Snow Angels

by Stewart O'Nan

  “I made coffee.”

  “That was sweet.”

  “Do you want me to bring it in?”

  “That would be nice.”

  I went into the kitchen and brought her coffee back and put it on her night table. She smiled but didn’t touch it.

  “You don’t mind if I stay home today,” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Arthur,” she said, but said nothing more for a while. I stood there in the dim room. The coffee steamed. The minute turned on the clock.

  “I’m just very tired,” she explained. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’ll be all right, I’m just worn out right now.”

  I didn’t know what to say to this.

  “I’ve got to get my bus,” I said.

  “I know. You go ahead. Don’t worry about me.”

  “You don’t have to pick me up. I’ve got practice and then work.”

  “So you’ll be home late.” It seemed more than a disappointment to her. An accusation.

  “The regular time,” I said.

  She turned away, uninterested. “Go. You’ll be late.”

  Outside, it was still dark. Lily was sick again. Lila asked why I was pissed off so early in the morning.

  “Why do you think?” I asked, and then apologized.

  “It’s all right,” she said, and I thought, as we walked up toward the bus stop, that this was another part of my life that my parents were creeping into and ruining. I felt wrong for abandoning my mother, leaving her with the lights out and the shades down, but it was not my fault. Didn’t Dr. Brady tell me to always remember that?

  When I came in that night, my mother was asleep. She’d left the light in the kitchen on. The house was cold. Her coffee mug was in the sink, along with one other dish and a soup spoon. Ice cream, maybe, or cereal. I wondered if she’d left the house all day. I wondered how long this would go on.

  The next morning she was up before me, but in her robe. Eating my eggs, I watched the clock over the sink. She sat across from me, smoking and nursing her coffee. Please get dressed, I thought, please. She caught me looking at her and then the clock and sighed.

  I took a bite of toast and buried my eyes in my plate.

  “I need time, Arthur. Will you give me some time?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  She took her mug to the sink. I kept eating. I was surprised how easily I had given up on her. Now that it was done, I was glad not to discuss it I had endured the moment; I had won. Yet that night, faced with my reflection in the Fry-o-lator, as I tried not to picture the pipe sucking the mitten in, I saw my mother running water over the tip of her cigarette and then tossing the wet butt in the garbage.

  Thursday she saw Dr. Brady while I priced gold chains at Milo Williams and browsed through the True Value for a tool my father might need. The lightpoles were festooned with huge tinsel bells and candles. We didn’t even have a tree, and the colored lights running marquee-like around Woolworth’s windows annoyed me. I got back to the Hot Dog Shoppe on time, afraid of making her wait, but she hadn’t come down yet. The air was heavy with grease. I wasn’t hungry and ordered a cherry Slurpee, and then a lemon-lime when she hadn’t showed. I was almost done with it when she pushed through the door. She had her driving gloves on. In one hand she clutched a tissue. It would never stop, I thought.

  “I think that’s what I needed,” she said in the car, but didn’t explain. Inexplicably, I felt jealous of Dr. Brady. But the next day she went to work, and silently I thanked him.

  Saturday was our last home game and our final try at the tornado. Driving over, my mother wondered if I wanted her to stay and watch. She had never come to any of our games before and she was dressed to go shopping.

  “No,” I said, “that’s all right.”

  “I will if you want me to,” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  She should have stayed, because we actually did the tornado right. We stood sweating on our assigned spots as the crowd rose, then hustled off double-time. Mr. Chervenick pounded us on our backs as we filed into the runway. He leaped between the rows, waving his score. “Tremendous!” he crowed. “You are the ones!” We marched—still with precision, though the show was over—through the parking lot and inside to the gym to change. Our shouts reached down the long, empty halls. When we had come out of our respective locker rooms and gathered wet-haired on the basketball court, Mr. Chervenick addressed us from the bleachers.

  “I am very proud of you. You have all come a very long way since this summer, and I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to work with you. This is a year I will always remember. I hope you will too.”

  “Yeah yeah yeah,” Warren said beside me.

  “Don’t be a jerk,” I said.

  “What’s with you?” he asked after we had given ourselves three cheers. And what could I say—that I liked Mr. Chervenick, that I wished everyone were more like him, even if he was full of shit?

  “Nothing,” I said, and being friends, we let it drop.

  My mother pulled up with a Sears bag in the backseat. I told her about the tornado. She was impressed for a second, then asked what my father and I had planned for the rest of the afternoon.

  “I don’t know,” lied.

  “What time is he coming to pick you up?”

  “Around four?” I said, though we had agreed on it. I even knew what we were going to eat—homemade pizza.

  At home I waited in the living room with the Pitt game on softly. My father was late, which once would have been unusual. He no longer came to the door but just honked. I listened for the chug of his Nova over the play-by-play. By the end of the first quarter it wasn’t close anymore. Tony Dorsett sliced through the Navy secondary, running up his numbers. At halftime my mother closed the door to her room to wrap whatever she’d bought, and I went to the front window. The sun was orange in the trees, shadows stretching across the snow toward our building. The sky was bright high up but fading gray down low. It was the time of day my father would break out the potato chips and dip and the card he bought for a dollar at work and see how his picks were doing. Now, as he had when we were living in our old house, ABC’s Jim Lampley went through the top twenty. I looked in the fridge, going shelf to shelf before getting myself a Pepsi and sitting back down.

