He snapped the guitar case closed and glanced over at her. She stood at the front door of the restaurant, the door open just a crack. Snowflakes danced in past her, wind rustling her hair, and a pang of regret hit him hard. Ella hadn’t even turned around to look at him, but still she was beautiful. They had been friendly for ages, but tonight—sitting around talking as, one by one, the rest of the staff finished prepping for the next day and headed out into the storm—TJ had felt a connection to Ella that he could not explain.
They had sat together while the logs burned down in the fireplace; he strummed and sang a few songs, faltering in the middle and jumping to some other tune. He could play in front of crowds and he could play for himself, but when The Vault’s cook had gone out the door and left them intimately alone, he’d felt self-conscious about playing just for her. His fingers jumped around on the neck of the guitar, the pick sweeping the strings, and he’d moved from song to song like some ADHD kid who couldn’t just leave the radio on one station.
“It’s pretty bad out there, huh?” he asked as he moved across the restaurant toward her.
Ella didn’t turn around. “It’s crazy. We must be getting three inches an hour.”
The wind howled through the narrow opening of the door. TJ saw the door judder in her grasp. He went to join her and she let the wind force the door open wider. The two of them stood there looking out at the street together.
“You weren’t kidding,” he said.
The snow blanketed everything, save in places where the wind had scoured it nearly to the pavement, creating huge drifts that crested like ocean waves in the middle of the street. Whatever work the plows had done the storm had undone. From the looks of things, it had been a while since anyone had even attempted to clear the road. There were tracks that cut through it, though. Someone in a truck had gone past in the last half hour or so and not gotten stuck. But Ella drove a Camry.
“You going to be okay getting home?” he asked. “I’ve got my Jeep. I could drive you.”
She turned to him and TJ became abruptly aware of how close they were standing. Only a few inches separated them. Ella shivered as a fresh gust buffeted them and more snow danced across the threshold of The Vault. Outside, the storm raged, but here they were just on the edge of shelter, somehow daring and yet still protected.
“I’ve been thinking I might just sleep here. In my office. I’ve got a blanket in there and some cushions. If I try to go home I might get stuck, but even if I make it, I’ve got to worry about getting back here in the morning.”
TJ might have told her she couldn’t be sure she would even open tomorrow, that the storm looked fierce enough that the whole region was likely to shut down for the day. But her lips glistened in the light above the restaurant’s doorway and her eyes were a bright, burnished copper.
A snowflake landed on the lashes of her left eye and he couldn’t breathe.
They leaned in, but she paused, glancing down and away. “You need to go. It keeps up like this, even that old Jeep won’t get you home.”
“Ella, I—”
“You told your mother you’d be there.”
TJ smiled, hanging his head in defeat. But only for a second.
“Something’s going on here,” he said, gazing at her until she had to look up and meet his eyes. “This is one of those moments … I can feel it.”
“You can feel it?” she said, cocking her head.
He struggled for a second, not knowing how to continue. Then he reached up and brushed away a stray lock of hair that hung across her eyes and she shivered again, their gazes locked.
“I don’t play a lot of the songs I’ve written. I guess I’m a little afraid to share them. But you know my song ‘Stars Fall’?”
She nodded. “I love that song.”
“One night in high school I slept over my friend Willie’s house. Me and Willie and another friend, Aaron, had spent the day together, and it had been a
great
day. Maybe the greatest day, back then. Willie wanted us to stay over, to take sleeping bags and steal beer from the fridge in the garage and go and camp in the woods by Kenoza Lake. I got permission but after Aaron called home he said his mother wouldn’t let him sleep over. We all knew he was lying.”
“He didn’t want to camp out or he didn’t want to drink?” Ella asked, letting the door swing closed, the two of them even more intimate now, just inside with the storm screaming beyond the door.
TJ shrugged. “Maybe both. Thing is, that night cemented something for me and Willie. We didn’t see a bear or meet a bunch of girls or find secret treasure or anything. But we lay out all night by the lake and watched the stars. We talked all night about our families and about girls and about the future. I can still remember it vividly, but that’s because
it felt
vivid, even then. After that night, Willie and I were inseparable.”
