第7章 Seven Kinds of Snow

The March book was called *Seven Kinds of Snow*, and Maeve Kilbourne had not opened it, because the snow had opened her. It came on the first Thursday, the heavy wet kind that closes the schools and the day program and the roads out of the valley. Maeve woke to the phone tree and a gray window and Howard already up, standing at the bedroom door in his pajamas, asking whether it was a workday. "No," she said. "Snow day." "Whose?" "Everyone's." He considered that. He had been a man who liked a snow day — genuinely liked it, the way some men like a holiday because the rules are lifted. He would make pancakes and shovel the walk and then sit in the kitchen window making predictions about the river that were usually right. The year the ice went out early, he had called it three days before it happened, and the neighbors had teased him about it for years, and he had pretended to mind. Now he sat on the edge of the bed and did not know what a snow day was for. She got him dressed. She made the pancakes, because she was not ready to give them up, and he ate them without comment. She set him in the front room with the television on and the volume up, and she went out to shovel, because the walk had to be cleared and because the shoveling was, in a way she was not proud of, the best hour of her week. She was out for fifty minutes. She came in with her coat steaming and her back aching and the front room empty. The television was still on. His boots were by the door, which was worse than if they had been missing, because it meant he had put on his boots and gone out with some plan in his head. She checked the bathroom, the back bedroom, the cellar, the shed. She checked the shed twice, because the first time she only looked from the door, and the second time she went all the way in among the paint cans and the lawn mower and said his name. Then she called the town police, and the woman who answered said, *how long,* and Maeve said, *forty minutes,* and the woman said, *we'll put it out,* in a tone that told her forty minutes was not very long and also that forty minutes was an eternity, depending on which part of the sentence you believed. She walked the street. The snow had stopped and the plow had come through, and the town was white and cut into clean tunnels. She walked to the corner. She walked to the church. She walked toward the school, and then she stopped in the middle of the road because she understood something and wished she had not, and turned and went the other way, down Main, past the pharmacy and the insurance office and the bakery, toward the old brick building at the end, which had been an insurance agency for forty years and was now a chiropractor and a title company and a dental office, and where Howard had kept books in a corner office with a window, before he forgot which window. He was standing in front of it in his boots and his coat over his pajamas, looking up at the second floor. Two police officers were with him already. A neighbor had seen him and called. He was not upset. That was the part Maeve could not get past later, in the small hours: he was standing there quietly in the snow, looking up at the window of the office he had gone to every day for thirty-one years, and he could not tell anyone why. "Maeve," he said, when he saw her. "I couldn't find my keys." That was all. She put her arm through his and thanked the officers and walked him home through the tunnels in the snow, and he said the word *keys* three more times, and then he said, "You made pancakes," and she said, "I did," and he said, "Good," and that was the whole conversation. --- The March meeting was four days later, and Maeve came because staying home would have been a form of surrender she was not willing to make. She had not read *Seven Kinds of Snow*. She said so, plainly, the way she always did, and nobody pressed. But they had noticed the change in her — they were readers, all of them, they noticed everything — and when the tea was poured and the small talk ran out, and Katia had read her passage, and Vernon had read his, Maeve eventually said it, because the room had a way of making the unsaid feel heavier than the said. "Howard went out of the house on Thursday," she said. "In the snow. I found him downtown, standing in front of his old office. He didn't know why he was there." Nobody said they were sorry. They had learned that one. They had all been sorry at someone in this town, and none of them remembered the sorriness helping. So they asked questions instead, small real ones, which is a better way to love people. "How far?" Vernon asked. "Six blocks. He crossed Main." "Did he fall?" "No." "Good," Vernon said. "Six blocks and no fall is not nothing." "How did he seem?" Junie asked. "Calm," Maeve said, and her voice did something on the word. "That's the part that scares me. He was calm. He was doing a thing he'd done ten thousand times. He was going to work. In his head he was going to work, and it was Thursday, and it was a workday, and he was fine." "That's not the worst way to go missing," Katia said. They all looked at her. She had spoken quietly, and now she went on, in her careful unhurried English, as if she had checked the words in a dictionary on the way to her mouth and found them sound. "Where I worked before," Katia said, "I took care of my mother for four years. In the country I left. She had this also. Not so young. But the same." She looked at Maeve and did not smile, which was the right choice. "When she went, she went to the market, always. Three streets. She wanted vegetables. She wanted to cook for my brother who was dead twelve years. She never once went anywhere else. So the neighbors learned. They would walk her back with the vegetables, and she would cook for my brother, and no one told her, because what would it help, telling." Maeve sat very still. "Some days she went out. Some days she did not remember the door. On the days she went, it was not the worst day. It was a day she had a job." Katia folded her hands. "On the door, you can put a bell. The hardware in the county seat, they have it, for a shop door. It is not a lock. It is only a sound. But then you hear, and she — he — has a job, and you have a sound." The room was quiet. "Thank you," Maeve said, when she could. "You do not have to thank me," Katia said. "I wish someone had told me about the bell." --- Afterward, Maeve drove home the long way, down Main, past the old brick building, and looked up at the second-floor window, and then drove on and did not stop. At home, Howard was watching the television, and the day aide was on the couch with her phone, and Maeve paid her and sent her off and made supper. After supper she sat down at the kitchen table with the March book and read the first chapter, which was about a woman who had lived her whole life in a place with seven names for snow — one for the kind that falls on a warm day and makes the branches heavy, one for the kind that squeaks, one for the kind that lies, one for the kind that comes in April and takes the lambs. It was a book about knowing the exact difference between things that looked alike, and Maeve read the first chapter twice, and then went down to the basement and found the old cowbell from the shed and a length of fishing line in the tackle box that had been Howard's father's, and she brought it up and hung it inside the front door, low, so that it would ring, and stood back and looked at it, and decided it looked like a bell that belonged to a house, and went to bed. The February meeting had been the first one Romy had made in a year and a half; the March one, she came in early and set the chairs, and at the end of it she took the ice home because the freezer over the bakery was bigger. None of this was said. It was the kind of thing the circle had always done, out of habit and privacy, and it was a good habit, and it had failed Romy for four months because habit is not the same as asking. Maeve thought about that on the drive home, with the bell ringing behind her at every draft, and she decided that the next time she saw Romy with her hands full she would ask, out loud, whether she needed anything, even if the answer was no. It was a small resolution. It was all she had in her that month, and it would have to do. ---