He walked back across my yard to the side stairs.
He paused at the bottom. The cold had gotten worse in the last few minutes. The wind had picked up. The smell of the coming blizzard was in the air — that sweet metal smell, the smell of pressure changing.
He did not look at me.
He said, “Go inside, Maple.”
He went up the stairs. Two at a time. Quick. Efficient.
His door clicked shut. The light in the apartment went off twenty seconds later.
I sat on the porch in his jacket with my cold tea in my hands. The jacket smelled like cedar and cold air and something else I refused to name. Something like intention. Something like someone was trying to tell me something.
I sat there for a long time. The tea got cold. The cup got cold. My hands got cold inside the warm jacket.
I did not, for the record, go inside.
I sat there until my tea was so cold there was a thin film of milk on the surface, and then I sat there a little longer, and then I sat there long enough to hear my grandmother’s voice from somewhere — from the porch boards, from the light in the kitchen window behind me, from the inside lining of the jacket of a man I had known for two days and did not understand and was going to fall in love with whether I wanted to or not — say, the way she had used to say it from her chair in the kitchen when I was nine,honey, you are going to catch a cold.
I went inside.
I hung the jacket on the back of her old chair.
I stood in the kitchen looking at the jacket for what was probably four minutes, but felt like more. The jacket was draped over the chair. It was taking up space. It was telling a story.
I picked up my phone.
The text from Mira from this afternoon was still open:foreclosure clock?
I typed:eighty-five days.
She wrote back instantly:tell the man.
I turned the phone face down on the counter.
I did not tell the man. I did not go across the yard. I did not knock on his door. I did not do any of the things that would have been brave.
I went to bed wearing two sweaters because his jacket was on the chair and that, at twenty-six years old, on a Wednesday in January, in a house my grandmother left me, in a town that was about to be buried in eighteen inches of snow, was not — for reasons that a smarter woman would have already worked out — something I was ready to do.
Not yet.
4
KNOX
The television in the Frostbite Arena locker room was showing a map of Minnesota colored in shades of red and purple. The meteorologist was pointing at a block of weather that covered the entire northwest quadrant and then some. A historic system. Once-in-a-decade. The terminology had shifted sometime between the overnight briefing and now. Now they were using words likecatastrophic.
I had been listening since five-thirty in the morning.
I had not slept. The bed in Maple Sutton’s grandmother’s apartment had been too small and the dark too complete and my brother had been there in the way he was always there now—a weight in the chest, a name I did not say out loud. I had gotten up at three. Had made coffee in the kitchen of the small clean apartment that smelled like cedar because it had been loved and maintained for as long as the woman who loved it was alive. I had sat at the table with the coffee and a stack of printouts — the team’s forward roster, the league standings, the play-by-play logs from the first three games — and I had not read any of them.
I had been thinking about the woman in the house twenty feet from me, wearing his jacket to bed because the man in the weather report was wrong and seventeen inches was going to be twenty-four by morning and the power was going to go out and her furnace had never been updated past 1997.
By four-thirty I had driven to the rink.
By five-thirty I was watching the television with my arms crossed and my jaw tight and the understanding that something was about to change.
Maddox came in at five forty-two. Beckham at five-fifty. The rest of the team trickled in starting at six. By six-forty-five the entire front office and coaching staff had assembled itself in front of the television, and the meteorologist was pointing at the exact moment the system made landfall.
