Snow Angels

by Stewart O'Nan

  “Here she comes,” Brock hollers from downstairs.

  “She’s early,” May complains, then hustles down with the basket. It’s hers and there’s nowhere to put it. She thought she’d have time to stick it in her car.

  Outside the woman is swinging into the drive. A big, black Galaxie 500 with white, official writing too small to read on the door. Brock takes the basket from May and thunders up the stairs.

  Annie grudgingly turns off the TV, as if this has nothing to do with her.

  “Try to be polite,” May says.

  Annie walks past her to the door and opens it, waits for the woman to cross the lawn. May doesn’t know her. She’s dark-haired and young, in her early thirties, with a perm, an expensive calf-length wool coat and a massive black handbag. She’s carrying a brown accordion folder, and when she reaches the porch May can see her gloves are real leather, creased at the knuckles. When she says hello she holds the o too long. Pittsburgh, May thinks, probably went to college.

  Her name is Sharon. She takes her gloves off to greet them. A single silver band, elegant. Brock introduces himself without saying what relation he is to Annie. He takes her coat and hangs it in the closet. Underneath she’s wearing a mustard top and a black skirt, dark hose and smart kneeboots. Beside her Annie looks terrible.

  “For now I’ll only need to talk to you,” Sharon says, and Annie leads her into the kitchen. May follows, asking if Sharon wants some coffee. She says yes, that would be wonderful. May thinks that her plan is working. She has baked a plate of cookies, and sets it on the table between them. She waits for the coffee, eavesdropping.

  Sharon opens her folder and starts filling out forms, asking Annie simple questions. May has told Annie not to smoke, so immediately she has to light up, waving the cigarette around, dismissing each answer. May knows the tone; Annie’s already lost interest. Concentrating on her paperwork, Sharon doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Officially,” Annie says, “we’re still married. Five years in August.”

  “And your daughter’s name?”

  “Tara. Tara Elizabeth.” May detects a change, a hardness in this.

  “Date of birth?”

  May knows all the answers.

  “Okay,” Sharon says, finishing a sheet. “Good.” She tears it along a perforation, sets both pieces aside.

  The coffee’s ready but May doesn’t want to leave. She stands at the counter with her back to the table, waiting for them to go on.

  “Mrs. Van Dorn?” Sharon asks. “I’m afraid the rest of the interview is confidential, if you don’t mind.”

  “No,” May says, “I was just going to pour.”

  Annie gets up. “Go ahead, Ma.” She takes the mugs from her, holds the lid down while she tips the pot.

  May still hasn’t moved.

  “I’ll be all right,” Annie says, and May can see that it’s true, that she’s not going to let this woman hurt her.

  “I’ll be in the living room,” May says, but even as she’s leaving, she hesitates, looks back as if Annie might need her.

  Annie’s first day back at work is Sunday brunch. It’s an easy shift, a buffet. All she has to do is keep track of drink orders, take an occasional chafing dish of sausages to the skirted table. Families come in their church clothes, the girls dolled up in gauzy sleeves, boys in velvet breeches. Annie leans down to hear them ask for cranberry juice and Cokes.

  “What do you say?” the mothers prompt.

  “Please.”

  At the bar Annie arranges the glasses around her tray according to the table: mimosa, white wine, screwdriver, mimosa, Coke, beer, mimosa, bloody, bloody. It’s been a while, and she makes mistakes, apologizing as she switches drinks. If Barb were here she’d tease Annie, but the other girls ignore it. In the break room they don’t know what to say except that they’re sorry, that they’re glad she’s back. Annie knows they’re just worried. They don’t mean to hurt her.

  Out on the floor she can feel the club members gauging her, wondering why she isn’t at home, what they would do if something like this happened to them. One older woman she’s served for months at a corner table holds on to her wrist and says, “I wish there was something I could say.”

  “Thank you,” Annie says, to get her to let go.

