Summer Snow (10 page)

“So,” he pressed, “what is it today?”

The girl with the pink Columbia jacket acquiesced. “There's a homeless family wandering around Mason,” she said, her eyes sparkling.

Graham considered this for a moment. “Nope. I don't believe it. Too cold.”

“It's true,” she contradicted. “My aunt owns the motel just outside of town, and she said they stayed there for a few nights. Most people pay their bills at the end of their visit, but my aunt had a bit of a funny feeling about them, you know? So she tried to collect after a few days. She told them that payment was expected every other day to secure the room.”

Michael laughed. “Like the Mason Inn is so busy in March that the rooms need to be reserved!” He was right; it was rare to see even a single car parked outside the outdated orange and white motor inn.

“Oh, shut up,” the other girl scolded him, but she pinched his arm flirtatiously and watched him through downcast lashes.

“
Anyway
,” the girl in the pink jacket continued pointedly, “my aunt tried to collect the bill from them, and
they couldn't pay
.” She paused to let us digest this shocking information. “What could she do? She had to kick them out.”

There were a couple of murmurs of assent, but Graham was shaking his head. “Nice story, Monica; could be true, but that doesn't make these people homeless.”

“It does if they were caught sleeping in their car by the gravel pit,” Monica said, saving the best for last and savoring it with a satisfied smile.

“Those poor people!” Graham exclaimed, looking truly concerned. “It was freezing last night—how could they survive in their car?”

My mouth was dry, but I moistened my lips a little with my tongue and managed to ask, “Are they a … a big family?” I was nauseous long before Monica ever responded. I knew exactly what she was going to say.

“Nah, just some mom and her kid. They don't even look alike— my aunt says the boy is practically black, and the mom's white.”

I was able to stay upright in my seat, but when everyone was badgering Monica for more information, Michael moved beside me and quietly asked, “Are you okay, Julia?”

“Fine,” I whispered, trying to look normal. “I'm fine.”

“You don't look so good. If you still want me to cover the rest of your shift—”

“No.” I stopped him hastily. “I'll be fine. I just have a little headache.”

But it was much, much more than a headache. The thought of Janice and Simon huddled around each other in her cramped two-door car all night long was some pitiful scene from a low-grade tearjerker. It was not reality. It couldn't be. I felt sick and guilty and horrified at the same time. My mind flashed to Grandma and her afternoon role of gumshoe. Had she uncovered the truth that I was learning? I wanted to lunge for the telephone.

Apparently Monica had even convinced the skeptical Graham as to the reliability of her story. He broke into my reverie by jumping off the table and making it bang against the wall. “We have to do something! That's so terrible—I feel so bad for them.”

“Don't feel bad for them,” Denise said derisively from somewhere behind the group.

No one was even aware that she had slipped in, and we all went quiet as if we had been caught doing something forbidden.

“My pastor says every event carries a consequence,” she continued haughtily, wagging her finger as if warning us about the dangers of immoral living. “They're sleeping in a car tonight because they deserve to. Somehow, somewhere along the way, she must have done something to warrant a practically homeless night. Decent, respectable people with decent, respectable lives don't end up curled in the backseat of some beater car for lack of a better place to lay their heads.”

Six pairs of eyes blinked disbelievingly at her. Her theory was full of holes—and didn't say much about the inherent goodness of our lives if we were all working at Value Foods—but we were too stunned at her unexpected outburst to retaliate with anything intelligent. I was briefly thankful Grandma and I did not go to her church and wondered how her pastor reconciled his ideas of decent, respectable people living decent, respectable lives when Jesus Himself had been born in a barn.

Finally, to loosen the tension, Michael said, “Wow, Denise, that's pretty philosophical coming from you. I had no idea you were so opinionated.”

Or so pitiless
, I wanted to add.

