Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [85]
In the car my father tells my grandmother about finding the baby and about the detective and about Charlotte coming to our house. He tells her about his visit to the police station, about Charlotte’s being in jail. My grandmother is shocked and a little frightened. My father must also tell her that I got my period, because when she comes in, she gives me the kind of hug I haven’t had in a long time, with a little rocking back and forth. She has fragile white skin with spots on her cheeks and forehead. She smells like the lavender sachet she will put in my stocking. I think her teeth are false, but I don’t know for sure. She’s a good person to hug, because her body fills up all the empty spaces.
She hardly has her coat off before she’s looking inside the cabinets and the fridge to see if my father has bought all the right ingredients for the Christmas Eve dinner. I can hear her ticking items off under her breath: pearl onions; nutmeg; beef broth. She has brought her own apron, her own potato peeler. She gives me the job of peeling the potatoes with the new peeler, which works so well I don’t mind the chore. I keep the water running at a slow trickle from the tap because it makes the peeling and the cleaning easier. Beside me my grandmother is cutting the tough skin off the turnips. She has a blade that’s about a foot long, the kind that might figure in a horror movie. She digs into the turnip with both hands on the back of the blade and pushes down. The knife makes a hard thwap against the cutting board. I’m surprised at the strength in her arms. From behind, my grandmother is one large mass with a small head of tight gray curls. From the side, she is almost pretty.
“I got my period,” I say.
My grandmother sets the knife down and wipes her hands on her apron. She pretends she doesn’t already know. She envelops me in her arms. I still have a peeler and a potato in my hands.
“How do you feel?” she asks, holding me at arm’s length.
“Good,” I say. “I had cramps, but I don’t now.”
“Do you have pads?”
I nod.
“Do you need any help?”
“I don’t think so,” I say.
She puts her fingers under my chin and raises my face to hers. “If you ever want to talk about anything, you just have to ask me. It’s been a long time since I had any bother with that, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know all about what to do.”
She gives me another hug, and I feel in her squeeze a reluctance to let me go.
“Grammie,” I say after a time.
“What is it, sweetie?”
“Do you know what pfeffernusse is?”
While my grandmother cooks, my father and I go out into the woods to cut down a tree. I worry that we’ve waited too long; it’s late afternoon, and the sun is about to set. We have hundreds of trees to choose from; the problem will be clearing away the snow around it so that we can bring it inside. We both carry shovels, and my father has an ax.
Neither one of us says a word the entire time we are in the woods. The silence seems perfectly natural and comfortable and doesn’t register until later that night. We are on snowshoes, and I follow in his footsteps. I have a shovel in one hand, so I can’t put my thumbs and forefingers together, but I’m clicking pictures all the same. Of pink snow crawling up the side of a tree. Of the tips of the pines, rust-colored, on fire. Of tiny arrowhead tracks that skitter around a bush. My father stops and shakes the branches of what looks like a pointed bush. He