  It’s not all bad. She’s busy. The crowd is constant, another rush around one-thirty. Annie wills herself into the rhythm of prepping, serving, bussing, then prepping again. It’s not like the house, where she can’t think of anything else. Only once in a while does she stop and—tricked by routine—think of Tara waiting to be picked up at her mother’s.

  At break she smokes a cigarette by herself on the loading dock, arms folded over her breasts against the cold. The bottom of the parking lot is empty and snow-covered; beyond, a fairway stretches like a white avenue through the trees. A car passes on the road, and she thinks of the Sundays Barb stood here puffing while she and Brock were at Susan’s. He’s going to leave her as soon as she’s strong enough; they both know it. In his eyes, half the battle’s over; Child Protective Services has cleared her. He’ll never know what it means to be a parent, she thinks. He’s being polite, not fighting with her, trying to be nice. Annie can’t remember what she saw in him. A fuck. She smokes the Marlboro down to the writing and flicks it off the dock, watches it poke a hole in the snow. She’s not strong enough, Annie thinks, she may never be. He can leave. He will anyway. Inside, in the bathroom, she chews a stick of gum while she fixes her hair and is ready to face her audience again.

  She hasn’t had time to take the Maverick in. Going home, the plastic bulges in the window, shouldering her. Even with the heat up, the car’s freezing. She’s got to start worrying about all these little things again. It exhausts her just thinking about it. She imagines letting the car drift into the oncoming bridge abutment. She could fold her hands in her lap, close her eyes and step on the gas pedal. But she doesn’t. The bridge with its teenage graffiti—“Joann I love U 4ever Dave”—passes overhead. She’s started to think about dinner.

  When she gets home, Brock is making barbecued chicken and stuffing from a box. The Steelers have won again. Three empty beer bottles sit on the coffee table—unsubtle proof that he wasn’t at Susan’s with his Patricia. It’s pointless; the inspector says they do it at lunch. He’s shown her the girl’s picture. She has a double chin and frizzy hair. Annie doesn’t understand.

  “How was work?” Brock asks.

  “Good,” Annie says.

  “Are you going in tomorrow?”

  “I said I was.”

  “I didn’t know how you’d feel after today.”

  “I feel tired,” Annie says, plopping down on the couch. “I feel like I’ve done something.”

  “Good,” Brock says, overly cheerful. He comes in wearing an oven mitt, clutching a meat fork. “That’s great.”

  “Please,” Annie says, “will you cut the crap and start acting like a normal human being?”

  She can see Brock wants to explode all over her but can’t. She doesn’t know which is more offensive, him pitying her or pretending nothing has happened.

  She works the full week on day shift, getting home in time to make dinner. She reads the mail, writes thank-yous to people who have sent checks. Saturday while the Maverick is being fixed, Brock takes her and her mother Christmas shopping. There are two weeks left and the mall is jammed. She sees children everywhere, hears their squeals coming from the video arcade. She ignores the people pointing. Only the line for Santa Claus bothers her. In it waits a girl wearing Tara’s coat. They have to stop and turn around, give Annie a minute in the Potato Patch.

  “Maybe we should go,” her mother says to Brock. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

  “I’ll be okay,” Annie says, “I just need something to eat.”

  Her mother raves over the tacos, but they don’t go back past the North Pole. It’s good, Annie thinks, that she has limits. In a way, she doesn’t want to lose this part of Tara to
o easily.

  On her day off, she visits the cemetery, pulling her car off the road and walking back in through the stones. Her mother owns plots for all of them—herself, Annie, Raymond and Dennis—though she doesn’t expect they’ll use them. Tara is beside Annie’s father. Cemented into the ground in front of his grave is a vase. Annie thought of getting one for Tara until she conferred with her mother.

  “A windy day,” her mother said, “forget it,” and it’s true, even a breeze plucks the flowers right out, sends the bright heads tumbling. Annie brings them anyway, packing snow around the stems with her fingers. She has seen other people visiting alone talking to their loved ones—old Polish women mostly—but she does not feel close to Tara or her father here, rather the opposite. With her father, she accepts this distance, accepts the fact that time has passed.

