Sarah St.Vincent - Ways to Hide in Winter

“Not sure if you remember, but we’d talked about you coming over for dinner sometime. I was wondering if you might like to come down on Sunday. I gotta get my engine fixed, but after that, I’m around. I’d love to show you the place.”

I held the phone against my shoulder, picturing him as he had been that evening, standing there solidly in his jeans and flannel shirt.

“Well,” I said.

The stranger’s face appeared in my mind, wearing that expression that was almost too patient, too compassionate, as if I were the one to be pitied and helped. You are very smart. But not smart enough.

My stomach tightened.

“Sure,” I said into the phone. “Sure, I’d like that. What time?”

The face in the rearview mirror was one I both avoided and couldn’t stop looking at. Beth had made me up in pinks: blush, lipstick, a blue shirt with pink trim she’d brought over to my grandmother’s house.

“Ugh,” I’d said as she’d perched on the bathroom counter upstairs, dusting my face with various brushes. “I’m really not a pink person.”

“Baloney. It looks great,” she’d said, her hands moving in swoops and circles as a large brush tickled my face. “You wouldn’t want anything darker—it would wash you out.”

My grandmother’s voice had reached us from the living room. “Kathleen!”

Beth had jumped, and we’d looked at each other and laughed.

“How does she do it?” Beth had whispered. “I could be a drill sergeant and she’d still scare the crap out of me.”

“Yeah, I know. Don’t ask me how she can yell like that when she’s on oxygen.”

My grandmother had bellowed again. “Why isn’t the remote working?”

I’d sighed, and Beth had smiled. Despite the expression on her face, I’d noticed, there were deep circles under her eyes and her skin looked strangely dull, although her voice was as cheerful as ever. Something was wrong, I’d thought, something beyond Mark’s absence. I’d remembered something she’d once told me about one of his furloughs, how he’d spent every night in the car with the engine off and the radio on, staring out into the dark. She could hear the station changing, scanning from talk radio to music, over and over, as if he didn’t know or care what he was hearing. Just voices.

“Remind me what I’m supposed to call your grandmother these days, again?” she’d asked me under her breath.

“Oh, who even knows?” We’d descended the stairs and I’d gently taken the remote from my grandmother’s grip. “You’re holding it upside down,” I’d told her.

She’d taken it back in her claw-like fingers and looked me up and down. “Johnny McCullough,” she’d said after a moment, and I hadn’t been sure if it was a question or an accusation.

“Yes.” I’d told her earlier where I was going and had somehow managed to fend off a longer interrogation. “Don’t forget to take your prednisone. And there’s leftover chicken in the fridge. I’ll be back before too long.”

“I’ll be fine. I’m always fine. You go on.”

The farm where John lived was close to Shippensburg, in a wide stretch of rocky cornfields and winding roads known as Quarry Hill. As I drove, I pulled on a sweatshirt, covering the thin fabric that showed a keyhole of flesh at the throat. I didn’t want him to get the wrong impression—that I normally looked like this, which I definitely didn’t.

Besides, I told myself, he was probably drawn by curiosity more than anything. If I showed up looking as if I were actually taking the whole thing seriously, he would probably just laugh about it later. I would give him the benefit of the doubt, I thought, but I wasn’t going to let him think I was a fool.

There was no town to speak of in Quarry Hill, just a scattering of farmhouses and trailers that were all distant from one another, most of them as worn-out looking as everything else in the valley. But when I found the mailbox with John’s address and turned up a long, rutted driveway, I was startled to see a small but comfortable-looking house, its outside done in a modern-cabin style and its windows glowing.

I parked and stood looking up at it. There were neat blue-and-white curtains, a flagstone walk. This couldn’t be the place, I thought. But a truck cab, shining as if recently washed, was parked on the grass beside me.

The door opened. John emerged, thumbs in his belt loops, smiling.

“Good thing you got four-wheel drive,” he called. “I was worried you wouldn’t make it. Driveway’s hell on smaller cars, that’s for sure.”

“Naw, I made it.” I found myself echoing his drawl.

“Yeah, I can see that. I’m glad.” He was still smiling. “Come on in.”

Awkwardly, I drew nearer. Was I supposed to shake his hand? Let him embrace me? Do nothing? But he solved my dilemma by turning and walking into the house.

I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting; probably something like the inside of just about every other house I’d seen, with the old, mismatched furniture, the chipped mementos on the shelves, the blankets with twelve-point bucks and leaping bass on them, maybe a wind chime dangling from the ceiling. But the inside of John’s house was much like the outside, simple but somehow appealing, with heavy carved furniture he must have gotten from the Mennonites. A large black dog that had been stretched out in front of the fireplace stood up and walked toward us, stopping at a distance and sniffing idly in my direction. Everything looked warm and solid.

I found myself wondering if his wife had ever lived there, had maybe given the place its atmosphere. But no, I thought; he’d said they’d gotten divorced down south somewhere. He must have done all this himself.

He turned to me, reaching out.

“Can I take your coat?” he said.

The next morning, I sat behind the counter shooting rubber bands at the wall. There was a calendar over the sink, one with pictures of rivers and sunsets and the address of Martin’s church printed at the bottom. I took aim at the photo for February, a red barn in the snow, sending my projectiles smacking crisply against the paper. When I ran out, I walked over to the sink and gathered them up again, returning to my seat for another round. The empty squares seemed to taunt me; all I ever did was cross them out, marking them off like a prisoner in a cell or a castaway on an island. I hooked the rubber bands on my forefinger, stretching them back as far as they would go. Smack, smack, smack. After striking the photo, they scattered lifelessly onto the floor.

I was thinking about John, about John’s house. The man who had sat across the table from me, lifting salad onto my plate, both was and wasn’t the man I’d been expecting. The voice was the same, and the scruffy look, the slow grin, but he was, somehow, a settled person, one who was at ease with himself and moved through his home as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The divorce hadn’t exactly been amicable, he’d told me—“She was a real spitfire,” he’d said, with more than a hint of admiration—but it seemed to have made him thoughtful, given him a depth I hadn’t suspected. There was a light in his eyes, an awareness, that made me think he noticed more than he remarked on.

The dinner had lulled me, almost. I had been wary at first; it had felt like a setup, somehow. There were candles, pork roast, pie for dessert: he was overdoing it, I thought, almost embarrassingly so. Yet, as the evening wore on, I had found it difficult to stay on my guard. It was the depth of the house, I thought, the warmth of it, the satisfaction it seemed to take in itself. It was as if it had created a space for me, was waiting for me to join it, to complete it, to sink into it.