[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell “][/title]
There was an ice storm on the last day of December, so wide-reaching it took down both a church steeple by the park and the rotating sign above the all-night, twenty-four-seven laundromat way over there at the edge of town.
Now, it is nine o’clock on the morning of January first, and Ezra McCoy is outside assessing the damage to the trees in his front yard. Mable insisted on planting two Bradford pears when they moved here twelve years ago. He was against it then, and if Mable were still around, he’d show her he was right.
The two trees are split in two. The one on the right side of the driveway is cut down the middle, as if a mother had been tasked with evenly dividing the last slice of pie for her squabbling twins. The tree on the left looks as if it had its head cut off. All that’s left is the stubby trunk.
“Well,” Ezra says, “isn’t that just about perfect.”
There’s a power line down on the ground at John Casey’s place. The Hawkins’ house has a rolled-up newspaper in the yard, encased in ice. It looks like something you’d see at an art show. Something with a message about the end of traditional news outlets, the last issue frozen in time. Ezra has these kinds of thoughts a lot. He is too high-minded for his job as a meter reader for the water department.
Ezra realizes that as soon as the roads are clear, he’ll be at it again. Dodging dogs that bite, fighting rose bushes that cover the water meters, so problematic that he has come to carry a pair of pruning shears with him. He likes the physicality of the job when the weather’s nice, but he hates almost everything else. At thirty-seven, he thought he’d be farther along than this. At thirty-seven, he thought he’d have a desk job and maybe a flat-bottomed boat and a trailer to pull it.
He slip-slides across the yard on his way back to his house. Inside, he sidles up beside his gas fireplace, another thing Mable insisted on that he sees the value in today.
The knock at the front door startles him, and he catches a glimpse of himself in the entryway mirror on his way to the door. He needs a shave. He needs to pick up the living room. He hesitates. Maybe he should pretend he’s not home.
His neighbor from around the corner, Sammie Cutberth, is standing on his porch. She is dressed in Carhart overalls the color of acorns. She has on brown jersey work gloves, a red knit scarf around her neck, a wool coat she’s not buttoned.
“Sammie,” he says as he opens the door.
She stands in his living room, in front of the fire, her hands spread wide to receive the heat. Two windows flank the fireplace and the icy light flooding the small room looks blue.
“I remembered you had a fireplace,” she says, and Ezra feels his face grow hot.
There was about a year after Mable left when he was so lonely it felt as if his skin was crawling. He went through a slew of women, all of them nice as could be just not Mable. During that time, after considerable flirting, he had a disastrous date with Sammie, who cooked him chicken fried steak and mashed
potatoes right in his own kitchen.
He remembers telling her the meal wasn’t as good as what Mable would have made. He remembers the way Sammie’s smile slid off her face, how he could feel her body tense even though she was sitting across from him. She said, “You got no business dating,” and then she got up and left. He cleaned the kitchen alone. He gathered up the whisk she’d brought with her, the crystal tea pitcher. He left it on her doorstep so early one morning it was still black outside.
“Quite a storm,” Ezra says. “I guess you’re without electric.”
“I thought about going to Mama’s up in Chester, but there’s no way I could make it on these roads. It got so cold in my house, I had to leave.” She looks toward the front door. “I tried Annette’s house across the road first, but she’s not there. She must’ve gone somewhere for New Year’s.”
“Annette’s got that son that lives in St. Louis. She’s always going there.” Ezra points to the couch then. “I slept there last night to be close to the fire.”
“I slept under so many quilts, I couldn’t turn over, so I don’t think I got more than an hour.” She touches the delicate skin below her eyes. “I’m sure it shows here and here.”
This is the first time Ezra’s seen Sammie up close in eighteen months, quite a feat for neighbors on this street. He’d started taking the long way to work that bypassed her house. He’d spotted her a few times at Walmart, but he’d always scurried away.
In the light from the window, he can see the tiny lines around her eyes. She looks back at him, lifts her chin like she’s daring him to say a bad word. Ezra looks down at his feet.
“You look pretty as the first day of spring, Sammie,” he says.
