Mind of Winter by Laura Kasischke Page A

nearly twenty-four hours. In the car, in the backseat, Eric had immediately fallen asleep, but Holly had been unable even to close her eyes. Never in her life had she been more awake. She’d stared out at the snow and the landscape, and the landscape and the snow, as they became one and the same passing by. The people and their houses and their vehicles and their farm animals—all of them were buried, blurred. Snow ghosts, all of them, everything, for two hundred miles. Holly could not make out a single detail, and early on she gave up trying, yet never felt the slightest desire to close her eyes. It was a kind of comfort, really, to look out at this country and find it to be populated by nothing but apparitions.
     
    NOW SHE PUT a hand to the picture window and watched as the space between her warm fingers filled with fog against the cold glass. It was like that landscape out there. The angel birdbath was an impression, not a figure, and the rest was obliteration. Then she snapped out of it, remembering the roast and the guests and the chores left to be done, and she took her hand away from the window, looked at her watch, gasped at the time. The guests should be here within an hour. Or less. Although she realized it had been nearly an hour already since she’d last heard from Eric. And the airport was only an hour away. Unless they’d closed down the freeway, he should have been home with his parents by now. Surely, he would be here with them any minute. And the brothers and their families would be next. Holly had given the Coxes a slightly later arrival time than the others, so as not to risk their getting there before Gin had been given time to embrace her sons and grandchildren, and to weep for a little while, as she always did.
    Thuy, Pearl, and Patty were going to a church service that wouldn’t be over until 1:30, and then they needed to stop back at the house and pick up the presents and the bread pudding Pearl had made. So, they would be the last, but, for Holly, the most welcome, of all the guests. Holly knew that Thuy would bring a six-pack of some kind of imported beer, and that she would proceed to drink each one steadily over the course of the afternoon into the evening until she was goofily drunk. Pearl would fawn all over Tatiana—beg to hear her sing her latest madrigal tune and to see every photograph on her iMac and to peruse every song she’d downloaded onto iTunes. Surely this attention from her dearest “aunt” would jog Tatty out of her bad mood.
    And Patty! Patty would be a sugarplum, a fairy princess, a little beauty queen! She would hold Holly’s hand and chatter about something girly and nonsensical and silly. And all the stories that Pearl and Thuy were sick of hearing, Holly would happily listen to a million times. Except for Tatiana, there was no one on earth whom Holly loved more than her goddaughter, and although she fervently hoped that Thuy and Pearl lived long and healthy lives, she also couldn’t help fantasizing that they might die (painlessly!) so that she could take custody of Patty. Holly joked about this with Thuy and Pearl, who forgave her the ill-will, being pathetically grateful to her for loving their only daughter so much, but Holly did not exactly tell them that, not infrequently, she stood in the doorway of the guest room and thought about how, if her dear friends died, she would rip the built-in bookcases out of it and paint the walls sea-foam green for their daughter, who would then be her daughter, and give the room a mermaid motif. She’d think about how, as sisters, Patty and Tatiana would make such a pretty portrait between herself and Eric:
    One dark and elegant and chiseled from marble, and one soft, with a crooked smile, and full of light.
    Although Patty was not, Holly felt, the most intelligent child she’d ever known (for one thing, she was never quiet or still long enough to think ), she was easily the most pleasant. She was a purely American child. She