“Were?” Ella asked.
A familiar grief ignited within him. “Iraq. He didn’t come home.”
“I’m sorry.”
For a moment, TJ said nothing. Then he reached out and took her hand, meeting her gaze again. “Things were never the same with Aaron after that night. He was still our friend, but he hadn’t been there, y’know?”
Ella let out a breath and gave a tiny nod. “I think I do.”
“I don’t want to be Aaron,” he said.
“What…” she said, laughing softly. “What about your mother?”
“The drifts are so bad out there, I’m not even sure the Jeep could make it,” TJ said. “I’ll call her and explain. She’ll understand.”
Ella smiled. “Let me rebuild the fire, then. And you’d better get that guitar out again.”
TJ grinned and bent toward her, hesitated for a second, and then brushed his lips across hers. No need to rush. They had all night.
Ella locked the door to keep the storm at bay.
Later, as she poked at the logs in the fireplace and the wood began to blaze with light and heat, he played “Falling Slowly” by the Frames, the one Ella was always asking for.
And the power went out.
Martha Farrelly loved her son, but sometimes it frustrated her that he treated her like an old lady. Sure, she’d been a late bloomer as a mother—she’d been thirty-nine when she gave birth to TJ—but she thought she was in excellent shape for a woman of seventy-one. She did yoga, went to the gym three times a week, and knew her way around a computer just as well as her son did, though that wasn’t saying much.
The only reason she’d asked him to stay over tonight was that she was worried about getting out of the driveway in the morning. She had a man who plowed her little patch of pavement, but after even a moderate snowfall he tended to take his time, clearing the way for his bigger customers first. In a blizzard like this, there was no telling when he would show up, and Martha had a lot on her agenda for tomorrow, starting with her favorite yoga class at seven
A.M.
If the plow man didn’t show up, she wanted TJ there to dig her out, but he thought she was afraid of the storm.
Silly boy,
she thought. At her age, there wasn’t much that frightened her. Certainly not a snowstorm, no matter how many inches might fall. Her refrigerator and cabinets were full and she didn’t eat much anyway. If she ended up snowed in for a few days, it would just give her a chance to do some reading.
When he’d called to say that he had gotten held up at the restaurant and the roads were looking ugly, she’d been a little perturbed, but any worry over missing her morning yoga session was outweighed by the unusual hesitancy in his voice. As uncommon as it was, she knew that quaver all too well—how could she not, after raising him? He’d met a girl. Yoga or no yoga, Martha was not about to stand in the way of her son getting himself a new girlfriend. One of these days, she hoped to have grandchildren.
He was a good man, her TJ. Called her every few days even when his work kept him busy and never forgot her birthday or missed taking her to brunch on Mother’s Day. He didn’t visit often, but Martha didn’t mind that so much; she had a life of her own, and she understood in a way that a lot of her friends never seemed to. They were always complaining about their children and grandchildren not making enough time for them, somehow forgetting that they had raised those children to go off and have good lives of their own, to raise good children and to
do
good for others. She and TJ had dinner together every three or four weeks and once in a while they met up for a movie, and those times were lovely, but she never wanted him to see her as needy … as an old lady who needed someone to take care of her.
“Old, my bony ass,” she muttered to herself, and then chuckled. If she was muttering to herself about her behind being bony, she might be on the elderly side after all. But she didn’t have to like it, and she didn’t intend to surrender to it, either.
The fellow doing the weather this week on channel 5 had sounded so ominous talking about this storm that it had made her a little nervous. The regular guy, Harvey something, was on vacation—and he’d sure picked the right week to be away—and Martha would have felt more confident in the forecast if he had been doing the predicting. Regardless, the storm was shaping up to be just as nasty as advertised.