No one knew how Denise would take Michael's comment, and you could almost hear the frightened heartbeats as we all held our breath in anticipation of her reprisal. But because Denise had a bit of a crush on him, she took Michael's remark as complimentary. She laughed a little, and everybody else followed suit. Swinging her hair over her shoulder as though the act would somehow entice the object of her affection, she said as diplomatically as she could, “Well, coffee break is over.”

Everyone started to go their own directions, and it looked like Denise was going to get away with her uninformed tirade until Graham cleared his throat. “I don't agree with you, Denise,” he said softly but bravely. “This mom and her son could be having a hard time. They could be just having some problems. … For all we know, they're angels in disguise.”

It may have been a bit of a silly thing to say, but judging from the earnestness in his eyes, Graham meant—and believed—every word. A part of me cringed to hear Janice referred to as an
angel
, but another part of me shuddered to hear them discussing my …
family
as if they were what many of my coworkers so courteously referred to as trailer trash—bottom-feeders, the lowest of the low, the kind of people gossip was invented for. What would they think if they knew Janice was my mother? Or that Simon was my half brother, the son of a man Janice had probably had some sordid affair with? In a few weeks, when I couldn't hide my pregnancy another day, would they nod sagely to themselves and assert that they'd known all along that the apple hadn't fallen far from the tree? I was torn between wanting to leave work in a sprint to save Simon—and, grudgingly, Janice—and wishing that I could forget I had ever heard the rumor that would bring me to them. But it was too late.

I finished work, feeling every moment pass as if God had plunged the world into slow motion. Grandma once told me that a life lived outside of the will of the Lord is like trying to climb a waterfall. Surrender, on the other hand, is peace—a flowing, moving calm that comes with letting His water, His way, carry you downstream.

“Okay, God,” I whispered in a moment alone by the canned goods, “I give in. I'll go find Janice.”

Until

T
HE CAR WAS
warm and quiet, the radio so low I couldn't make out the song that was playing. I had practiced what I would say to Grandma, how I would break the news of Janice and Simon's whereabouts to her, and the words were fresh on my tongue as I swung open the door and clicked my seat belt on. But I didn't have to say anything. The leaden feeling in the pine-scented interior of Grandma's car told me that she already knew.

When she didn't put the car in drive and didn't bother to greet me with her usual query—
How was work?
—I turned to face her. There was a shallow pucker in her cheek where she was biting it, and she looked hesitant, unsure. She was terrified to tell me, and I was about to make it easy for her when she spat out, “I know where they are.”

“I do too,” I confessed without preamble.

“You do?” Her eyebrows shot up almost comically.

“We live in Mason,” I reminded Grandma grimly. “
Everyone
probably knows by now.”

She exhaled disapprovingly and rubbed her temples with gloved hands. “Always gossip but rarely good,” she mused. I couldn't help being cynical and instinctively rephrased her grievance in my mind:
Always gossip,
never
good
. “Why don't people ever
do
anything when they hear these sorts of rumors?” she wondered sadly.

I felt like I should respond, or at the very least shrug, but it seemed like altogether too much effort. I was exhausted. Instead, I reached over and turned the heater up. I had shivered all afternoon.

Grandma sighed and put the car in gear, heading cautiously out of the Value Foods parking lot. She pulled up to the stop sign on Main Street and put her blinker on to turn south. A little wave of apprehension swept over me. The farm was in the opposite direction.

“Where are we going?” I asked carefully, watching a handful of cars drift past. The roads were just slippery enough that cars appeared to float across them like drops of oil skimming along the surface of water. They were dangerous only if you didn't know what you were doing—if you accelerated too quickly, stopped too abruptly, switched lanes thoughtlessly. Though she had lived in Iowa nearly her entire life, these kinds of driving conditions always made Grandma nervous. I wished that I had offered to drive. I would point the car toward the farm, where we could talk things out before we did anything rash.

But Grandma had thought everything through. “We're going to get them,” she said matter-of-factly.

I swallowed. “And … ?”

“And we're going to take them home,” she finished. “What would you have us do? Rent them a room with all that extra money from my social security check?” Grandma wasn't being sarcastic; she really saw no other way.