  “Do you want me to call him?” my mother said. “It’s almost five-thirty.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I can call him. I don’t mind. He should at least be fulfilling his responsibilities to you.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Call him.”

  I turned back to the set and pretended not to listen to her dial. Pitt had the second string in.

  My mother clacked the receiver down.

  “No answer.”

  I turned to look at her. She picked up and tried again.

  “Nothing,” she shrugged. “This is just like him. I’m sorry, Arthur, I don’t know what’s wrong with your father anymore.”

  “It’s all right,” I said, which was dumb.

  “It’s not all right with me, and it shouldn’t be all right with you.” She started to go on about it, following me down the hall to my room. She stopped in the door. I turned on my stereo, lay down on my bed and put my headphones on. The Who, Quadrophenia, Side 4. The needle traced the record’s shiny edge, the hiss growing into the boom and hush of the ocean. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, my mother had closed the door.

  She tried him again after dinner. I don’t even remember what we had. I heard her dialing and concentrated on the TV. Two firemen in a kitchen saying something—a joke about chili. My mother wasn’t saying anything. Four-alarm chili. The laughtrack laughed.

  “Not there,” she said, and I was angry with her for calling at all. I waited until she had gone to bed to stand outside on the landing and get stoned. I turned my light off and put my headphones on, Side 1 this time.

&nb
sp; Sunday she reached him in the middle of the Steeler game. She announced that she was going to see if he’d returned from wherever he’d been. I pretended I wasn’t interested. Unwinding, the dial clicked.

  “Well,” my mother said loudly in the kitchen. “We were looking for you yesterday.”

  His explanation was not long.

  “Will you be able to make it next Saturday? Seeing that it is the last weekend before Christmas.”

  “That’s good, because your son would like to see you.” She took a deep, satisfying drag of her cigarette, and as she waited for his reply, I thought I saw her smile. She liked this.

  “I don’t want to hear about your problems, Don. I’ve got enough of my own. I could have told you that—I tried to tell you that. Don’t tell me I didn’t try. You’ve made your bed, mister, and whoever does or doesn’t sleep in it is none of my concern. Don’t you dare use her as an excuse for not seeing Arthur, don’t you dare.”

  She was sitting on a stool by the counter, but now she crushed out her butt in the sink and got up to pace.

  “Bullshit,” she said, and laughed. “Do you know what I say? I say good for her. She’s not such a little idiot after all.”

  “No,” she said. “Don, no. No. That is bullshit and you know it. You are not going to turn this around onto me. There is no way.”

  She halted suddenly and put up one hand as if to stop him from talking. “Ha!” she said.

  I quietly moved to my room. I could hear her through the door. Not every word, but enough. I lay down on my bed and looked at my stereo, then at the ice flowers on the bottom of my window. They ran in zigzags like stitches, spiked like barbed wire. Outside, high in the sky, a single ball of a cloud drifted through the blue, dwindling sunward like a runaway balloon. I imagined how Foxwood looked from up there—the miniature buildings and cars and trees—and how the drive up to the bus stop met the county road that cut through snowed-over fields and across smaller blacktops linking farms and trailer parks and auto graveyards until it hit the outskirts of Butler where I used to live. I wondered about our old house, and my old room. Who was in it, and did they feel me there sometimes? I didn’t think so, but in my mind I walked the hallway to the kitchen and down the stairs to the basement, where my father would be watching the game I had just left, and so slowly, savoring every detail on my way, that I no longer heard my mother in the other room.

  “That was your father,” she said when she came in. She was surprised to see me without my headphones. “He apologized for yesterday. He said he’d like to reschedule for next weekend, and I told him it was all right with me if it’s all right with you. Is it?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You know that all of this has nothing to do with you. Don’t be too angry with him. He’s having some problems of his own right now.” She said this with concern, as if she was worried about him. I did not understand why—if she was glad that Marcia had left him, which she was—and decided she was lying about how she felt. She was doing it for my sake when there was no need. Right then, I did not want her to forgive him.

  Monday she was out of the house before me. It was the last week of school, which meant tests followed by lame parties. Band was done, and I was torn between riding the bus home with Lila and punching in early at the Burger Hut. My mother laughed at me and said, yes, she could drive me over to work when she got home. Walking back from the bus stop, I realized I had been working so much that I rarely saw Foxwood by daylight. The roofs steamed. The ruined chapel sat lumpy under snow. When the three of us reached my stairs, Lily kept walking. In the mailbox, along with a few red-enveloped Christmas cards, was a hand-addressed letter that said only “Louise.” It did not have a stamp and was in my father’s hand. It was thick. I buried it in the stack and left everything on the counter.

  We were nearing the shortest day of the year, and as Lila and I necked on my bed, the bright square of light from my window climbed the wall. Have you ever been, Jimi Hendrix asked, have you ever been to Electric Ladyland? Lila’s hair smelled of strawberry shampoo; we were trading a wad of watermelon bubblegum, making a game of hiding it from the other’s tongue. I thought, If I could just stay here.