Ezra has never been the kind of man to hand out compliments, but he feels the rightness of these words. “Let me get you
something to drink.”
It is easing up on nine thirty in the morning now, but he offers her the Tennessee hard cider he keeps behind the coffee cups in the kitchen cabinet anyway. “Life’s too short not to enjoy it,” Ezra says.
Sammie sits in the plush chair that used to be Mable’s and drinks in tiny sips. She shivers in between. He doesn’t know much about her, but he’d have pegged her for a drinker before today.
“Do you enjoy it?” Sammie asks after a long bout of quiet between the two.
“Enjoy what?”
“Life,” she says.
Ezra thinks for a minute. When Mable was here, his whole purpose was making her happy. He hadn’t stopped to think if he was happy himself. Since then, he’d tried all kinds of things to find happiness, but he was starting to think happiness is something that runs away when you chase it. “No,” he says. “Can’t say that I do.”
Sammie takes another delicate sip. “That’s a shame,” she says, but then she starts to laugh until she doubles over. Holding up her hand, she says, “It’s the alcohol, I swear it is.”
Ezra feels the burn of her laughter. He wonders if she is thinking of the night she cooked dinner for him, of his unkind words. He wonders if he deserves this.
“I owe you an apology,” Ezra says. “That night in the kitchen. I was awful.”
“I knew better,” Sammie says. “I’d been around Mable a little bit. We took a cookie decorating class at the library a few years back. She couldn’t get the hang of piping on the frosting, and it tore her up.
“It was a cookie, for heaven’s sake. I don’t know about Mable, but I planned to eat mine on the way home. Stop and get a McDonald’s Coke, nothing better than a McDonald’s Coke, and I’d eat that cookie while I drove. Heck, I might eat two.”
“I never knew Mable took that class. She was a canyon of secrets is what I think now.”
“So, anyway, when you asked me over, I figured she did everything like those 1950s housewives you see on TV. But then I wondered if you might be tired of perfection.”
Ezra plays a reel of their life inside his head. He sees Mable frowning as she looks at their decorated Christmas tree that didn’t meet her expectations. He sees her standing on the bathroom scale, her face bright with the agony of gaining two pounds. He sees her push his hand away when he tries to hold it in the car.
Outside, the wind blows, a low whistle on a hushed morning. Now and then another tree limb falls, a small explosion that disrupts this frozen world. Sammie sits on the edge of her chair. She’s not wearing makeup. Her hair is wild. Ezra feels a tap on his heart, like a tiny knocking.
“My daddy died when I was six,” Sammie says. “My mama hasn’t remarried. She lives in the house he built on a piece of land that’s too big for her to handle. She wears her wedding ring still. I thought they must have been the happiest couple ever, but then my grandma took me aside one day and told me a different story. One where my daddy stayed gone a lot and my mama cried buckets.
“I know she loved him, but I think she needed to tell herself a different story after he died. I think it was easier to live as if her big love story hollowed her out than to go out there and start writing a new book.”
“Do you think I’m like that?” Ezra asks, and Sammie shrugs. “I have no idea,” she says. “I just know Mable got married again real fast after you, and she’s on Facebook about every day with a picture of her big house and foreign car and one of those designer dogs that are supposed to be pretty but aren’t.”
Sammie stands, a little wobbly, and walks back to the fireplace. “Lord help me, Ezra McCoy, but I still like the look of you.”
“Is that the cider talking or is that you?”
“A more adventurous man wouldn’t ask,” Sammie says, and he remembers the week they talked non-stop on the phone. The week before the fated dinner.
Ezra grips the stocking cap, plants his feet on the floor. He would never kiss her while she’s under the influence of anything but him. But, my word, someday soon he is going to kiss her.
“I like the look of you, Sammie Cutberth,” he says, and he wills himself to stay put.
She looks at him and smiles, and the world seems to thaw as she does it. He wonders if this is what poets strive to capture but never can.
Ezra will spend years replaying this day, the first day of a brand-new year when Sammie Cutberth knocked on his door, and he opened it. That, he will decide, was the best decision of his life.
