When the Snow Fell Read Free Page A

twenty-five, he’d have said. Although he was bad at guessing people’s ages. He sometimes thought that Miss Nederström was ninety, but somebody had told him, to his great surprise, that she wasn’t even fifty.
    There was something else about the new shop assistant that had made him curious. She sounded different when she talked. She wasn’t a local. Although he couldn’t be certain, he thought she probably came from Stockholm. The previous summer, a traveling circus had come to town. As usual, Joel had helped to erect the fence and carry chairs in order to get a free ticket. He’d run an errand for one of the circus workers, and bought some coffee. The worker came from Stockholm, and spoke a very distinctive dialect. The new shop assistant at the grocer’s spoke in a similar way. As far as he could tell.
    His train of thought was broken when the fat woman came out of the shop. Joel gritted his teeth and hoped ashard as he could that she would slip on the steps and kill herself. But she didn’t, of course. It was only innocent people who slipped and got hurt. Really bad criminals never did. Nor did fat women who talked about things that didn’t concern them.
    Joel saw her hang her shopping bag on the handle of a kick sledge. He thought it looked like a Walker on runners. It was painted brown, and there were fancy upturned points at the front of the runners, which was a bit unusual.
    Joel memorized what the sledge looked like. He knew where the woman lived. On one of his evening expeditions through the town, he would pee all over it.
    He watched her disappear round the corner. She still hadn’t burst. Joel hurried home. He felt cold. His hands were white. He thought about the new shop assistant at Ehnström’s.
    He wasn’t quite sure exactly what he thought.
    When he got home he took off his boots, and started his work by peeling the potatoes. Then he snuggled down in his bed and massaged his toes. They felt sore. His boots really were too small for him. He wondered whether he ought to limp when Samuel came home. Or maybe he ought to lie down and drag himself over the floor. As if he’d been crippled by the boots. In which case Samuel couldn’t very well refuse to buy him a new pair.
    He decided to wait until the following day. The boots would still be too small then. He had too many more important things to do tonight.
    While he was waiting for the potatoes to boil, he went to the bathroom and examined his face in his dad’s shaving mirror. He had got into the habit of doing this over the last year. It was a New Year’s resolution he’d made a year ago. He would examine his face in the mirror every afternoon, and see how much he’d changed. But now, after a whole year, he thought he looked exactly the same as before. The shaving mirror couldn’t tell him that he’d grown bigger and taller. Nor could it tell him that his feet had become too big for his boots. He supposed it would have been better to have examined his feet in the mirror every day, but surely nobody did that?
    Joel tested the potatoes with a fork. Five more minutes. While he was waiting he laid the table. Sometimes he would put out a third plate. Just to see what it would look like. If Mummy Jenny had still been there. He wondered where she would have sat. Between him and his dad? Or in his own place, next to the stove? He decided that was it. She would have been the one to collect the food from the stove.
    When everything was ready, the black pudding fried and placed under a lid to keep it warm, and the lingonberry jam fetched from the pantry and put on the table, all he had to do was to wait for Samuel. Joel did what he always did: sat on the window seat and looked down at the street. He’ddone that for as long as he could remember. That was the window from which he’d seen that mysterious dog. It was also where he generally sat when he was forced to make a difficult decision. Or when he felt sad.
    You could say that the window seat was