Chapter 9 - The Sunday Frost
The driveway of my parents’ house looked different on Sunday under a hard, blue noon sky. The slush had frozen into hard, ridged ruts that crunched beneath the Buick’s tires like broken eggshells. My father’s old red snow shovel was propped against the brick pillar by the garage, the blade caked in frozen gray mud from where he had cleared the path down to the property line.
I sat in the idling car for two minutes, Lily sleeping against my chest in the blue snowsuit my father had insisted on. The heater hummed a low, dry note, blowing air that smelled faintly of old dust and hot metal.
Come back for Sunday dinner. Helen’s making pot roast. She bought the good potatoes.
The text sat on my phone screen like a standing invitation to a treaty. I hadn’t replied, but I had shown up—which, in the vocabulary of my family, was the same thing as a signed contract.
When I stepped out onto the porch, the brass fox knocker was cold enough to bite through the leather of my glove. Before I could lift it, the door swung inward with its familiar, oiled hiss.
My mother was standing in the foyer, wearing a charcoal-gray cardigan over a black turtleneck. Her hair was combed back into its usual rigid shell, but her shoulders weren't locked quite as high as they had been on Christmas Day. On the mahogany table by the mirror, instead of the red glass ornaments, a simple glass jar held three dried pine sprigs and a single white candle that hadn't been lit.
"You’re late," she said.
It wasn't an accusation; it was a time check.
"The bridge over the creek had black ice," I said, stepping past her into the warm, garlic-scented air of the hallway. "I had to take the lower road."
My mother’s eyes dropped instantly to Lily’s head, visible beneath the blue hood. She didn't reach out, but her hand twitched once against her thigh, the fingers curling into a loose fist.
"Is she warm enough?"
"She’s fine, Mom."
"The wind comes off that creek like a knife this time of year. If you don't wrap her ankles, she’ll get the croup by Tuesday." She turned and walked toward the kitchen without waiting for an answer. "Your father’s in the basement. He’s fixing the latch on the storm cellar door before the next freeze. Go down and tell him dinner is twenty minutes."
The kitchen looked different. The yellow oilcloth with the faded lemons had been replaced by a plain white linen cloth—ironed so flat there wasn't a single wrinkle near the edge. On the counter, a heavy cast-iron Dutch oven was venting a thick, savory steam that smelled of carrots, bay leaves, and cheap red wine.
I walked down the narrow cellar stairs, the wooden steps groaning under my boots. The basement was dim, lit only by a single bare bulb hanging from a twisted cord over my father’s workbench.
He was kneeling on the concrete floor, a screwdriver in one hand, tightening the brass screws on the wooden frame of the root cellar door. His gray cardigan was slung over the back of an old wicker chair, revealing his flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, exposing forearms covered in pale freckles and faint white scars from old woodshop accidents.
"Dad," I said.
He didn't jump. He finished giving the screw a final, hard turn before looking up over his glasses.
"You made it," he said, wiping his thumb across his thigh. "Volvo give you any trouble on the hill?"
"None. The snow tires held."
He looked at Lily, who had woken up and was staring at the swinging cord of the overhead light with wide, blinking eyes. He stood up slowly, his knees making a dry, cracking sound that he ignored by reaching out to tickle the baby’s chin with a grease-stained finger.
"She likes the light," he murmured. "Her mother used to stare at that same bulb for twenty minutes when she was three months old. Thought it was the moon."
May you like
I smiled, though the chest-tightening weight I usually carried when I crossed this threshold didn't entirely vanish. "Mom told me to tell you dinner is twenty minutes."
"Dinner’s always twenty minutes away in this house," he said, picking up his rag and tossing it onto the workbench. "Whether the meat is done or not."
