lucky frog, long dead and tanned by long-gone air. How many years had he kept this?
There was other stuff in the pocket and although Evelyn held the entire frog between her fingers, could see its squashed diamond completeness, a dread passed through her that there would be half a frog left behind. But there was just a scrunkled lift-pass sticker and two barley sugars. Daniel wore his lift pass around his neck; he was so known here that his whole face was a lift pass, and the date on this one was from last year, and the last mountain, before she had caught up with him.
Evelyn had never touched the frog before and this was the first time she’d taken a close look. It had no smell; all she could detect on her fingers was the wet-fleece scent from the inside of the ski gloves. There was the sound of boots being scraped and stamped on the grill outside. The new family came in the door and they smiled, and exchanged hellos in each other’s languages. The father pulled his dark blue beanie off and batted snow from it, his fine blond hair sticking out crazily from his head. Evelyn finished pulling the sheepskin boots on and nodded at the family once more before climbing the pine stairs to the body of the chalet. The frog was in her pocket now.
She called a greeting to Daniel and he called back from somewhere in the hut. Evelyn tightened her ponytail and washed her hands under the kitchen tap. While she waited to feel his warmth behind her, to be enveloped in his arms, Evelyn tried to focus on the food. The onions in the wicker basket were firm, golden orbs, crunchy green beneath the skin where the knife sliced in and left pungent milky droplets on the chopping board. At the industrial-sized oven she turned on the dials, stiff with trapped food crumbs, and kept chopping. The chopped onions were soft and translucent in the frying pan. The kitchen smelled of their cooking and of melted cheese. There was a tumbling sound as she tipped dried macaroni into the boiling water, which fizzed up and almost over the rim of the saucepan in a rush of white froth. The salt shaker clogged in the steam. She put the macaroni cheese in the oven and started on the birthday cake. She cut adze-shaped chunks of butter and wiped them off the knife with a finger into a large bowl with a chip out of its rim the size of a fingernail. The fine white sugar poured into a peak on top of the butter, a mountain in the bowl. She sniffed the wooden spoon, which smelled of onions, and scrubbed it under hot water then used it to beat the butter and sugar together hard. The eggs were thick-shelled, hard to crack, with a taut matt skin between each shell and the contents. In the bowl they created a separated viscous swirl with the creamed-butter mixture, the yolk trailing through the pale butter, the transparent whites floating jellyishly around the surface. The fragments of shell were tacky and sharp when Evelyn carried them in cupped palms to the rubbish bin. She sifted flour and baking powder over the wet mixture and a fine dust sprayed over the bench, down her apron and onto the floor. The vanilla essence bottle was empty; she shook it over the bowl but only that sweet, oozy smell wafted out, and she threw the bottle over to the bin, and it bounced off the rim and skittered along the floor.
Daniel was not in the bedroom. Evelyn held the banister and swung off the top stair to look down into the entranceway: his boots had gone from the neat row of pairs. In the kitchen she looked at the clustered red heart-shaped strawberries in the plastic punnet the family had brought with them. In winter! She was over the shock of it now.
The family was settled in the lounge, the father on a couch reading to the girl of about eight by his side, the mother and older girl playing a game at the table. There was the hard rattle of blocks inside a plastic shell, and the girl flipped a timer. She said, ‘OK, Mama, go.’ Yellow salt crystals slipped through the timer and the girl scribbled on her paper, an arm crooked over it so nobody could see what she wrote.