In the Bleak Midwinter

The kitchen door was as uncurtained as the rest of the house, and Russ could see the rector of St. Alban’s sipping red wine and cooking up a storm on her gas stove. She was wearing jeans and a University of Virgina sweatshirt hacked off around the waist. From the bulk of the sleeves pushed up her arms, it must have belonged to one of her hulking brothers at one point. He could hear music through the glass, the pounding of the bass vibrating throught his palm when he touched it. Some group from the ’eighties, Sons of the West or something, singing, “Live it up, live it up, Ronnie’s got a new gun,” and as he watched, smiling helplessly, Clare shimmied back and forth shaking some sort of dried herb from a little glass bottle into an enameled pot on the stove. He started laughing at the point where the music blasted, “You can take all your flags and march ’em up and down,” because she did just that, swinging her hips and jabbing a wooden spoon in the air. Russ knocked loudly on the door before he could scare her by suddenly appearing in her window when she turned around.

He startled her anyway. She spun at the sound, dropping the spoon, her stockinged feet slipping on the floor. She didn’t screech, but she did clap a hand dramatically to her chest as she reached for the door. “Holy cow, you nearly gave me a heart attack,” she said, standing in the doorway.

“Sorry.” He retreated down a step, so her eyes were almost level with his. Coming over in person suddenly seemed intrusive. “I’m sorry, I should have just called.”

“I tried to reach you at the station,” she said, crossing her arms around herself against the cold. A gust of wind stirred her hair. “Good lord, it’s freezing out here. Please, come in.”

He paused. “Just for a minute.” He stomped more snow off on the top step. There was a wide rubber mat inside the door and beside it, a cardboard moving box held rubber rain-boots and a pair of wet running shoes. A coat tree tilted precariously toward the telephone, weighed down by the Millers Kill police-issue parka she still hadn’t returned.

She shut the door behind him. Her arms were still crossed, the wooden spoon clenched in one fist. “Please. Take your things off. Can I—oh, dang!” A dollop of tomato sauce had dripped off the spoon onto the worn white linoleum. Clare grabbed a rag and swiped at it while Russ shucked off his parka and hung it on the opposite side of the tree. There was a calendar thumbtacked into the wall next to the phone, picturing a stained glass window. There were saints listed in most of the days, and each Sunday was highlighted in red.

Clare tossed the rag into a bland, stainless steel sink, and replaced the spoon in the pot. She leaned one hip against the counter, her arms crossed again, while Russ rocked back and forth in his boots, reluctant to tread muck all over her floor, hesitant about taking them off.

“Oh, take off your boots and sit a spell,” Clare said, as if he were a book she could read. Bent over unlacing, he could hear her deep breath. “I wanted to apologize for last night,” she said. “I never just break down like that. It was inappropriate and poorly timed and I’m sorry.” It sounded as if she had practiced the speech.

Russ straightened, sliding his boots off heel by heel. “Never? You never break down and cry?”

A flush rose in her cheeks. “Okay, almost never. Certainly not with someone I haven’t known for very long.” She clapped her hands to her cheeks. “Oh, this is embarrassing.”

He sat in one of the four wooden chairs clustered around the kitchen table. “Funny. It doesn’t feel as if we haven’t known each other for very long. Does it?”

She blinked. “Honestly? No. It doesn’t.”

He spread his hands. “Remember what you asked me last night? ‘Who do you go to when you feel this way?’ ”

She smiled faintly, then laughed, a breathing out kind of laugh. “You’re doing me, aren’t you? That’s supposed to be me. Okay, okay, you’re right. I guess I don’t need to apologize for dumping on you.”

“I bet you’d call it ‘sharing’ or ‘venting’ if somebody did it to you.”

“Hmmmm.” She turned to the stove to transfer sauteed mushrooms from an iron skillet to the sauce pot.

The rectory kitchen was a faded white, with a dull and unpolished white linoleum floor, unornamented white cupboard doors, a serviceable white refrigerator, and a matching dishwasher next to the sink. The whole room had been turned out as cheaply and inoffensively as possible around fifteen or twenty years ago, he guessed. Reminded him of army housing.

Clare had evidently dealt with the blandness by littering the refrigerator door with photos, clippings, and cartoons, and hanging up a series of framed prints, each one featuring a single vegetable: an improbably wide carrot, a voluptuous eggplant, an aggressive tomato.