again after that.
With each accumulating thought, Bell thrust the shovel forward, hooking it up underneath a too-big hunk of snow, bending over to lend an extra oomph to her maneuvers. As she straightened up, the shovel came up with her, along with its fresh burden of snow. She grunted. She turned, dumping the load next to the sidewalk. At first she’d tried tossing it, but the snow was too heavy, and she ended up just letting it slide off the side. Then she inched forward and did it again: bend, thrust, hook, lift, grunt, dump. Repeat.
Years ago, when she lived in D.C. with Sam and Carla, they had hired a landscaping service to keep the walks and the driveway clear after heavy snowfalls. And the few times since her return here that a major storm had come barreling in, Bell paid a kid in the neighborhood, Ben Fawcett, to handle the aftermath. Trouble was, Ben was away this weekend on a ski trip with his Boy Scout troop.
Standing at her front window just after the deputy’s departure, she had decided at first to ignore the snow on the porch steps and the walk and the sidewalk in front of her house. Just let it be. No one would blame her; her neighbors understood how busy she was, how the prosecutor’s post is a 24/7 deal, how she needed a little down time. They never judged her. It would be okay, right?
No. It would not.
As she had continued to watch, people began trudging out of their houses up and down Shelton Avenue, encased in big plaid coats and thick corduroy pants tucked into blocky black boots and furry hats and earmuffs and insulated gloves, toting shovels and brooms and old blue-tin Maxwell House coffee cans full of salt, attacking the porch steps and sidewalks with a gritty gusto. When they exhaled, their breath was instantly visible. There were moms and dads and small children. There were grandmothers and grandfathers. Even the can’t-miss-a-Sunday churchgoers were out here, digging and clearing. The fancy clothes stayed on coat hangers back in the closet. This was the priority. The pastor would understand.
I’ll be damned, Bell had thought, if I’m going to hang out here at this window and just watch.
She needed to pitch in. She wanted to pitch in. There was something about dramatic weather—a big snow or a shingle-snatching wind or an epic rain—that brought a neighborhood together. Shared misery was a great unifier. And so she had gotten dressed, opened the front door, stepped outside. A clear dome of cold had settled over everything, like a lid on a jar. The air was as crisp as a finger-snap. There was a black-and-white simplicity to the world that Bell found appealing. Snow was the only meaningful reality.
She finally remembered where she had left the shovel—it was propped up against the side of her house, buried in snow up to the handle. She wrenched it loose and got to work.
She didn’t know what time Carla would be arriving. Between now and then, she had a lot to do to be ready, outside and in. During the past year or so she had begun using her daughter’s old room as kind of spillover area for things that would not fit anywhere else: the 12-speed bike she had bought so that she could accompany Clay Meckling on long rides down the county back roads; plastic bins filled with out-of-season clothes; boxes of notebooks from her law-school days that had outlived their utility but that she could not quite bear to throw away, either. Bell envisioned Carla stepping hopefully into the room that had been her beloved sanctuary until her junior year in high school—and coming to a dead halt when she spotted the box marked ENVIRONMENTAL LAW/PROF JEFFCOAT in purple Sharpie or the one on top of it that bore the label TORTS/PROF STANLEY.
“Hey, Bell! Betcha woke up and thought you’d moved to Canada, right?”
She knocked the snow off her shovel and looked to her left. Hank Bainbridge, Myrtle Bainbridge’s youngest son, was waving a heavy-gloved hand at her from the driveway two houses over. He was round, like his mother, and in that puffy white parka he resembled a human snowman garnished with a tuft of gingery hair on top.
The Bainbridge boys had been in high school the same time as Bell. Hank was a year younger, George was her age, and Wyatt was a year older. They had been wild things back then, surly hell-raisers