The knock came at ten minutes before five in the morning, and I knew whose knuckles those were before I ever pulled the curtain back.
You learn a person’s knock the way you learn their walk across a kitchen floor. Garrison always knocked like a man who did not expect to be kept waiting, three hard raps close together, the last one a little louder, as if the door itself owed him something. I had heard that knock on my own front door maybe four times in eleven years. Garrison did not come to my house. My house was where the snowblower lived.
So I stood in my nightgown and my dead husband’s flannel robe, one hand flat against the cold plaster of the hallway wall, and I listened to my son in law knock in the middle of the worst storm the county had seen in six years, and I did not hurry.
Let me back up. You will not understand why I stood there so long, letting the boy freeze on my steps, unless I tell you the whole of it, and the whole of it starts a long way back from that door.
My name is Vesta. I am seventy one years old. I have lived on this place, sixty acres and a farmhouse on a county road with no name that anybody uses, for forty three years, and I have lived on it alone for the last eleven, since my husband Foss went to sleep in our bed on an ordinary Thursday in March and did not wake up on Friday. He was sixty six. He had spent that whole last Thursday fixing the float in the stock tank so the horses we did not have anymore would have water we did not need, because that was Foss, he could not stand a thing being broken even when it did not matter, and he came in at dusk with his hands cracked from the cold and I made him hold them under warm water at the sink. That was the last thing I ever did for him. Warmed his hands under the tap. Twelve hours later he was gone.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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