Martha sat in the soft, floral-upholstered reclining chair in her living room, flipping TV channels with her remote. The dance show she liked had ended at ten o’clock and she’d spent three-quarters of an hour dissatisfied with everything else she found, watching bits and pieces of half-a-dozen different movies and snippets of reality shows that tried to lure her in. She felt a certain horrific fascination with those shows but could not bring herself to sit through an entire episode. She felt sure that if she ever did, her humanity and intelligence would be lost forever. A bit melodramatic, she knew, but still somehow true.
Irritated, she changed the channel again, searching for anything that didn’t seem vapid. Not that she would be awake much longer—she would doubtless fall asleep in the chair the way she did nearly every night—but she wasn’t ready to succumb to sleep just yet.
When she clicked over to a Clint Eastwood movie she gave the remote a breather. Eastwood was just about the only legitimate old-time movie star left on the planet and she had always liked looking at him. Even as he aged he was still interesting to watch.
Within minutes, her eyelids grew heavy and her head slowly lolled to one side. Half aware, Martha shifted to get more comfortable, listening to Eastwood’s throaty growl.
The phone jerked her awake. It jangled a tinny melody that she preferred to an old-fashioned ring—usually. This late at night it was intrusive and much too cheerful. Frowning, Martha rose and hurried as best she could into the kitchen, thinking it must be TJ, checking up on her, but by the time she picked it up, there was nothing on the other end. Hitting the ‘Flash’ button several times, she could not raise a dial tone. The storm had knocked out the telephone line.
She’d gotten off her chair for nothing.
Standing in the kitchen, she thought about going up to bed rather than falling asleep in front of the TV. Instead, she wetted her lips with her tongue and went to the cabinet in search of the bag of Oreos she kept for just such moments. She imagined the cookies behind a special display case marked
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS
and smiled.
She made herself a cup of tea, nibbling on a couple of cookies as the water came to a boil, then letting the bag steep in the hot water long enough to make the tea nice and strong. As she fished out another Oreo, a knock came at her front door. Martha jumped, startled by the sound, then glanced with a frown at the clock on the microwave. It was 10:51
P.M.
What could this possibly be about?
Hurriedly discarding the used tea bag, she left her cup sitting on the counter, steam rising into the chilly air, and headed back through the living room to the front door. She knotted her eyebrows and peered at the darkened windows. Snow had accumulated on the screens and made little piles on the sills just beyond the glass. She tried to imagine who might be out and have reason to knock so late, and then she halted, five steps from the door, thinking about downed power lines and ruptured gas mains. Could there be some kind of evacuation?
The knock came again, and she thought of the phone call. Exhaling, laughing at her nervousness, she realized the only logical answer: TJ. must have tried to call to check on her and then when the line went dead he’d come out into this crazy storm, worried about her.
“You know,” she said as she unlocked the door and then pulled it inward, snow flying in her face, “I really
can
take care of myself.”
But, in truth, she could not.
And it was not her son at the door.
Cherie Manning was pissed. The power had been out for over an hour, and the way the storm had been slamming the house, she knew it would not be coming back before morning—and maybe not for a while after that. One of the trees in the backyard had already fallen over, a huge branch smashing against the cellar bulkhead. Another few feet and it might have shattered windows or even the wall.
“And where the hell is Doug?” she said into her cell phone. “Out drinking with the rest of the grease monkeys.”
Curled up on the sofa with a thick blanket, talking with her best friend, Angela, she watched the way the candlelight played across the glass of the windows. She knew there were drafts in the little house she and Doug had bought in the fall, thinking it was time to start a family, but the way the flames flickered, it seemed like something was open somewhere.
“Did you call him?” Angela asked.
Cherie rolled her eyes. She didn’t want to be a bitch, but sometimes Angela could be so dense.
“Five times. He’s not picking up.”
“Come on, Cherie. You know how guys are. He’s drinking with his buddies and watching the game. He probably left his phone in his jacket or something. Or he’s not getting reception because of the storm. I tried you twice before I could even get a call through. Cell service is all screwed up tonight.”