The Snow Angel Read Free

him any attention.
    “Do you have good eyes?” Max asked me out of the blue as I walked past his driveway.
    I turned and considered the man who was my neighbor. He was bent and grizzled, a stooping giant with hands like bear paws and tufts of wiry hair poking from his ears likeforgotten bits of cotton. I wasn’t afraid of him, but we had never talked before, and as soon as he inquired after my optical health I was convinced that there was good reason we avoided each other: He obviously had dementia. Most people regarded me with thinly veiled pity and apologized immediately about the loss of my mother. Max skipped right over these trivialities.
    “My eyes are fine,” I told him. Then I spun on my heel and kept walking—I decided it was best not to encourage him. But his next question stopped me in my tracks.
    “Would you like a job?”
    A job? In the month after my mother’s death my life had consisted of little more than parrying people’s unwelcome condolences and trying to weed out the sincere offers of help from the ones that were born of avarice and gossip. It seemed everyone wanted to know what had gone on in the Clark house, and there was no lack of scandalmongers willing and eager to rifle through our home in an effort to ascertain the truth. But Mr. Wever’s question was singular, unexpected. I couldn’t have ignored him if I wanted to.
    “What kind of a job?” I asked warily.
    “My wife and I are tailors,” he told me in his thick Dutch accent. “We mend clothes. Make new ones.”
    As if I didn’t know.
    “We could use someone to sew buttonholes, press fabrics, run errands …”
    “I’d be a gofer?”
    Mr. Wever looked confused.
    “An errand girl,” I clarified, not entirely put off by the thought. Anything sounded better than wandering the streets of Everton with nothing to do and nowhere to go, the tragedy of my mother’s demise following me like the proverbial ball and chain.
    “Yes,” Mr. Wever said slowly. “An errand girl, I suppose. But maybe more than that. If you have good eyes.” He took a shuffling step toward me, and I lifted my chin as if offering up my eyes for inspection. They were blue and bottomless, too big if I chose to believe my late mother’s persistent criticism. And maybe my baby blues were a smidgen buggy, but I never understood why Bev felt the need to critique. They were her eyes, after all. I was the spitting image of my mother from the tips of my delicate fingers to the roots of my unruly ginger hair.
    “How much?” I asked.
    Mr. Wever hooked a finger around the wire frame of the glasses that were perched on his nose and tugged them down so he could regard me through the lower lens of his bifocals. His gaze was direct, and maybe just a little amused. “Three dollars an hour,” he said. “The hours will change. Sometimes we will have a lot of work for you. Sometimes not.”
    Three dollars was less than minimum wage, but thehours sounded suitably vague and variable. “Okay,” I said, shrugging. “I’ll be your errand girl.”
    Mr. Wever nodded once and gave me an earnest, tight-lipped smile. When he took a step toward me, I thought that he was going to rattle off a collection of do’s and don’ts, an indomitable checklist for working in his hallowed shop. But instead, he extended his hand and waited patiently for me to reciprocate. Our handshake was solemn, and as my fingers disappeared into his giant palm, I realized that we were sealing a covenant.
    “Elena and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow morning at eight,” he said.
    Since Bev’s death I had gotten used to loafing, but Mr. Wever didn’t really leave room for discussion on the matter of my starting time. I lifted a shoulder and he must have taken the gesture as assent because he nodded again and turned to go. “Thank you,” I called after him.
    He was shuffling up the driveway, and he only acknowledged my gratitude by waving his hand in the air as if he was swatting at a cloud of