  Hot August he used to take her fishing out at the new lake. He had a glazed ceramic jar with a lid she’d made for him in art in which he’d grind out his Lucky Strikes. When the jar was full they’d call it a day. She has pictures stuck in her mirror of herself standing on the concrete launch, holding a stringer of perch, crappie, a lucky trout. Just her—her brothers were too old for that. “The hell with them,” her father used to say, lounging on the cooler, an orange life preserver behind his head. “They wouldn’t know a good time if it bit them square in the behind.”

  Annie refused to visit him in the hospital; on the phone she said she’d see him when he got home.

  “Don’t wait for me too long,” he said, his voice rags.

  “Do you want me to come in?” she asked.

  “I think you’d better.”

  “Did you hear that?” her mother said from the kitchen extension.

  “I heard it!”

  “I don’t want you two fighting,” her father said, so they fought in the car.

  Squatting there in the cold, Annie misses him only dimly. She misses holding Tara, brushing her hair, feeling for a new tooth pushing through. She doesn’t need a stone to remember her.

  Her mother comes with her sometimes, and sometimes goes alone. Annie finds her footprints, and a man’s which she assumes are Glenn’s. She hasn’t run into him since he was arrested the second time. Inwardly, Annie worries that he may try something after Brock leaves. She keeps the gun loaded.

  His father has called, saying Glenn’s distraught, that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Annie has always liked Frank Marchand, but he’s wrong; Glenn’s sick. Whether it’s just depression or a real mental illness, he’s sick and possibly dangerous and she’s not taking any chances.

  “In your position,” Glenn’s father concedes, “I suppose you don’t have a choice.”

  When she’s not working and Brock is, she stays out of the house, spends time with her mother. Her mother thinks they should move in with her. It’s foolish, two houses. Annie doesn’t tell her that any day Brock is going to take off; it would give her more ammunition. They drink coffee and play gin and talk about the Parkinsons filing for divorce.

  “Twenty-three years,” her mother says.

  “They always seemed happy to me,” Annie says, discarding. Her mother lets her smoke in the house now, as if they’ve come to an understanding.

  “The new people are nice.”

  “Where are they from?” Annie asks, to keep the conversation alive. The afternoon deepens, the windows dim. She keeps an eye on the clock above the fridge, waits until it’s safe to go home. Her mother walks her to the door and, in yet another new ritual, gives her a hug. She stands there while Annie backs out, waving in the cold.

  The road’s empty, the flag of the mailbox up. One from Bradford, Kane, Altoona. Lately the number has been dwindling, and Annie’s glad. She has twenty minutes until Brock gets home, and before taking her coat and boots off, sticks a pot of water on. She finds a jar of sauce in the cupboard, a box of spaghetti with the end taped shut. Bread, butter. She turns the early news on to fill the house, then stands at the stove, customizing the sauce with spices. The floor is freezing and she gives the pot a good stir before going upstairs to get her slippers.

  She is sitting on the end of her bed putting them on when she notices the room is different. It’s subtle, a subtraction of something not there in the first place. Brock’s stereo—it’s missing. She goes to the closet; his smaller half is empty, the pole bare of hangers. He’s forgotten his toothbrush, probably on purpose. His razors and shaving cream are gone, his nail clippers. Annie checks his dresser drawers. Cleaned out.

  She knew he would leave, but now that he has it’s no consolation. He could have at least told her. But that wouldn’t be Brock.

  Downstairs the sauce is bubbling, spewing like a geyser. The stove is a mess. She turns it off and sits down at the table and finds she’s carrying the toothbrush. In the other room the news is going on and on. She gets up, goes to the front door, opens it and throws the toothbrush into the yard. It skitters to a stop. She slams the door and turns off the news and sits on the couch. She lies down and looks at the sky in the front window. Cold gray. At least the waiting’s over, she thinks. Now what?

