561. Katherine Heiny
the tenth trip, Charlie’s nose has begun to run, and her feet are numb. Also, something is wrong with her hands—even inside the gloves they seem to be made of metal, like the skeleton hands of the cyborg in Terminator. Surely there is no flesh on or blood in her fingers, keeping them warm.
Zap. Zap. She decides she will make the next trip out of the front door just to stay inside as long as possible. She takes a small box labeled “brandy snifters”—it couldn’t possibly hold more than three glasses—and walks down the hall past the dining room, where Barbara and Forrest are.
Right away she wants to kill them. They have turned on the fire (yes, there’s a fireplace in the dining room), put on a Johnny Cash CD, and are sitting at the table, looking warm as toast, and slowly swathing jade figurines in bubble wrap.“Remember that first house we lived in on Jefferson Street?” Barbara says to Forrest fondly. “Where we woke up one morning and found a mouse had died in the candy dish?”
“And Stevie got so upset,” Forrest says, smiling, “because he wanted to keep it as a pet.”
“We had to bury it in the backyard,” Barbara muses, “still with a lemon drop stuck in its mouth.”
“I never felt the same about lemon drops after that,” Forrest says, and they both laugh softly.
Really, it’s a good thing that at this moment, Charlie is carrying a box of glassware and not a bunch of steak knives, because otherwise she’d be serving a double life sentence for murder in the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, and serving it proudly.
She stops in the doorway to the dining room. “I didn’t realize I’d be outside so much,” she says pointedly. “Barbara, do you mind if I borrow a coat?”
Barbara frowns, and Charlie can almost hear the low, whirring buzz of Barbara’s brain as it tries desperately to think of some valid excuse for not lending her warmer outerwear. But there is no excuse. When someone is making a hundred trips outside with your belongings, you can’t withhold all favors, much as you’d like to. It’s like having to let workmen use your bathroom, even though you know they’re going to leave the door open a crack.
“Why, certainly,” Barbara says at last, pushing back her chair. “The coat closet is—”
“I saw it,” Charlie says, turning. “Don’t get up, I’ll help myself.”
“The blue wool is especially warm,” Barbara calls.
So, clearly, any coat but the blue wool, Charlie thinks. She steps into the coat closet, which is bigger, of course, than most people’s kitchens. But it is reassuringly jumbled, and smells of athletic socks and wet leather, like all coat closets. Charlie chooses a puffy white down parka that looks warm and also like it might stain easily and have to be dry-cleaned, all of which are positives to her. She pokes through a basket of gloves until she finds a nice pair of fur-lined deerskin ones and pulls them on. Her fingers are too long for them, as they are for all gloves, everywhere. No one has fingers as long as Charlie’s. She puts her own gloves back in her purse.
She makes a few trips out of the front door and down the flagstone paths, but it’s even worse than the slippery back stairs because she’s out in the cold longer. She begins alternating, first the long route, then the short one. Zap. Zap. Zap. (Actually, not even electrolysis was this bad.) By late morning, Charlie is so cold that her teeth hurt. It feels like the fillings in her molars have been dipped in liquid nitrogen. Zap. Zap-zap. The mountain of boxes doesn’t seem to be getting any smaller.
Charlie hopes that she and Forrest will go have lunch somewhere, but on one of her trips past the dining room, she sees that Barbara is setting the table for three, and on her next trip, Barbara tells her that lunch will be ready in five minutes. Charlie takes off her coat, hat and gloves, and goes into the bathroom to wash her hands. In the mirror her eyes are bright with tears from the cold; the skin across her cheeks is raw and chapped-looking. Her nose is as pink as a rabbit’s.
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