The tremor in Mattie Krakowski’s fingertips increased as they brushed her thin, lined lips. Through the dusty curtain, the late-afternoon gloom of drifting snow glowed neon blue. She pulled back the lace veil and studied the puffy mounds strewn up and down Beecham Street like igloos. Not one car had moved all day. The snow that covered the sidewalk was free of footprints.
“My, oh my, Tom! So this is what you call ‘global warming’?”
She was talking to WGN’s renowned meteorologist, who had been explaining why Chicago faced its heaviest snowfall for February 9 in more than 125 years.
“I just don’t get it, Tom. I just don’t get it.”
Tom Skilling was Mattie’s friend. So were Regis and Kelly and Oprah and anyone else who cared enough to talk to her from the moment she woke up until after she fell asleep in her tattered old rocker . . . only to rouse herself later just enough to shut off the late-night car commercials that always blasted twice as loud as her friends.
Mattie surveyed her street once more. The city trucks hadn’t even tried to plow Beecham. Still, none of the snow mounds were big enough to cover the big pickup truck belonging to the man next door. He was very industrious. A Muslim or something. Maybe he was out somewhere plowing parking lots. Those drifts were high. Mattie noticed that one nearly covered the awful For Sale sign the bank had planted in her yard. If that weren’t bad enough, they’d come along and tacked the word Foreclosure on top. It still showed above the snowdrift.
She shivered and let the curtain fall back into place, releasing a musty whiff of burned toast, rancid grease, and scorched coffee. The place needed cleaning, but ever since her second-floor tenant moved out over a year ago, she’d had no money for cleaning help. She hadn’t been able to make her mortgage payments either. Her son had remodeled the second floor, but still she hadn’t been able to rent it. Now the bank was telling her she had to move out.
She waved her hand in front of her face to fan away the dust. She didn’t like to think about the things she couldn’t change and turned back toward the TV. “You didn’t say it was gonna be this cold, Tom. Don’tcha think a little warning woulda been considerate?” Pulling an old blanket around her shoulders, she walked to the thermostat in the hallway, the ragged ends of the blanket dragging on the floor. Though she’d turned the dial up to seventy-five, the thermometer needle said the temperature had dropped to sixty-two. No wonder she felt so cold! She tapped on the little gizmo her son had installed a few years before to help her save money and turned the dial up to eighty . . . and listened. But there was no familiar rattling in the air ducts to assure her that the old furnace had come to life. She waited . . . still no rumble from the basement.
Land sakes alive, she’d have to give Donald a call. Maybe if he knew she was freezing, he’d drive in from Elgin to see her. But no, no . . . he couldn’t do that in this storm, and she shouldn’t make him feel guilty. She was trying not to do that anymore. Besides, he was much too busy with those grandchildren. Mattie wrinkled her brow and closed her eyes. What were their names again? She could see their cute little faces . . . no, wait, they were teenagers now, all knees and elbows and loud, much too loud . . . or, maybe one was even married. She wasn’t sure.
Regis was almost eighty, same age as she was, and he didn’t seem so forgetful. Still pretty handsome too. And he was such a nice man.
Mattie drifted back toward the living room. She’d check with Tom to see how long this cold snap would last, because she needed some heat!
Suddenly, her hand shot up to pat her withered lips. What if . . . what if . . . ? Had she paid her gas bill? “Oh Tom, Tom,” she called toward her TV screen, “I have to go check on the gas. I’ll be right back. Now don’t go away, Tom!”
She made her way into the kitchen and turned on the front burner of the stove. It lit with a poof and settled into a nice circle of blue flame. She held her hands above it, enjoying the warmth until the fringe of her blanket nearly caught on fire. “No! No! No!” She slapped at the fringe. “Whew.” She took a deep breath and turned off the stove. So it wasn’t the gas! At least she’d figured that much out. A paper-thin smile stretched across her face. She hadn’t yet lost it all.
When she got back to the living room, Tom was gone. Mattie picked up the remote. “I asked you to wait for me, Tom. Now I’ll have to find some other weatherman.” She surfed through the channels, stopping on channel seven, and a woman she didn’t even recognize was talking about the storm. What was it Tom called himself, a “meteorologist”? This woman looked more like a floozy.
Mattie stood in the middle of the room, staring glassy-eyed as the floozy pointed to charts and maps and recited meaningless numbers while Mattie’s mind drifted back to her inoperative old furnace. Then she turned, shuffled back through the kitchen, and opened the door to the basement. She didn’t like to go down there. The old wooden stairs creaked, some lightbulbs were out, and the place was damp. It was also a cluttered mess, what with Fred’s old tools, mildewed National Geographics, racks of empty canning jars—Mattie hadn’t canned since Fred died, but maybe someday—and . . . and the cockroaches. They’d never been able to get rid of those nasty things! But the basement also housed the old furnace, and it was calling to her. She had to go see what it needed. She turned the knob on the antiquated light switch and clutched the blanket more tightly around her as she gripped the handrail and began her descent.
Three steps down, her left toe caught the torn hem of the old blanket, and a little cry escaped as she realized she was tripping. It happened so slowly that for an instant she thought she could catch herself, but the railing was wrenched out of her hand with such force that her body twisted all the way around and bounced off the lower steps with a resounding craaack, a crack that in that instant reminded her of the first home run Donald had ever hit in Little League.
As she tumbled backwards, Mattie grabbed the edge of the canning rack, hoping to stop her fall, but instead it pulled away from the wall, dumping a cascade of Mason jars down on her just as her head thudded on the concrete floor.