  An hour later she is still lying there watching the sky darken when she hears a car on the road. The sound jerks her head off the cushion. It wouldn’t be him. She thinks of Glenn and the gun upstairs and dashes across the room to the window. Before she sees it, she recognizes the engine, a high-pitched metallic ringing that reminds her of a wind-up toy.

  The yellow Bug comes into view and Annie runs outside in her slippers. Barb swings in behind her car.

  “He called and told me,” Barb says. She shows Annie the bag with the bottle in it and they embrace.

  “I’m sorry,” they both say.

  “Jinx.”

  “I owe you a Coke,” Annie says, but can’t keep from blubbering.

  “Turn it off,” Barb says, just beginning herself.

  In the town where Glenn’s fathers were born, there was a square with benches and swings and seesaws. Which one took him there he can’t remember. It’s not in any of his pictures; Glenn has to draw it in. He wakes late in the day and sits in his long underwear at the dining room table, laboring over a sketchpad with his colored pencils. He gets things out of perspective and proportion but it’s unimportant. He can see the streets, the dust in summer. The store his father robbed has two gas pumps out front with glass heads; you can watch the amber juice bubble. Glenn hasn’t tried to draw his father. He envisions him in prison, playing solitaire, his face the same as Glenn’s, and thinks that finally he understands him, that the blood they share is a stronger bond than he used to believe.

  He only shows Rafe the town and the portraits of Tara he’s copied from photos. The pictures of the old house and Annie he keeps flat under his mattress; when he takes them out when he’s alone, they’re smudged, the red lead staining the boxspring’s ticking. He remembers her opening to him, and thinks of Brock. He can’t go by the house anymore or the judge will give him time. “You’re a young man,” he said before suspending Glenn’s sentence. “If I were you I would cut my losses and move on to the next part of my life.”

  Glenn’s driven past the road, watching for Brock’s car. He knows that Annie’s back on nights, which means she and Barb have patched things up. Deep in the morning, when he wakes to take a piss, he thinks of her alone in the house, asleep, her father’s revolver on the night table by her head. He thinks of Tara’s room and the snow blowing over her grave. His truck is outside; Bomber’s asleep on a pile of dirty clothes. Glenn gets into the warm bed and lies on his back, open-eyed.

  “I wish you would tell me what to do,” he prays.

  Late the next afternoon, as he’s working on Tara’s chin, he suddenly stops and puts down his pencil. The photo is from the mall package, the last pictures they have of her. He’s never given Annie or her mother a set. He takes two of each print—the wallets, the five-by-sevens and eight-by-tens—and fits them into an envelope.

  In the truck he decides it’s not enou
gh, pulls a U-turn and heads for the mall. It takes him a while to find a store that sells frames. He only has enough money for one of the nicer large ones, and he needs two. He asks the cashier if they take checks.

  “All major credit cards,” she offers.

  “I don’t have any of those,” Glenn says.

  A line is piling up behind him.

  “I can hold them for you.” The cashier moves to take the frames, but Glenn says, “That’s all right,” and picks them off the counter and walks out of the store.

  “Sir,” he hears her call, “sir!” but he’s running, dodging the shuffling holiday shoppers. It’s funny how they part to let him through. It makes Glenn laugh.

  Annie is bringing in a busbox of fruit cups and saucers when Barb says she has a phone call. She swings the box off her shoulder and down to the counter where Mark the dishwasher begins emptying it, cramming the untouched melon balls and strawberry halves into the Insinkerator with his bandaged hands. She wipes her own on her apron before taking the phone.

  “Glenn was just here,” her mother says. “I thought I should warn you.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. He brought over those pictures he had taken, do you remember those?”

  Annie doesn’t.

  “Of Tara,” her mother explains reluctantly. “They’re very nice. He’s had one framed or framed it himself, I’m not sure. I told him I could take a set for you, but he didn’t want to leave them with me.”

  “Did you call the police?”