  A little before five we turned the music off and straightened our clothes and smoothed the bedspread and went into the living room to listen for the Country Squire. My mother came in and said hi to Lila and “Give me five minutes” to me. She riffled through the mail, pausing at my father’s letter, then put the stack back on the counter and headed for the bathroom. I kissed Lila goodbye at the door and watched her away.

  “You two,” my mother commented. “You’d think you were the only people to ever fall in love.”

  Yes, I wanted to say, in a way we were.

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  On the stairs she asked, “Did your father come by with that letter?”

  “I didn’t see him.”

  “You’d tell me if you did.”

  “Yes,” I said defensively.

  “Just want to make sure,” my mother said.

  I worked, totting up my hours like every night at closing. I imagined Lila opening the box and not being able to talk. She would say my name. When Mr. Philbin dropped me off, I looked for the light in her window, but she was asleep. The thought of her warm and peaceful with her glasses off pleased me, made me want to go directly to bed so I could think of her.

  My mother was up, watching TV with a drink. She had my father’s letter spread across the coffee table. Eight or nine pages of his tiny print. My mother waved a page to show it was both sides.

  “Would you look at this?” she said. “Your father has completely flipped his wig.”

  What does it say? I wanted to ask, but didn’t. I figured she would tell me.

  “Oh, he’s lost it this time. He says he’s sorry. Isn’t that rich? Sorry!” She shook her head and puffed long on her cigarette. I looked into the kitchen to see if she’d started a new bottle.

  She picked up a page and held it close. “Listen to this: ‘I see that what I’ve done to you was unfair.’ This is him telling me! I know this already; what is he telling me for?” She threw the page at the table. “He loves me now. He misses us.” She folded her arms and bit her thumbnail. “The fucker!”

  She took a drink.

  “I’m going to go to bed,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, Arthur, I don’t mean to drag you into this. Go to bed. I’m just angry right now, I’ll be fine tomorrow.”

  “Then I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, and she smiled at the joke.

  “Okay.”

  And the next morning she was fine. She went to work, I went to school. Coming home, Lila and I held hands, and Lily sulked. In our mailbox was another letter from my father.

  My mother did not show me this one, or quote from it. She had both of them neatly sealed on the coffee table when I came home. She was calm, almost pleasant, and when the news was over, she suggested we both go to bed.

  Wednesday she received another, and again Thursday. She did not even open the last one because we were late for her appointment with Dr. Brady. She shoved all four into her purse and we hopped in the car.

  “Are you going to be all right with him Saturday?” she asked as we drove along.

  “Sure.”

  “You tell me if you’re uncomfortable about it. You can always call me and I’ll come pick you up.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “I know.” We went along in silence for a while, past fancy ranches and old mobile homes, until she asked, “Why is he doing this to me?”

  I left her at the door of the Hot Dog Shoppe, my wallet heavy with twenties. It was the shortest day of the year; lights dyed the piled snow pink and green. The clerk in Milo Williams knew me by sight. He slid the back of the case open and pulled out the blue velvet box.

  “That’s the one,” I said, and while he giftwrapped it I looked at the trays and trays of ugly engagement rings and w
edding bands.

  My mother was waiting for me in the Hot Dog Shoppe, polishing off a foot-long with brown mustard. Her gloves were off, and I noticed her rings, the tiny diamond and the simple silver band.

  “Not much to do today,” she explained. “How much did you drop on Delilah?”

  When I told her she winced and shook her head. “It’s your money.”

  Friday there was another letter, this one thinner. Bringing it inside, I tried to make out the writing, but couldn’t. Lila suggested we steam it open, which I didn’t find funny. My mother went to her room to open it, and when she came out later, said nothing.

  “She sounds better,” Astrid said over the phone. “What’s happening?”

  Saturday my father was supposed to pick me up at five. At a quarter to, we heard his old Nova rumble up, and then a honk.

  “Be nice to him,” my mother instructed. “He’s having a hard time. Whatever you do, do not mention her. You know who I’m talking about.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She did not come to the door.

  In the car my father apologized and then was quiet. He did not offer to let me drive. I had thought I would be able to see the effects of what he had been through in the last week, to read it in his face, but he had not changed at all. He seemed more like my father now than he did when he was with Marcia, and I thought that was good.

  “So how have you been?” he asked.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Talk to your sister lately?”

  “Yesterday. She’s okay.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “What do you say to pizza?”

  “Pizza’s good.”

  “Then pizza it is,” he said.

  We went to the same place he’d taken me our first Saturday. The front window was sprayed with fake frost and dripping with condensation. Monday was Christmas, and we were the only ones there besides the woman behind the counter. My father ordered and we took off our coats. We got our drinks—him a Duke, me a Fanta grape—and picked a table near the window.

  We talked at length about the Steelers, and briefly about Annie. He wasn’t sure what had happened between her and Glenn Marchand. It was a mystery and a shame. My father said he’d learn more when he went in to work. He’d been out the last couple of days.