Snow Angels Read Free Page A

years it has become a bit of a ritual for me to drive by our old house and stop to contemplate it. It’s a form of stalling, of warming up for the hard part.
    â€œCan we?” I say.
    Astrid says nothing, but reluctantly slows and pulls onto the cinder berm. All fall we’ve talked on the phone, and she knows I need a little indulgence.
    We sit in the warmth of the car with the radio off. The shrubs have grown up and filled out around the foundation, but the house itself hasn’t changed much. Astrid thinks it’s the siding. On the roof stands a faded Santa, waving. The new people are doing all right. In the last year they’ve added an aboveground pool; it sleeps under a blue tarpaulin. I’ve seen their boy shooting hoops on the drive, and once a daughter shoveling. But what about the inside, is it any different—the tree, the smell of turkey all afternoon while on TV the football games change? We sit in the car and I imagine our father in the basement rec room, lying on the couch under an afghan, his ashtray on the shag rug.A razor commercial jangles, the baseboard heaters clink. The Steelers are beating someone but he is asleep, and our mother shoos us upstairs.
    â€œSeen enough?” Astrid asks, and when I don’t answer shifts into drive. I will never stop being the baby; all the decisions are hers.
    Carlsen’s field is mud and stubble. Every Christmas our mother marvels that he is still alive, guiding his glass-cabbed Deere over the furrows. A mile off, the Van Dorns’ rises.
    It is here, between, as we approach their house, that the past reaches me. On both sides lie nothing but fields, snow in the ditches, telephone poles. A windbreak of old oaks waves around the house. Astrid doesn’t slow, though I turn from her. The second son, Dennis, is in it now; the side yard is clogged with his projects. Beside a pair of school district vans a camper sits on cinder blocks, beside it a snowmobile, a fat stack of tractor tires. In back leans a small barn, doorless, a car peeking its nose out like a mouse—Raymond’s old Maverick. The house, like ours, betrays little, but the paint is new, and the tin roof and quaint lace curtains. From the porch flies a rainbowed fish windsock, defying the season. I will have to remember that. And then we are past, shooting between the drifted fields. I turn in my harness to watch the house diminish, and Astrid sighs.
    â€œAre we going to go through this again?” she says.
    â€œNo,” I say, “I’m all done with that.”
    She looks at me as if to say I’m not fooling anyone, then turns back to the road.
    â€œI guess I should just forget it, right?” We’ve had this argument forever.
    â€œI’m not saying you should forget it,” Astrid says. “Just stop going over it. Let it rest for once. One year.
    â€œRight,” I say. “This’ll be the last year. Promise.
    She snorts and shakes her head, gives up on me. I say this every year, but what if this year it’s true?
    Behind us the two houses are blips in the mirror, dots on the horizon, and as we speed along the empty fields they drift with the dwindling perspective and line up like the sights on a rifle, become one.
    Today, after we say hello and get settled, our mother will ask one of us to run out to the store, and before giving me the keys, Astrid will look at me as if to say, I know where you’re going. I will sit a few minutes under the water tower while the snow falls and later tell my mother I had to go all the way into town.
    I don’t like coming home. It keeps me from being nostalgic, which by nature I am. Even before the plane begins its descent, I find myself dreading the questionsleft unanswered by my childhood. Annie. My parents. My own lost years. I know that once we touch down I will not be able to think clearly, that every remembered Pizza Hut and body shop, every stretch of road I know intimately, will stun