held out my finger, cocooned in red cotton. “Remember? My proposal?”

“Oh, right. Your ring was on them. Like a necklace,” she said.

I nodded. “But I never told you why Brendan did it that way.”

“Why?”

“Why didn't I tell you? Or why did he?”

Teggie lifted the twin knobs of her shoulders. “I don't know,” she said impatiently. “Both. Either.”

I glanced out the window. The snow had finally stopped and the opaque world was starting to clear. “I learned something today.”

Teggie propped one foot on a shelf three feet above her waist, nodding that she was listening as she began to stretch.

I walked closer to the window. The glass gave off a frigid layer of air, but I shucked off my outer gear anyway, feeling stifled by it all of a sudden.

“I found these laces around the time Brendan and I first met. In his dorm room.”

Teggie wafted a slim arm down to meet her toes.

“They were in with a whole bunch of stuff. Brendan always keeps—kept—important things around. Together, in special places. This box mainly. It was his father's.”

“So the shoelaces were important somehow?”

“Not shoelaces,” I corrected. “Skate laces. Although I didn't know that until today.”

Scales of shivers ran up and down my back. My husband had lied to me.

“Brendan said he'd been a clown once for Halloween. His favorite holiday as a child. So he held on to the laces that went in his shoes.” It had sounded plausible at the time, although now I felt silly for believing it.

Plausible,
I heard as a distant echo. Not right for
risible
either. That was cheating.

Teggie, now limber, slid into a split.

“I didn't see them—or think about them—again until his proposal.” I held my left hand some distance away. The diamond needed cleaning. I couldn't imagine going about that small task, which I'd once attended to frequently. Chemicals from renovation work tended to dull the stone. “And then we had a fight.”

“You fought? The day he proposed?”

My cheeks heated. Teggie had always coveted a relationship like mine and Brendan's. Most of the men she came in contact with were gay. She joked sometimes that she was destined to be a maiden auntie to our kids.

But that hadn't turned out to be true, had it? Not for either of us.

Tears crowded my eyes, and I turned blindly away from the window, dropping onto the bed. The quilt still smelled faintly of Brendan, and I started to cry.

Teggie leapt to her feet, squatting gracefully beside me. “Oh, Nor. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for asking. Who cares if you had a fight? What matters is the marriage that came after, right?”

I pressed my fingers into both my eyes, hard, forcing the tears back. “It does matter, that fight. It matters now.”

“Why?”

I took a deep breath and my sobs shuddered to a stop. “I asked him why he had done such a silly thing. Made a necklace out of laces that once belonged to a costume. For a clown, no less. It felt like he was making a joke of asking me to marry him. I almost said no that day. I wanted him to do it—” A groan escaped me. “Do it over.”

“Okay,” Teggie said soothingly. “That's understandable. Every woman dreams about how she'll get engaged.”

“But Brendan convinced me that he used them because the laces were special. A memory from childhood.” I looked up at Teggie, my eyes suddenly arid, vision clear. “I think he was telling the truth. These laces
did
have to do with his childhood. But not with dressing up as a clown.”

Teggie shrugged, clearly puzzled. “So he swapped stories. The laces are from a childhood memory that had to do with skating. What's the big deal?”

The laces, dangling near the edge of Brendan's desk, suddenly slithered off. I didn't stoop to pick them up.

“No, you don't understand,” I said. “What's bothering me isn't that Brendan used to skate as a kid.
Everybody
skates in the Adirondacks. Or even that he lied about it later. It's that for some reason he …”

Teggie's loosened-up shoulders suddenly tensed. “Stopped.”

Later that night, after we'd failed to eat much dinner, I crept back upstairs, where I'd abandoned the keepsake box. I'd noticed several items when I looked for the skate laces earlier. Now I was looking for something I hadn't seen, but knew should've been there.

Bill Hamilton's wedding present to us had been a small, homemade album. The album itself was pretty, with a hand-tooled leather cover, but what made the gift really special was that it contained the only collection of pictures of Brendan as a little boy. My father-in-law had brought us to his sister's house for the presentation.

It was an older home, built around the turn of the last century, and Jean tended this property with care. Unlike the non-attention Eileen had given her twin house across the road, Jean had lavished framed daguerreotypes, antimacassars, and needlepoint benches upon all of the rooms, decorating in a fussier way than suited the house, but still obviously taking pains.

“Okay,” she had wheezed during that visit. Jean was a heavy woman, for whom just talking sometimes took effort. “If she stops by, you're not here.”

It took me a second to realize whom Jean was referring to, and it was then that I began to get a sense of how close the two women were. Linked through Bill, they were the sisters-in-law Sprat: one no fat, the other no lean.

“Just for this once,” Bill told his sister, leading us into a spare room, and handing Brendan a paper bag.

The little album that was in the bag contained no more than a dozen pictures, all taken before Brendan was eight. But my husband loved that narrow, almost barren scrapbook, studying the shots far more frequently than twelve photographs required.

I figured Brendan loved the album especially because it was the last thing his father ever gave him. One Saturday morning, two months after our wedding, Bill went out to the garage for something and never returned. Eileen found him there at the end of the day, dead of a heart attack. Sadder even than my father-in-law's premature demise was the fact of how long it had gone unnoticed.

Dropping my gaze back to the yellow box, I attempted to take in each item of my husband's collection.

The leather photo album was gone.