Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [47]
I complained incessantly. The school bus could make it only halfway up our road, and the walk was killing me, I said. My bedroom was freezing. The kids were all retarded, and the teacher was lame. There was no outlet for the hair dryer in the upstairs bathroom, and the shower had no pressure. One night, insisting that my father sit in the den with me while I completed my homework, I badgered him to help me and then interrupted him every time he tried to explain an answer. I mauled a math paper with the metal top of a pencil (popping the erasers off with my teeth was a habit I couldn’t break), tearing the paper and creating a furious scribble in the wood of the coffee table beneath it. My father stood and walked out to the barn. For a time I sat with my pencil in hand. I tried to cover over the gouges in the wood with my spit. I followed my father, preparing a defense as I went: it wasn’t fair; I had no friends; the kids were dorks; the house was spooky. I opened the door to the barn and at first couldn’t see a thing. My father hadn’t turned on the lights. But eventually, in the moonlight through the windows, I spotted him. He stood on the other side of the cavernous room, leaning against a wall. Maybe he was simply having a cigarette, but to my eye he looked exhausted and defeated, a man who knows he has lost everything.
I shut the door as quietly as I could and walked back into the house. I sat on the sofa and completed my homework easily, which I could have done all along. I searched through the cupboards and found a tin of cocoa. I boiled water in a saucepan and made two mugs of hot chocolate. I went out to the barn, carrying the mugs, loudly calling, “Dad,” as I went. Before I reached the door, the lights went on. I walked in as though nothing had transpired in the den barely an hour before. “You want some hot chocolate?” I asked.
Together we sat on a bench and blew over our mugs. “This hits the spot,” he said, the effort in his voice to sound cheerful nothing short of heroic. Neither of us made any mention of the fight we’d just had.
“It’s cold in here,” I said.
“I’m going to try to fix up that woodstove,” he said.
“I was thinking I might like to get some posters for my room.”
“There must be a store in Lebanon where you can buy posters,” he said. “We can check it out this weekend.”
“And the other thing I’m going to need,” I say, “is a desk.”
My father nodded.
“What are you going to do for a job?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, “maybe something with my hands.”
I wake to a hush. The wind has stopped; there’s no pinging against the windows, no whooshing against the glass. The world is completely still, as if resting after its long battle the night before. I hop on bare feet to the window because the floor is cold. The sky is gray, and snow still falls.
I put on my slippers and my bathrobe and open my bedroom door. From the kitchen I can hear the sound of the refrigerator closing. Dad must be up, I think.
But it is not my father I find in the kitchen that morning. Charlotte stands at the stove, spatula in hand. She has on the flannel pj’s with the pink and blue bears and her gray angora socks. I study the cables, and for a moment all I can see is the motel room with its bloodied sheets. I look up at Charlotte’s face.
“I’m making French toast,” she says. Her hair is wet and waved in single ringlets down the back of her neck. Her face is scrubbed and shines clean in the overhead light. “Do you drink coffee?”
“No,” I say. The change in Charlotte is unsettling. She seems rested, but it’s more than that. She’s somehow healthier, more robust.
Three plates and silverware have been placed on the counter near the stove. Charlotte covers one of the plates with two pieces of the toast. “I don’t know if you like syrup or not,