Within ten minutes her hands were going numb. She tucked them into her coat pockets, then into her sleeves, then back into her pockets. The pockets of Robert's coat were deep, and for a while that was enough — her fingers curled into fists, generating their own small, desperate heat.
She walked. The sidewalk stretched ahead of her, gray and glittering with patches of ice where the morning melt had refrozen. She watched her feet. Left, right, careful on the ice, careful. The houses on this stretch were set back behind their lawns, curtains drawn against the cold, and no one was out. A car passed — the first in a while — its windows fogged, its driver a dark shape bent toward the wheel. Evelyn watched it go. She thought, with a flash of something like envy, of the heat inside that car, the warm air on the driver's hands.
The wind rose. It was no longer gusts; it was a wall, and it pushed against her chest and stole the air from her lungs. She leaned into it, head down, the tote dragging at her arm. Her face went numb first, then the numbness spread — her ears, her chin. Her feet, inside the walking shoes, began to feel like blocks of wood.
She was a mile from home. Then three-quarters of a mile. The numbers went the wrong way in her head. Her fingers had stopped aching and that frightened her, because she knew from somewhere — some article, some winter of raising children — that when the ache stops, the damage starts. She tried to wiggle her toes. She couldn't tell if they moved.
On Ellery Road, where the town thinned out toward the highway, the wind hit her full force across an open lot, and she stumbled. The tote swung wide, and she caught herself on a telephone pole, gasping, the breath scraped out of her. Ahead, fifty yards down the road, was the Route 9 bus shelter — the little three-sided shelter with the cracked plastic panel that the county had put up years ago for the factory workers. It was empty. It was shelter. The wind could not follow her in there, not all the way.
Across town, in the cab of a rust-eaten tow truck parked behind the shuttered Amoco station, Dale Kessler watched the cold do his work for him.
Cold snaps were good for Dale. People stayed inside. Pipes froze. Cars died. And the houses that had gone dark — no lights in the windows by four o'clock, no smoke from the chimney, no tire tracks in the driveway — told him everything he needed to know. An empty house in a cold snap was an open invitation, and Dale had never been a man to refuse an invitation.
There, he said, and nodded through the windshield toward a gray two-story on Harlan Street, its porch dark, its walk unshoveled. "That's three days now. Nobody home."
In the passenger seat, Cody Pritchard said nothing. He was twenty-three, thin in a way that made his coat hang off him, and he had the look of someone who had been arguing with himself for a long time and losing. He stared at the gray house.
Uncle Dale, he said. "It's eight below out there. Maybe they're just — maybe they're at work."
Three days, Cody. Dale's voice was patient, the way a teacher's voice is patient with a slow student. "Work doesn't last three days. You watch the signs. Dark windows. No tracks. That's a house that's waiting."
Cody looked away. He had been riding with Dale for two months, since the warehouse job in Dayton fell through, and every time he told himself this would be the last time. He thought about his mother. He thought about a Target parking lot, a long time ago, and a woman on the ground, and his mother's hand pulling him along.
You drive past it tonight, Dale was saying. "Slow. If it's still dark, we go in tomorrow. Old folks' houses always have cash. They don't trust banks."
Cody didn't answer. The wind rocked the truck on its suspension, and somewhere across town, an old woman was walking home in the cold with no gloves on, and neither of them knew it yet.
Evelyn Ruth Hawthorne walked the last fifty yards one careful, wooden step at a time, and stepped out of the wind.
She sat down on the metal bench inside the shelter and set the grocery tote on the ground between her feet, and for a moment she simply breathed. The wind still found the open side of the shelter — the Route 9 shelter on Ellery Road had never been built for a wind like this — but it was a fraction of what it had been on the road, and the cracked plastic panel on the west side broke the worst of it. Evelyn pressed her back into the corner, pulled Robert's coat tight around her, and tucked her hands — white now, wax-white, frightening — into her armpits.
She would rest. That was all. She would rest until the feeling came back into her hands and feet, and then she would walk the last half mile home. It was a plan. It was a good plan. She had walked a mile and a half already. She could walk half a mile more. She was Evelyn Ruth Hawthorne, and she did not quit.
The first car went past on Ellery Road.
It was a silver sedan, going fast, its tires hissing on the salted asphalt. The driver was a man in a dark coat, both hands on the wheel, eyes forward. He did not look at the shelter. Evelyn watched the taillights shrink toward town, and she thought, absurdly, that she should wave — that if she waved, someone might stop — but her hands were buried in her armpits and the thought of moving them was unbearable, and the car was gone before she had decided.
The second car was a minivan, a woman driving, two car seats in the back. The third was a pickup with a plow blade. The fourth, a small red hatchback. None of them slowed. Why would they? A bus shelter with a figure huddled in the corner was not a sight that asked anything of anyone. It was part of the winter landscape, like the bare trees and the gray snow. Evelyn understood that. She had driven past a hundred such shelters in her life without a second thought.