I stood at the edge of his path and I said, “What are you doing.”
He shoveled one more time. Then he looked at me.
“Clearing the walk.”
“It’s coming back down as fast as you move it.”
“I know.”
“You’re wasting effort.”
“Probably.”
He went back to shoveling.
I watched him shovel for maybe thirty seconds, which was long enough to understand that Knox Kovak was the kind of man who did useless things anyway, because the thing that was not useless was the attempt.
I said, “The apartment is warmer, sugar.”
He did not stop shoveling.
I said, “You have a heater.”
“Two. One in the apartment. One in your mudroom.”
“You got a generator.”
“I did.”
“Why.”
He pushed the shovel through the snow.
“Because your furnace is not going to turn on when the power comes back, and your house is going to freeze, and you are not going to leave just because it is cold.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Maple. Don’t be stupid.”
The wind hit me then, hard enough that I stepped back. Hard enough that I had to lean into it to stay upright. The cold was not cold anymore — it was a thing, a creature, something that was actively trying to move me.
He set the shovel down. He did it carefully, like setting something down carefully was a form of communication. Like he was telling me that he had heard me. That he understood.
“Come on,” he said.
He walked toward the side stairs without waiting to see if I would follow. He did not need to wait. He knew I would follow. He had known it since he had put a generator in my mudroom. He had known it when he left the rink. He had known it when he bought the supplies.
I followed because the alternative was freezing. I followed because the wind was getting worse. I followed because standing on my porch in three sweaters and refusing his help felt like a kind of pride that was going to kill me.
I followed because part of me had been waiting for him to appear on my front walk since the moment he walked into my diner. I had not planned to follow. I had planned to stand in the snow and tell him I was fine, that I had a diner with a propane stove, that I did not need his generator, that I did not understand what had happened in my mudroom or what it meant.
But he was already at the top of the stairs, holding the door open, and the apartment behind him was warm, and I could see the heater running, see the light inside, see the small table where he had made coffee at four in the morning, probably, or five, or whenever his sleep had failed and he had decided to prepare for the world to end.
I climbed the stairs. The snow was packing down under my boots. The wind was trying to push me sideways. I made it to the top and Knox held the door open for me without speaking.
I went inside.
The apartment was warm the way the inside of your mouth is warm — alive and moving and completely at odds with the frozen world outside the windows. The shock of warmth mademe gasp. My lungs expanded. My body, which had been coiled in on itself for two hours, suddenly remembered that it could uncurl.