I had hoped to go home, make myself a good hot cup of Mrs. Walker's homemade, pregnancy-friendly strawberry tea, and sit down with Grandma to meticulously go over every possible scenario. A wicked little corner of my heart wondered why we couldn't just leave them to their own devices. Janice had lived without my help—or even my very existence—for ten years. Surely she didn't need it now. But of course we couldn't leave them in the cold. And though I knew that with certainty, I had almost desperately schemed all afternoon, waiting for another option to present itself.

The first feasible one that had crossed my mind was the Walkers. They had an enormous house and hearts to match. … Yet somehow I couldn't imagine asking them to do something so monumental. Baking cookies together was one thing; taking in my hapless would-be mother and her unknown son was quite another. I couldn't bring myself to do it even if I thought it was the most viable solution.

The only other alternative I had come up with was contacting the pastor at Fellowship Community. Reverend Trenton was elderly and unpretentious—boring but docile and utterly harmless in a sweet and grandfatherly way—and I knew that his heart would shatter into a million pieces if he knew such a need existed in his small corner of creation. But what would he be able to do? Drum up enough money to keep them in the Mason Inn for a few more days? Bundle Janice and Simon off to some halfway home or maybe to one of the safe houses for victims of domestic abuse? None of those options felt right.

I opened my mouth to offer Grandma one of my grand ideas anyway. “What about … ?”

“You have another idea?”

“No.”

We headed south.

“I fixed up the sewing room for them,” Grandma informed me. “Everything is moved along one wall, and when we get home, you can help me pull the mattress downstairs from the attic. They can sleep on that until …” She broke off, letting the uncertain word hang in the close air of the car. It fluttered against the lids of my closed eyes, demanding consideration that I was unwilling to give.
Until
. Until when? She didn't say any more; she didn't have to.

I can't do this
, I thought, shoving panic aside with hard, angry sweeps of steely concentration. The sewing room was directly beneath my attic bedroom; Janice would sleep a mere floor away, her body only feet below mine, a shadow of my own twisted limbs and pounding heart as I tried to sleep, tried to forget that she was there.

“Everything is going to be all right,” Grandma assured me, reading my mind. I wanted to believe her, but her promise felt hollow.

Everything is going to be all right
, I echoed silently, willing myself to have faith in words that sounded so easy, so trite.

There was no car at the gravel pit. In some preoccupied daydream I had imagined that we would drive up to the little lake and they would be there, needy and vulnerable, simply waiting for us. Like something out of a movie, we would glide onto the snow-packed lane and pull up behind them, reluctant heroes but heroes all the same. Janice would be penitent and tearful and, of course, forever indebted—as if she wasn't already. But Grandma and I drove around the empty lot a few times and eventually had to admit that our rescue was poorly planned at best and completely unnecessary at worst. Besides the crisscrossing tread marks of a few different vehicles in the snow, there was no sign of life whatsoever in the deserted, modest park. For a moment I imagined that they were already gone, that they had moved on and we had missed our chance.
I
had missed my chance.

“Five fifteen,” Grandma observed, glancing at the clock on the dashboard.

“Maybe they've left.” I tried to say it indifferently, but my words came out barely above a whisper.

“They haven't left,” Grandma was quick to reassure. “Where would they go?”

The guilt I felt was immediate and churning. Where
could
they go? Though we could hardly consider ourselves acquaintances, much less family, Grandma and I were all Janice and Simon had in Mason, maybe in the world.

Janice's family—Eli and Margaret Wentwood and their only, very spoiled, daughter—had moved to Mason when Janice was in high school. Eli was the newly acquired philosophy professor at Glendale Hill University, a small liberal arts college a twenty-minute drive from Mason. The formidable Dr. Wentwood had his doctorate from Cambridge, and Glendale hadn't seen someone with credentials like that in all their fleeting sixty-some years of existence. The Went-woods were practically celebrities in Glendale, though they had moved to Mason instead of settling in the quaint college town.