I also knew that the diner was one block off the lake, and the diner was old, and the diner’s furnace was probably newer than the woman who ran it was old, but probably not by much.
I said, “The diner girl.”
Maddox said, “Is fine. She has a propane stove.”
“That does not mean the house is heated.”
“Knox.”
I did not answer.
I left.
I walked out of the locker room and down the corridor and through the commons and out the side door into the weather that was starting to thicken. Not snow yet. Clouds. Wind. The smell of it. The barometric pressure sitting heavy on my shoulders.
I drove to the hardware store.
The drive took ten minutes. The sky was going dark faster now. The clouds were moving in like something alive. The wind had picked up to the point where it was starting to push the truck sideways on the straightaways.
The hardware store in Frostbite Falls was on the same block as the bank and the post office, a rectangle of brick and single-pane windows that had been there since before I was born. The windows were old enough that they rattled when the wind hit them. There were snow drifts piling up against the storefront. I parked and went in, letting the wind push the door shut behind me.
The man at the counter was old. Seventy, maybe. Had the look of someone who had been born in Minnesota and was going to stay in Minnesota even if Minnesota killed him. His name tag saidFrank, and he had been running this place long enough to see things change and then change back again.
“Morning,” the man said. His voice was the voice of someone who knew everybody and their business.
I did not answer with words. I did not have time for conversation.
I walked the aisles. I picked up a generator. The small one, not the massive one, because I had a truck and the massive one was going to be a logistics problem. I added a second space heater. Not matching the one she had. A newer model. Quieter. I knew the brand because my grandmother had used one in Saint Paul when she came to visit Caleb and me in 1998. She had saidthis one does not smell like burning dust,and she had been right.
I added bottled water. Five gallon jugs. Three of them. I added canned food. Beans. Soup. Chili. Things that required heat but provided it. I added a can of coffee. A box of matches. A flashlight. A battery-powered radio.
I added things I was not sure she needed, because the storm was going to last three days and three days was a long time to spend in a house that was about to lose its heat, and she was going to be alone, and I was going to be two blocks away pretending to read plays.
I loaded it all into the cart.
At the register, the old man looked at the pile and looked at me.
“That for the rink shelter,” the man said.
“No.”
“For personal use.”
“No.”
The old man rang it up anyway. He did not ask more questions. He was the kind of man who understood that some information came from silence, and some men preferred the sound of it.
The bill was four hundred thirty-seven dollars.
I paid it in cash. I always paid in cash. I had learned that somewhere in the thirteen years I had been not drinking. That cash was a kind of visibility, that showing people the actual weight of your spending kept you honest. I counted out the bills. I did not tip. I loaded the bags myself.
I drove to Maple’s house.
I parked in the street, not the driveway. I did not want her to think I was staying. I did not want her to think anything at all until I was gone. I unloaded the generator and the space heater and the water and the cans and the other things. I set them all in the mudroom — the small room between the house and the garage where coats lived and the door to the basement was and where her grandmother’s gardening tools still hung on hooks — and I did not knock. I did not announce myself.
I placed the generator on the far side, heavy and deliberate. I set the space heater next to the door where the cold wascoming in, positioned so that when she opened the mudroom door tomorrow morning the first thing she would see was heat. I positioned the water in the middle, the five-gallon jugs like sentries. I arranged the cans on the washer in a pyramid — five on the bottom, one on top. Tidy. Organized. The kind of arrangement that would be impossible to ignore. The kind of arrangement that said: I have thought about your survival. I have gone out in weather. I have spent money I have not spent in two years on a woman I have known for three days.
I closed the door softly and walked back to my truck without looking at the house.
