In the Snow

A story by Joe DeBritz. This is #37 of 52 short stories that will be written and released every week this year.

The Highwater Blues, the coldwater flats, bugs, nothing but bugs. Nothing—olive green. Magnolias. Chrysanthemums. The funeral home smell, the ride home, getting changed, back out to the dinner, all the friends, the men told stories, the women laughed. They laughed loudly.

We had to sell her table, sell her desk, sell her couch, sell everything. The woman who bought the table kept asking if it was wobbly.

No it’s not wobbly we said.

Okay, I’m not gonna get home and be like, dammit, they lied to me, am I?

No, we said, we’re not lying.

She asked where we were moving to.

We're not moving, we said, this is our mother’s house.

Where is she moving to? she asked.

We didn’t answer.

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We used to eat Italian food in the snow. We’d go out when there was a storm and find an open restaurant. Mom had friends she called gamblers, they played a lot of cards. They smoked cigarettes. They ate fine cuts of veal. I remember the houses they lived in, they had rusted metal door handles, wrought iron fences, dim backyards with overgrown shrubs. They made homemade wine in their basements. They would kiss me on the cheek and their wives gave me candy. Mother’s hands were full of cracks, deep crevices. She’d hold mine and walk with me into the unfamiliar houses.

Mom had a big doll collection, a lot of them were just heads. We put them in boxes, we didn’t know what to do with them. They sat in boxes in the house collecting dust while we cleaned everything else out.

When we were kids we’d all run around the yard playing tag with the neighborhood kids. Mom would be on her hands and knees gardening. She would take shovelfuls of rich black soil and work on her flowers. She’d pull out weeds. When I would run by sometimes she’d throw a little dirt at me or spray me with the hose. I’d laugh. She’d stay out there until we were done playing, sometimes longer.

I grew up in the snow. Mornings, where the orange sun whispered out over the cloudy horizon and poured over the thick hard snow on the ground, lighting up the entire block enough to burn your retinas. Nights where the moon rose and the dull blue glow spread across the ground. It never truly got dark in the winter. My hair was always long, my mom said the key to a woman’s beauty was in her hair.

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I got married when I was twenty-three to a man from the other side of the country. He didn’t understand snow, he couldn’t drive in it, he couldn’t do anything. We lived together away from my home for four years together. He ran away from me but never left. I had to leave him. I had to stand up and say,

What do you want to get out of life?

He’d just look at me. Blank. He didn’t know what he wanted. He thought getting married would set him up. He thought he’d be able to figure the rest out. So I languished in his wake for years, and he never thought of what he wanted. So I left along with everything I’d done there.

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I drove along the cold winter road. It didn't snow as much as it used to. It was cold and the roads looked so gray. There was no moisture anywhere, it was dry and cold and the sun was bright. I drove into the parking lot of the diner. I walked up to the table where the man was sitting. He waved to me and smiled quickly.

How are you getting on?

Pretty well, considering, I said, untangling from his embrace.

We sat down. There was no water on the table, just water glasses with short stems sitting upside down.

It was a beautiful service.

They did a nice job.

You did a nice job.

Thank you.

I was up last night thinking about her. That old worn out copy of Mrs. Dalloway she would read. I remember seeing her with that on campus all the time. She must have read it a hundred times.

Do you think she did, or just carried it around everywhere?

I guess…I…I don’t know…I thought she read it.

I was trying to make a joke.

Of course you were.

It’s hard to think of her all the time.

I know it is.

You go from thinking sometimes, to worrying, worrying all the time, then it’s remembering.

Remembering is good.

It was always remembering though, I mean looking back, right?

Sure, I think so.

The waiter appeared. We both looked down at our closed menus and ordered coffee. He poured us ice water from a metal pitcher and I took a big drink from mine. We opened our menus to find something to eat. Usually, choosing what to eat in a diner is not difficult. It was for me today, but I found something before the waiter came back with our coffees.

I looked into the eyes of the man across from me. He looked back into mine. He was sad only briefly. I looked to my right at the plate glass window that ran along the sides of the booth we sat at. The few trees were bare, their branches moving through the cold sky, a light wind swayed them, erratic and flowing, reaching out, remaining connected.

Our food came out so fast, and it seemed we were both hungry. We didn’t talk much the rest of the time we spent sitting there on the cold patent leather seats.

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I woke up one day at seventeen years old in a pool of my own vomit, some dried, some still wet and sticky. I didn’t remember where I was, I didn’t remember who I was. As I began to awake, the sharp needles lodged in my skull made themselves known. I was in my own bed. My bed in my bedroom, that was six feet from my parents. They didn’t know yet. I could clean this up myself and get away with it.

Right then, my mother came in. She had towels and a glass of water. She handed me the glass and looked at me. I drank it. She helped me out of bed, I was naked, save for the dried vomit on my stomach and thighs. The yellow and green washed out my pale skin. My mother took a wet rag and wiped off my stomach and thighs. She balled up the sheets and blankets and pulled them off the bed.

Come, was all she said and took my hand.

The shower was running already and I got in. I cleaned everything off me. I could hardly stand up. My mother threw the soiled sheets over the banister down to the bottom of the stairs. I looked at the neatly tied ball sitting there. I had to sit down in the bottom of the tub. When she came back to check on me, my mom shut off the shower and ran a warm bath for me. As soon as the water from the shower head stopped hitting mine, a wave of nausea overtook me. The bath filled up. She came back and shut it off. Had she not, I might not have been able to reach up and turn it off myself. She put a cold wash cloth on my forehead and had another glass of water with her.

Drink, she said, and I did.

She sat with me until the bath water got cold. She unplugged the drain and wrapped me in a big soft towel. She gave me her terry cloth bathrobe that I remember her wearing while making our school lunches in the kitchen when we were in elementary school.

I went back into my bedroom to find clean sheets, the window open, and a candle burning. The smell had mostly gone. I climbed back into bed and went to sleep.

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