One Night of Snow: The Widow and the Four Strangers

Chapter 2: The Village

Marlow Falls was not so much a village as a habit of one: a general store, a post office the size of a wardrobe, a white church with a leaning steeple, and forty souls strung along two roads like beads that had mostly stopped expecting to be counted. Agnes drove in on Tuesdays and Fridays in Thomas's old pickup, which started the way she did — reluctantly, then all at once — and she did her errands in an order fixed sometime during the previous century.

Carol Bixby sorted the mail with the unhurried precision of a woman who had read every postcard in the township since 1987 and considered it a form of ministry. She greeted Agnes through the wicket with the week's harvest. "Your girl wrote," she said, though no letter from Emily had come, nor was expected; Carol simply believed in keeping everyone's hope exercised. She said it every week, letter or no letter, the way other people commented on the weather, and Agnes had long ago stopped correcting her, because there were worse services a postmistress could perform than keeping a mother's hopes in practice. "And there's something official-looking." The official-looking thing was a heavy cream envelope with a Burlington return address and her own name typed, not written. Agnes knew the type. Gordon Pruce sent one every few months, the way other men sent seed catalogues.

She took her mail to the truck and sat a moment with the envelope in her lap. The offer inside would be larger than the last. There would be a number with a great many zeros arranged like furniture, and a date by which she was invited to be sensible, and a sentence about the development — condominiums, a small lodge, access to the ski mountain over the ridge — phrased as though the whole arrangement were a favor being done to the valley. She did not open it. She knew its grammar by heart. At home she would file it in the kitchen drawer with its brothers, unanswered, under the string and the spare fuses, because answering it either way would make it real, and she was not prepared for it to be real.

Frank Dolan at the store kept her list behind the counter and her dignity intact by pretending the list was for the store's benefit. He was seventy and deaf in the ear he turned toward gossip, which Carol maintained was selective equipment. "Storm coming for the weekend," he said, weighing her flour. "Radio says a real one. The kind that finds every loose thing you own." His radio sat on the shelf above the pickles and had been predicting the end of the world, in a mild voice, for thirty years. He had said the same of the blizzard in '78, the October ice, and one memorable August thunderstorm, and been right often enough that the village treated his radio the way farmers once treated an almanac: with respect, salt, and private reservations.

"You've got wood?" he asked, in the tone of a man asking after her health.

"I've got wood," Agnes said, which was true in the way that she had a roof: in principle, and in part.

The church ladies were stringing the hall for a harvest supper nobody expected to rival last year's. Two of them waved through the window. One — Deirdre, who had opinions about other people's immortal souls the way Carol had opinions about their mail — called out to ask whether Agnes would be coming Sunday, in a voice that counted the asking as attendance. Agnes said she would see what the weather did, which in Marlow Falls was understood to be a complete sentence meaning no, with love.

That was the village's whole choreography: everyone nodded to Agnes, and almost no one stopped. Walter Pruitt, her nearest neighbor up the road, had been the stopper once — the man who plowed her drive without being asked and ate Thomas's birthday cake every March for fifty years — but Walter was eighty-two now and folded over a cane, and his stopping days had dwindled to a raised hand from his porch, which she returned, both of them pretending the hand was the whole of it.

She drove home under a sky the color of wet slate, with the groceries beside her and the cream envelope riding on top like a passenger she hadn't invited. At home she put the flour in the bin, the eggs in the bowl, and the letter in the drawer, and pressed the drawer shut with the flat of her hand, firmly, as if something in it might otherwise get out. Then she put the kettle on, because it was four o'clock, and four o'clock was tea, and a woman with a routine could hold off a great many things — letters, winters, the long arithmetic of being the last one left in a house built for a crowd.