Chilly Scenes of Winter Read Free

number two Unger’s Westover pencils (yellow). He put them on the mattress under her feet. Later he took them back and used them.
    Charles liked his father. He died suddenly, at thirty-nine, on the bus coming home from work. He has foggy recollections of Pete at the funeral. Pete worked with his father. When his father died, Pete came over one evening with a bag of oranges. He came other evenings, too, at his mother’s invitation, bringing with him apples, grapefruit, pears, and finally boxes of Whitman’s chocolates, flowers, and a briefcase with his pajamas and toothbrush. One night not long after his mother married Pete, the fuses blew. Pete climbed downstairs and called up a lot of questions. He couldn’t fix it. Charles went down to help, carefully trying one fuse, then another, just as Pete had. “Could your Dad fix the fuses?” Pete asked. “Yes,” Charles said. Pete had cursed and beat his hands on the cinder block wall above the fuse box until they were bloody. Another time when Susan took some of Pete’s wood to make arms for a snowman, Pete pulled the wood out, spanked her with it, made her look out the window at the snowman as she got her spanking.
    “If he’s at the hospital, he’s sure to want us to hang around to go to dinner with him. We’re not going to do it,” Charles says.
    “I feel sort of sorry for him,” Susan says.
    “You can go to dinner with him if you want.”
    “No. I’m not going to go to dinner with him.”
    “You just feel sorry for him.”
    “I do. She’s crazy almost all the time now. And something you don’t know. This will really make you feel sorry for him. He thought she’d be less depressed if they got out more, so he signed them up for six months of dancing lessons. She wouldn’t go, and he couldn’t get his money back, so he went alone the first night. He said they were all old people, and he didn’t go back either.”
    “He’s a jackass,” Charles says.
    They are only a few blocks from the hospital. It has started to snow.
    “I’ll just take what I can get,” Charles says. “We can walk.” He pulls into a parking place.
    “I don’t want to get out,” Susan says.
    “She’s okay. She can probably come home.”
    “This is a lousy vacation,” Susan says.
    “We’ll have a turkey on New Year’s Day. We’ll have Sam over.”
    “I don’t even like turkey.”
    “We’ll have a ham.”
    “You’re always thinking about food.”
    “Susan. Get out of the car.”
    “Do you love me?” Susan says.
    “What the hell are you talking about? Will you please get out of the car?”
    “You curse all the time. Can’t you answer me?”
    “Of course I love you. You’re my sister.”
    “You don’t act like you love me. It seemed when I came back like I’d never left because nobody missed me.”
    “Susan. I work five days a week at a lousy job and miss my lover at night. On the weekends I go out and get drunk with Sam, and then I get sick. Your mother gets sick all the time and calls me in the middle of the night and at work. I’m just not in a very good mood.”
    “Well, it shouldn’t be like that. You should do things you enjoy.”
    “I don’t have any money. It’s all I can do to pay the bills and buy Sam drinks, because he doesn’t have any money either.”
    “But you could get that girl back.”
    “I can’t get her back. She’s not coming back. Christ.”
    “You curse all the time.”
    Charles opens his door, gets out, and closes it. Susan’s door does not open. He goes around to her side of the car, bends over, puts his mouth against the window. “Get out or I’ll kill you,” he says. She opens the door.
    “You’re in a strange mood,” he says. “When I was growing up this would have been called ‘an identity crisis.’ ”
    “You always try to make yourself seem older than you are. Why do you do that?”
    “I guess on second thought you’re a little sure of yourself to be having any sort of crisis.”
    “Were you nice to