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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“YOU JUST DON’T GIVE UP, do you?” Bernice gave her daughter a grudging smile.
“Nope.” Sara held out her mother’s long gray coat, inviting her to slip it on. “Just look outside!”
Bernice shot a dubious glance toward the front window and the huge snowflakes swirling lazily past the dark pines across the street. “So it’s snowing—the start of a long winter and more snow than we’d ever want, most likely.”
“But it’s the first snow. Isn’t it gorgeous?”
“Until you’ve got four-foot drifts at your front door and mounds so high at intersections that no one can see oncoming traffic until they’re halfway through.”
Staying cheerful sometimes took a lot of effort. “But at least it’s getting a late start this year—it’s almost mid-November.” After helping her into the coat, Sara retrieved her mother’s fur-lined snow boots and held them out. “And we’re only supposed to get three or four inches. You’re forgetting that in Dallas, I take home videos if we have any snow at all.”
Bernice pursed her lips as she pulled on the boots. “Then maybe you shouldn’t have moved so far away.”
That was about as close to “I miss you” as her mother ever got, and the hint of loneliness beneath her words tugged at Sara’s heart.
“Maybe not. Remember how I loved blizzards as a kid? I remember snuggling under my heavy blankets, listening to the school closings on the radio and praying the announcer would list Ryansville. Remember?”
“I do.”
“I can still smell the cocoa and warm oatmeal with cinnamon on those cold mornings. Kyle and I would etch pictures in the frost on our windows, and we’d build blanket forts all over the living room.”
“Those days passed by too fast, even though times were hard.”
“But they were good days, Mom. I have wonderful memories.”
“Do you?” Usually Bernice only expressed bitterness over the past, but now her voice held a note of sadness. It trailed away as she tugged on a pair of thick wool gloves. “I always wished things could have been better. Maybe Kyle wouldn’t have...”
“You did your best.” Sara leaned forward to give her mother a swift hug. “He made his own choices, and there wasn’t much else you could have done. I just wish he’d keep in touch with you more.”
That wasn’t going to happen, though, and they both knew it. His rebellion as a teen had led him into all sorts of minor juvenile offenses, and his mother’s pleas had been scornfully ignored. Kyle hadn’t been impressed with the warnings of the county deputies, either.
Only by the grace of God, his mother’s prayers, and the patience of the local juvenile court judge had he avoided being sent to reform school. Throughout those years he’d blamed his mother and late father for every scrape.
But this was going to be a pleasant walk. Not one for revisiting the past.
“Are you ready?” Whistling to Harold, who had curled up by the refrigerator, she led the way outside and then waited as her mother carefully locked the door behind them—probably one of the few people in Ryansville who bothered to do so.
As they started down the sidewalk, Sara savored the cool tickle of snowflakes against her cheeks. “Looking up at them makes me dizzy,” she said, laughing and giving Bernice’s arm a quick squeeze.
They’d traveled almost a block before Bernice sighed and looked over at her. “I...I want to thank you.”
“It’s great to be outside, isn’t it?” The snow was falling faster now, and the trees and shrubbery were covered. “Come January we’ll be looking at fifty-below windchills.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
They stopped at the corner of Poplar and Main, where young mothers hurried along the sidewalk followed by children who kicked up clouds of snow with their boots and licked icy flakes from their mittens. Drivers cautiously made their way up and down Main’s slippery pavement.
