DECEMBER 15, 1986
The sound of boots on the front porch, the scraping of snow, and then her front door opening. “Stephen?” she calls out. She’s at the table with coffee, next to the blazing Stanley, and is sure it is him. Her son. Long-limbed. Handsome. Kind. It was well below zero last night, the first real cold night of winter, and the Stanley this morning needed three logs going good before the kitchen warmed. “Stephen?” she calls out again.
But it isn’t Stephen. It’s Deb, with Danny behind her, their mittened hands wrapped together. Deb is still in her nightgown with jeans and Sorels on underneath, her hair a mess. Always the floozy.
“Hazel,” Deb says. Her face paler than Hazel has ever seen it, and she isn’t breathing right. The room suddenly smells strange, and then Hazel looks at Danny’s eyes. They are dark and small, two deep holes that seem to disappear too far back into his body. He’s shaking. His lower lip trembling and blue.
“What is it?” Hazel says, her throat dry.
“Stephen,” Deb says, not blinking, or moving, or looking away. “It’s Stephen.”
GODDAMN YOU, HAZEL THINKS LATER THAT DAY, AFTER the body has been carried down the mountain by two neighbors, after the police have come, and Bonnie with her baby. At last it is just Danny and Deb and Hazel and Bonnie (Vale sleeping on the couch), sitting in Hazel’s kitchen at the table, the only spot warmed by the fire, watching the sky give up its light for the grays and blues of dusk.
They are sitting eating the pea soup Hazel has warmed up on the stove, when Hazel says it out loud.
“Goddamn you,” she says, looking at the woman who turned her son’s life into who knows what. The woman who never seemed to work a lick in her whole life, who spent money on wine and records and had never wanted Stephen, or Danny, for that matter, to have anything to do with cows or the land. She wanted to take this place and Hazel’s son in her slender fist and turn it into some kind of fantasy, walk the hillsides in a poetic reverie. But what did she really know about any of it? Of who made those beautiful, now crumbling walls, of the blood and sweat and work that went into these now overgrowing fields. She was sure Deb had never loved her son like she should have. Was too demanding—needing him like a child needs a mother. And Danny. Danny sits next to his mother eating the soup, his eyes wide and still full of that too-deep look that made Hazel nearly gasp and turn away. In her mind: a flash of her own boy at that age streaking across a field, laughing. My son was perfect, she thinks, loving him as deeply as she has ever loved anyone.
Hazel turns toward Deb. “The boy can sleep here,” she says, coolly. Her daughter-in-law’s eyes have dried, and they look at her then with a look so cold it frightens Hazel.
“No,” Deb says. A cold laugh of disbelief. Standing and reaching for Danny. “Come. Let’s go home.”
And then they are gone, the door closed quietly behind them, and it is just Hazel and Bonnie and Bonnie’s baby, Vale, and soon they leave, too, and then it is just her there in her kitchen, alone again, alone as she has been, it seems, for years, and it isn’t until all the lights are off, and she is nestled deep under the wool blankets of her four-post bed, that she feels the pain streaking from her legs up into her back and neck and shoulders. An unbearable pain, which will not subside.