The screen door closed behind her with the soft, familiar sigh of weathered wood, and Evelyn stepped out into the morning. Eight o'clock. The air was cold but still, the way February mornings can be before the wind remembers its job. The sky above the rooftops of Meredith was a flat, pale blue, and the sun sat low and thin behind the bare branches of the maple on her lawn, giving light without heat.
She turned and checked the front door twice — a habit Robert had teased her about for thirty years and that she had never once broken. Locked. She walked down the three steps to the sidewalk, her grocery tote folded under one arm and her purse strap across her shoulder, and set off down Harlan Street toward town.
The streets were quiet. A few cars passed on the cross streets, exhaust blooming white in the cold, people heading to work or to the school on Pine. Evelyn walked at the steady, measured pace of a woman who had walked a thousand miles in her life and knew how to spend her energy. Her shoes — good lace-up walking shoes, Robert's sister had given them to her two Christmases ago — crunched lightly on the salted sidewalk.
It was a familiar route. She had walked these same blocks when the children were small, pushing a stroller in summer, holding mittened hands in winter. The houses looked different now. Not worse, exactly. Just quieter. The Hendersons' porch where they used to sit on August evenings was enclosed now, and a satellite dish crouched on the roof like something the house had grown in its sleep. The big Victorian that had belonged to old Mr. Abernathy was divided into apartments, three mailboxes where there had been one. People still lived here. Of course they did.
At the corner of Harlan and Fifth she passed the in-town bus stop, with its metal bench and its timetable behind smudged glass. She hadn't ridden a Meredith bus in years. The Civic had always been enough.
She thought about the Civic sitting silent in her driveway, the keys cold in her purse, the clicking sound it had made for three weeks. Click, click, click. Like a clock running down. She should have taken it in. She knew she should have taken it in. But the mechanic on Route 31 charged seventy-five dollars just to look, and the savings account held four thousand two hundred dollars and some change, and the county tax notice sat on her kitchen table like a stone. Seventy-five dollars to look was seventy-five dollars she would not have for the taxes. So she had kept driving it, listening to the click, telling herself it was nothing. It was something. She had known it was something.
Past the elementary school the sidewalk grew patchier, the plowed sections giving way to packed snow where shade fell. Evelyn picked her way carefully. Her right hip twinged with each step on the uneven ground — the old reminder from November, never quite healed, never quite gone — and she leaned a fraction into the tote bag as she walked, the way you lean into a friend's shoulder without meaning to.
By the time the Kroger sign came into view above the bare hedges, her cheeks were stung red and her breath was coming in short white puffs. Nine-fifteen. Seventy-five minutes. Longer than she had expected — in 2014, when the car was in the shop, she had done it in under an hour — but she was ten years older than that woman. She had made it. That was what mattered.
The automatic doors sighed open and the warmth of the store rolled over her like water. Evelyn stood in the entryway for a full minute, letting the heat find the cold places, flexing her hands inside her coat sleeves. Her fingers ached as they warmed — a deep, itching ache — and she realized, with a small jolt, that she had forgotten her gloves. She had looked for them. She had stood in the kitchen with her purse in her hand and looked directly at the kitchen counter, and the gloves had been there, brown leather, and she had missed them completely, the way the mind misses what it has already decided is taken care of. They were sitting on the counter at home, useless, while her hands went numb in her coat pockets.
No matter. She was here. She tucked her hands under her arms and took a cart.
Inside, the store was bright and calm, a Tuesday-morning Kroger, half-empty. Evelyn moved through the aisles slowly, the way she had always shopped, reading the shelf tags the way other people read newspapers. Bread — the soft white the grandchildren liked, though the grandchildren were ninety miles away. Milk. Eggs. A small chicken, the smallest one, for roasting. Potatoes. Onions. A bag of carrots that would keep. She picked up a tin of peaches and put it back, then picked it up again and put it in the cart, because Robert had loved peaches.
At the register she unloaded the cart item by item, her wrist — the right one, the Target wrist — giving its familiar dull protest when she lifted the milk. The cashier was a young woman named Denise, dark hair pulled back, a name tag Evelyn had read a dozen times, and Evelyn thanked her by name when the bag was packed, the way she always did.
Thank you, Denise. You have a good day now.
You too, ma'am. Stay warm out there.
Sixty-three dollars in cash from her wallet. Sixty-three dollars exactly, and change in her coat pocket. She zipped the grocery tote closed over the bags — heavy, but balanced — and stepped back outside into the cold.
And the cold had changed while she was inside.
The sky had gone the color of old pewter. The wind had come up across the open fields on the east edge of town, where nothing stood between Meredith and the horizon, and it came with teeth now, a raw, slicing wind that cut straight through Robert's coat and the second layer beneath it and found the skin. Evelyn pulled the collar up around her ears and set off down the sidewalk, the tote bumping against her hip.