Sarah St.Vincent - Ways to Hide in Winter

“Kathleen?”

I turned to find John, the trucker who’d shown up at the Joyride a few weeks earlier.

“Oh,” I said uncertainly. “Hi.”

“Merry Christmas,” he said, extending his hand. A smile creased his face. “Nice to see you. Been a while, eh?”

Not knowing what else to do, I took his hand. “Uh, Merry Christmas,” I replied.

“How you been lately?” he asked, standing in front of me as the other churchgoers—mostly older people—flowed around us.

Did “lately” mean the past few weeks or the past ten years? I thought of my plain room at home, the long days at the store, the stranger as we sat together on the mountaintop. “I’m fine,” I replied. But he didn’t go anywhere, and I soon realized I had no choice but to offer the normal response. “You?”

“Oh, I’m all right—can’t complain.” Despite his bulk, he looked at ease with himself, hands planted in his pockets as he tilted his head back slightly. I had forgotten that he was an inch or two shorter than I was—one of those solid, compact valley men whose impression of strength and immovability doesn’t depend on height. His face had a relaxed, open expression that was somehow startling, perhaps because I almost never saw it on anyone.

“I’m actually back in town for the first time in a while,” he continued casually. “I was living down in North Carolina with my wife, but she—we—got a divorce, and I decided to come back home. Bought a farm out on Route 11, down near Quarry Hill. Beautiful piece of land, about thirty acres. Real nice spread.” He rubbed the stubble on his cheeks. “Don’t tell the priest, though. About the divorce, I mean.” He winked.

“No,” I mumbled vaguely, looking around. “Of course not.” My grandmother was still engrossed in her conversation with the neighbor, which was unusual; there must have been some especially intriguing gossip about somebody she didn’t like.

“I gotta say, it’s good to be back,” John was saying. “I missed this place. You know, we always made fun of it when we were kids, but when you get down to it, there ain’t nowhere like it.”

I stared at him in bafflement. If there was a purpose to his starting a conversation with me, other than some kind of morbid curiosity, I couldn’t see it.

“I think I’ll wind up leasing out most of the land,” he went on, “but I’m definitely keeping the house, even though I don’t really know what I’m going to do with all of it. Not used to having a whole place to myself.” He chuckled.

“Anyway,” he said, “I was wondering if you might like to come over for dinner sometime. Can’t say I really cook much, but I figured I could pull something together. I remember you were always real interesting to talk to, and I thought it might, you know, make the place feel less big. At least for an hour or two.”

Blinking, I stood stupidly with the napkin full of cookies in my hand, at a loss for words.

“Well, I…” I began. My hand opened and closed around the napkin. “Uh, sure,” I stuttered, hoping he understood that I meant “absolutely not.”

“All right, then, I’ll look you up sometime. You take care, now.” Shaking my hand again, he nodded and ambled off.

I looked after him mutely.

“Was that Johnny McCullough? What did he want?”

I turned around to find my grandmother standing behind me, grinning one of her rare grins.

“Nothing,” I said, wondering how she’d managed to sneak around me when I wasn’t looking. “We were just talking. Come on, let’s go.”

With her gripping my arm, we descended the cement steps to the parking lot, the sky a cold, starry vault above us.

We’d barely walked in the door when Beth called. “I’m giving my son a very important lesson in how to decorate a Christmas tree. You want to come over?”

“Yeah, sure,” I replied, still disoriented by what had happened at the church. “I’ll be right there.”

The small ranch house where her parents had lived for as long as I could remember was draped in blinking white Christmas lights. In the driveway, two figures bent with their heads under the open hood of a Mustang, one trim and one with a wide back. When my headlights struck them, they turned around, and Beth’s father—still in the jacket he wore as a maintenance man at the War College—waved welcomingly. “Hey there, Kathy!” he called. “Merry Christmas.”

The larger figure didn’t say anything, but nodded at me from behind his beard, meeting my eyes as I gave a small start. Of course, I thought, he would be here. I knew his relation to the family; I just managed to keep the world of the store so separate from the rest of my life that I sometimes forgot.

“Hey, Mr. Calaman,” I said. “And…Mr. Calaman.”

Beth opened the door, Dylan on her hip. “Are my dad and Jerry still messing around out there?”

“Yeah.” Inside, the house smelled of butter cookies, the Irish recipe that had been passed down from Beth’s great-grandmother.

“Well, boys will be boys, I guess. Not that I believe in any of that claptrap.” She gave me a peck on the cheek. “You look beautiful, lady! Merry Christmas.”

“Thanks—you, too.” She must have just gotten home from work, I thought; she was still in her coffee-stained jeans and full makeup. Her lipstick—the same brilliant scarlet as the poinsettias on the table—left a smudge on my cheek, which she wiped away briskly and automatically with her hand, as if it were a smudge on her child’s face. “Where’s this tree I’ve been hearing about?”

Dylan pointed into the living room, his other hand in his mouth. A real spruce tree stood in the corner, surrounded by open boxes of ornaments. Beth and I set to work while the boy sat solemnly on the sofa, his legs extended, shaking a snow globe.

“We had Mark watching us on the webcam a while ago,” Beth said, “but it’s the middle of the night in Ramadi, so he had to go. There’s something surreal about all that, but at least he was able to be here, sort of. It’s already hard to believe he was actually here just a month ago.” She stood on her toes to hang an ornament shaped like a rocking horse, probably left over from her own childhood.

“Webcam?” I said. “You can do video over the internet?”

She threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, darlin’, you’re in your own world. It’s one of the things I love most about you.”

The ornament fell, and I picked it up for her, hanging it myself. She looked up at me as I reached for the top of the tree.

“So,” she said in a sly tone, “I don’t suppose you have anything to tell me.”

“Like what?”

She bent to rummage through a box with exaggerated nonchalance. “Oh, you know…like something about a new man in your life.”

“What?” Flustered, I fumbled for a reply. “Where did you hear that?”

“Ah-ha! So there is someone.” She pulled out a glass ball. “Uncle Jerry told me.”

I blinked at her in incomprehension. “Jerry?”

“Yep. Apparently he was out hunting and saw you walking in the woods with some tall, skinny guy. That’s what he said, anyway.”

A tremor of surprise ran through me.

“Oh,” I heard myself reply.

“Yeah. I don’t know how he can sit out there in the cold, given the amount of pain he’s in, but evidently he does. My dad keeps trying to get him to stop, but he’s been kind of funny since Joanne left him.” She sat back and put her hands on her hips. “Anyway, dish. Give me details.”

“There aren’t any to give.”

“Oh, come on. I can’t believe you’re holding out on me. Who is he, some hiker?”

I was about to respond, but a timer rang in the kitchen, and she hurried away, Dylan looking after her. There was the sound of an oven door opening, the clattering of a baking sheet.