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Mountains and forests and valleys, snow drenched, made a winter painting, all Americana. She drove and wound through the dream of it, and felt something nearly release when the moon—just a slice of it—broke through the clouds to drop its blue light on the white.
She’d hiked the forest with her grandfather on rare and all-too-short summer visits. He knew every trail. It struck her that she missed him more here as she drove closer to where he’d lived his life than she did anywhere else.
He’d listened to her dreams.
To be fair, so had her grandmother and her mother. Though her mother had always seemed just a little distracted. But Pa had listened, as if nothing else existed in that moment but her words and wishes.
She thought of him now as she traveled through his world and remembered the little things he’d taught her.
How to hammer a nail without banging her thumb. How to use a compass. How to recognize a deer print, a bear’s. How to fish, something she did not for pleasure but just to spend time with him.
He wouldn’t be here this time, she realized, and that cold, hard fact ached in her heart.
She pushed on, veering west with the road out of the forest, through the towns, their outskirts, the villages and theirs.
And at last, at last, nearly ten hours after she’d begun, she came to the sturdy old Tudor riding its slope of snow with lights shining in the windows, smoke curling from its pair of chimneys.
After parking in front of the garage, heaving a sigh that she’d made it, she got out on her rubbery legs to drag her pair of suitcases out of the car.
The cold cut like knives sheathed in ice, and the moan of the wind crackled through the frozen trees.
But they’d blown the snow off the drive, away from the wide bricked path. At her limit, she bumped the suitcases up the pair of steps to the covered entryway and knocked.
The door opened quickly, told her they’d been waiting. In an instant it hit her, that study in shared DNA. So alike, the slim builds, the bold blue eyes, the beautiful forever bones of their faces.
An instant more enfolded her in female arms, the scent of women.
“Close out that cold, Audrey. Let me get a look at this girl.”
Olivia Nash took Morgan’s shoulders to hold her back and take a good study. “Worn to the nub, aren’t you?”
“Long drive, Gram.”
“Well, get that coat off. We’ll get some stew in you. I’d say whiskey with it, but you never had a taste for it as I recall.”
Her mother took her coat, scarf, hat, then stood holding them, taking her own good study. “How about some wine to go with that stew?”
“That’d be great.” Though she didn’t want either. She wanted bed and a dark room.
But she let herself be handled, taken from the foyer, past the living room with its roaring fire, then the study that had once been her grandfather’s retreat, into what they’d remodeled into a great room with its cozy lounge, its dining area, its spacious kitchen that opened to the snowy yard and woods beyond.
All pin neat and, reflecting the two women who lived there, both practical and female.
“Sit right there at the counter,” Olivia ordered. “Audrey, you get the wine, I’ll get the stew.”
They bustled, working in a way that told Morgan they knew how to work together, be together, live together.
Her grandmother had let her hair go gray as steel—like her spine—wore it short as a boy’s. She didn’t move, in Morgan’s estimation, like a woman who had seventy in the rearview mirror.
From the pot on the shining stove top, she ladled twice as much stew as Morgan could have eaten on her best day.
Audrey put a glass of deep red wine on the counter, ran a hand over Morgan’s hair. “We’ve got fresh sourdough bread, too. I baked it this morning.”
“Baked it?”
“A friend gave me the starter last fall, so I needed to at least try. I like it, and I’ve gotten good at it. I think.”
She cut a generous slice from a round on the cutting board.
