Diane Davidson - Tough Cookie

Foul-smelling exhaust and the roar of the snowmobile engine announced we were about to go uphill. The snow was coming down so hard it seemed impossible to breathe. Glancing back at my wreck of a van, I thanked God that Arch had not been with me.

Crap , I thought crazily as the snowmobile hauled me up the hill, Tom’s damn skis are still in the van. Leave them , I thought just as quickly. They’ve caused enough trouble already .

Paramedics bustled me into the ambulance. One tended to me and monitored all my signs, while the other asked how I was doing.

“Not very well,” I said. “Not very well at all.”

Once we arrived at the clinic, my doctor checked for internal injuries and put a butterfly bandage on my arm. She told the ambulance driver to take me home. I should call her that night if I felt worse. I either thought or said, Welcome to Aspen Meadow, an old-fashioned kind of town .

This, then, was the scene that Marla told me she witnessed from the front seat of her Mercedes, parked in front of our house: an ambulance driving up—she knew I’d be in it, she said drily—followed by two handsome paramedics coaching me down onto our sidewalk. Me hollering that I was fine, to quit touching my arm. According to Marla, the hunky paramedics wisely declined to comment.

Beneath her fur coat, Marla’s bulky body featured one of her pre-Christmas outfits, a forest-green silk shift highlighted with silver and gold threads, plus matching suede boots. She clucked, fussed, tossed her brown curls, and asked how I’d hurt myself this time. She shook her head when I said I’d been fine when I left Killdeer, but then there’d been this pileup.…

She said I shouldn’t have been driving. My van hacked and sputtered just getting across town, she pointed out. Forget making it home from a mountainous ski area. In a blizzard, no less. I agreed with her—what else was I supposed to do?—while she fixed me tea. As I drank a cup of strong, delicious English Breakfast, Marla brought a merlot out of our pantry. It had been a gift from Arthur Wakefield, who’d commanded me to sample it only with roast beef. Because of her heart medication, she couldn’t have any. But she felt strongly that I should have some.

As I was finishing my first no-meat-accompaniment glass of wine, Tom called. I filled him in on my latest accident without too much detail, ignoring Marla’s smirks. Tom said he was bringing Arch home from Todd’s. My son was worried about me; he’d changed his mind about staying with Todd and wanted to be in his own place. Tom also said he’d called Julian. Julian was skipping his night of old films to join us for dinner—dinner that he would fix.

Marla told me to sit still while she set our oak kitchen table. She lamented that the library board was having a dinner meeting that evening, so she wouldn’t be joining us. I watched her work. No question about it, the glass of merlot was killing the pain in my arm. I’d have to suggest tea with it to Arthur instead of beef…. Marla hugged me gently and left, promising to call.

Two hours later, Tom, Julian, Arch, and I dug into Julian’s succulent, lemon-and-garlic-laced sautéed jumbo shrimp—his scrumptious version of scampi—served over spinach fettucine. I took a good look at Julian. His handsome, haggard face, dark-circled eyes, and ear-length brown hair gave him the look of a typical sleep-deprived college student.

He sensed my mood. “Don’t you like the shrimp?” he asked earnestly.

“It’s out of this world,” I replied, and meant it. But the events of the day had taken away my appetite. Arch and Tom, their mouths full, made mm-mm noises.

Julian put down his fork. “Goldy, now that your van’s totaled, I want you to take my Rover. If I stay in Boulder, I don’t need it.” Julian’s deluxe white Range Rover had been a gift from former employers. Before I could protest, he persisted: “My apprenticeship pays enough for me to share an apartment with some friends I’ve made. And I will be able to get around, oh mother of all mother hens.”

“Julian,” I murmured, “don’t. Who are these friends , anyway?”

He laughed while Tom looked doubtful. Arch, stricken, exclaimed, “So you’re moving out? You’re leaving us?”

“Guys!” cried Julian. “If you’re going to miss me so much, I’ll come back every weekend!”

We agreed that I would take the Rover, and I thanked him. Julian beamed. I didn’t know how difficult it would be to drive that vehicle for a personal chef assignment, especially with a bandaged arm. But the Rover was luxurious. More importantly, it had four-wheel drive. Julian then further mollified us with helpings of his pears poached in red wine and cinnamon sticks, surrounded with golden pools of crème anglaise. The first mouthful of juicy, spiced pear accompanied by the silky custard sauce was almost enough to make me forget my troubles. Still, I found that I couldn’t take more than three bites.

When the dishes were cleared, I searched for and found a bottle of generic buffered aspirin. Tom announced that he was doing the dishes, no easy task, as our lack of kitchen drains still dictated use of the ground-floor tub. I was to relax, he insisted, and Arch and Julian should go do something fun.

Julian opened his backpack and pulled out a foil-wrapped package of his trademark fudge dotted with sun-dried tart cherries. I declined any, but Tom took two pieces before clearing the plates. With a mischievous smile, Julian offered a chunk to Arch. “Hey, buddy, how about a second dessert? Better yet, how’bout I fix a batch of this Christmas fudge for Lettie? I can put in crushed peppermint drops instead of cherries.”

Arch shot him a dark look. “No, thanks.” Lettie was Arch’s girlfriend, or at least he had been “going out with” this lovely, long-legged blond fourteen-year-old—the two never actually went anywhere—at the end of summer. To me, of course, Arch provided no updates on the status of the relationship. My only indications that he had any social life at all at Elk Park Prep were the carefully folded notes I found in his pants pockets when I was emptying them in the laundry room. Fearful that these papers were homework assignments that he would later accuse me of tossing—this had happened—I always unfolded them enough to read the first line. If Arch’s small, vertical handwriting began, This class sucks! then I knew to toss the paper. He was communicating with somebody , anyway. Still, if we needed to plan for an additional Christmas present—Arch was notoriously lastminute on these things—I needed to know.

“So, is Lettie still in the picture?” I asked, noncom-mittally.

“Don’t worry about it, Mom.” Arch’s eyes gleamed behind his glasses as he informed Julian, who now seemed repentant that he’d brought Lettie into the conversation, that he had something to show him. The boys disappeared. I swallowed three aspirin and wondered if there was any chance they could be contemplating Arch’s ninth-grade reading assignment in Elizabethan poetry, or the homemade quantum mechanics experiment he was supposed to devise for his physics class. Probably not.

“Are you all right?” Tom said quietly, once he’d filled the bathtub with soapy water and the dishes were soaking. “You hardly ate a bite.”

The aspirins weren’t kicking in. “No, I’m not all right. But I will be soon. Thanks for asking.” I wiggled my unfeeling fingers, rubbed my rapidly-blackening elbow, then tried and failed to move my neck from side to side. If I hadn’t broken anything, how come everything hurt so much? Tom came over and gave me a healing kiss.

Just before eight o’clock, a state patrolman knocked on our door. Into our kitchen Tom ushered a tall, corpulent man with black hair so short and thin it looked like someone had ground pepper over his scalp. His name was Vance, and he wanted me to write down all I remembered about the accident. I scribbled what I remembered of the blur of events: cars skidding every which way, my inability to see what happened, being hit from behind, skidding, being smacked again and again and again. I’d hit another vehicle, crashed through the guardrail, and sailed down the hill. I begged for information about the truck’s driver. The cop announced glumly that he’d died. My heart ached.