Mind of Winter by Laura Kasischke Page B

expected everything to be fine, because everything always had been fine. How wonderful it was to be in the presence of such an untroubled human being!
    Holly turned from the picture window and crossed the living room to Tatiana’s room, where she stood as quietly as she could outside the door, holding her breath to see if she could hear anything coming from the other side. The light tapping of her keyboard, the opening and closing of drawers?
    No. All Holly could hear, even with her breath held, was the snow falling outside—on the roof, on the lawn, against the window glass. It did not sound damp to her, as she’d supposed it was from the sticky coating it had bestowed on the birdbath angel. It sounded, instead, sandy. Crisp. Holly breathed in, rubbed her eyes, went back to the living room, back to the picture window, and looked more closely at the backyard beyond it.
    Yes, the snow was pebblish now. Grainy. It was unrelenting, this snowfall. Now she could no longer see that angel at all.
    She went back to the kitchen, to the oven, and looked in.
    The roast, just beginning to sizzle in there, had begun to smell like food instead of flesh. Most of the time, Holly avoided red meat, for health reasons she’d read about in women’s magazines, but whenever she smelled meat roasting, she recognized that she was, at heart, a carnivore. Across from the dry cleaners downtown there was a bad diner, the Fernwood, which had been cited several times in the last few years for sanitation violations—but the Fernwood vented its kitchen onto the sidewalk, and every time Holly went to pick up the dry-cleaned clothes she smelled the frying burgers, and could easily imagine herself in a forest, wearing animal fur, ripping a hunk of meat off a bone with her teeth, and the incredible pleasure her ancestors must have found in that.
    Holly took a look at her iPhone, which was still at rest on the kitchen counter. Apparently only Unavailable had called (twice) since Eric’s call. If Eric didn’t arrive home soon, she would call him. Though she hoped she didn’t have to. She feared that if he was on the freeway with his addled parents the distraction of a phone call wouldn’t help, especially in this weather. Holly wasn’t the kind of person prone to imagining fatal car accidents, sudden disasters. In her experience, tragedy struck with a lot of warning—centuries’ worth, really—and, in the end, it surprised you mostly with how much forewarning it had given you, how much room for suffering beforehand. No. Eric would not be killed in a car accident on Christmas. At worst, he would be stuck in a snowbank.
    Holly left the kitchen island and went to the buffet, where she kept her mother’s wedding china, and the crystal—or what was left of it since three of her mother’s iridescent water glasses had been smashed. She opened the glass doors. Little pink rosebuds were painted onto the creamy white plates and cups and saucers in there, rimmed with gold. Janet, her oldest sister, had been given the dinnerware when their mother died, and then she’d passed it on to Melissa, the middle sister, when it was certain that she would, herself, die. But Melissa couldn’t stand it, she said, that reminder of their mother and their sister, all that hopeful dinnerware, and she’d dumped it on Holly’s doorstep in bubble wrap, in boxes.
    Originally Holly had thought that she, too, would not be able to stand it, and she’d left it boxed in the basement for years.
    Until they’d brought Tatiana home.
    It was then that Holly had felt the tug of the past, and she’d gone to the basement, opened the boxes, and found that, miraculously, the dinnerware had been purged of its association with her mother and her sisters by its long years in those boxes in the basement. She and Eric bought a cabinet specifically in which to store it, and, now, for every special occasion, Holly brought it out and felt pleased with herself for owning it, for being alive to