Page 21 of Boy Blue
I watched while he took a damp paper towel and wrapped it around the broom, which he used to go over the wooden floor. Then he used a second damp paper towel and repeated the whole process. Everything went into the trash, including the mound of tea-stained snow.
“I think it should be all right now,” he said. “Why you’re barefoot, I don’t know. Where are those socks I gave you?”
“Hot,” I said. “They made my feet hot.”
He shook his head and sighed as he put the broom and dustpan away and put the trash can in its spot on the other side of the fridge. He seemed to despair of me, but not to the point where he thought I was too much to deal with. Because I was.
My friends had sometimes thought so, at least the dark-haired one had. I saw flickers of his mulish expression when I refused to share in his joy at something so simple; in my previous life, I would have disregarded it without a thought.
What had the simple thing been? Not a bright yellow bag of M&M’s, but a garishly bright yellow bag of imitation M&M’s, left behind in a laundromat we’d slinked into during a heavyrainstorm, though we didn’t have enough quarters for even the cheapest machine.
The youngest of us, the red-haired one, had taught us to wash anything that needed washing in restroom sinks with powdered soap from a dispenser. His name was—Star. The other one must be Nimble. I’d connected names to faces. Choked on this memory and held it close, swallowed it so it wouldn’t get away.
Wolfe lifted me down from the kitchen counter. My toes curled and uncurled. The floor was mostly dry. The tea was gone, but it had stained the wood a darker oak brown.
“You look tired,” Wolfe said.
“So do you,” I said. Because he must be. Tired of housing a clumsy, ungrateful, greedy, lack-of-benefit guest.
“That’s enough,” he said. He touched my chin with his thumb. “We can only do what we can do. Now.” He nodded at me as though I’d just agreed with him. “I’ll bring in some gimp, and you can practice your box braids. Meanwhile, I’m going to plow snow because tomorrow we are going to town.”
Though I was supposed to be working, I took the gimp and watched from the front door as he made a path in the snow to the biggest lump, which was, yes, his truck. He dug it out, then hitched a snowplow to the front.
Then, like the frontiersman that he was, plowed a path from an open space and, in front of the house, he made a road. Then he guided the truck to plow another road that curved from the first. The truck chuffed and growled like a dragon, obedient only to his guidance.
By the time it was growing dark, the silence settling along with a sheet of cold that was so hard my nose and face felt it, I thought I saw a glimmer of lights going past, far off beyond the waves of purple and blue-hued snow.
Wolfe parked the truck near the house and took off the plow. Then he stormed through the front door, shedding his blue parka, stomping the snow from his boots.
“That’s Plowy McPlowface,” he said. “They’re already clearing the roads. I got a text about it. Now, I will take these off,” he said, bending to unlace the boots, “because otherwise I’m tracking snow through the house.”
The boots went into the boot tray. Wolfe glanced at my hand, at the strings from which not a single lanyard had been made, but didn’t say anything. Instead, he went into the kitchen and made us dinner. He salted the steak and boiled water for noodles. He seared the steak in a cast iron pan, then, while the meat rested, he fried mushrooms and onions in the fond from the steak, using bacon grease.
There was enough steak for one person, mushrooms and onions too. So even if I had been hungry, I wasn’t going to be. Luckily, I remembered I liked noodles, so I feasted on those, dripping with bacon grease and plenty of salt and pepper. Wolfe shook his head as he gathered the dishes to wash.
“I told you, it’s fine,” he said. “We can share what we have.”
“And I told you I’m not hungry,” I replied. He couldn’t force me to eat, but he gave me such a face, a glowering expression, so I took a bit of steak and a spoonful of mushrooms. I might be hungry later, but what did it matter. Like he’d said, we were going to the grocery store in the morning.
After I half-limped, half-propped myself up trying to help him clear the dishes and wash them, sweep the floor, he thumped off to his workshop, the back outdoor light shining on the snow as he shut the door. That was fine. It was his place. He could go anywhere he wanted.
Silence grew in the cabin, the darkness pressing down on the roof. I washed up for bed, made up the bed on the couch, and slithered between the sheets.
Staring at the ceiling, lit by the light over the stove, I was going to wait until Wolfe went to bed before I fell asleep. As though I was some kind of guardian of the night. Morning would come early, and maybe a drive across the snowy landscape would trigger something inside of me so I could remember who I was. That and, not only where I’d come from, but where I’d been going.
When I next woke up, the light over the stove was off. The back door light was off. The cabin was totally dark, as dark as if I was at the bottom of a deep well, a well so deep that not even starlight could reach me.
My chest felt heavy, as though something or someone was pressing on it, and I sat up with a gasp. I was all alone. Nobody knew where I was.
Except—in the other room, Wolfe was sleeping.
If I went in there, I wouldn’t be alone. I got up and stumbled through the darkness. Pushed open his door; it hadn’t been fully shut, but open a crack, and my hands on the door were hot against the wood.
“Wolfe?” I stepped into the room.
It would have been pitch black except that there were two windows. Both had the curtains drawn back, and through the glass I could see the starlight I’d been wanting to see. That starlight reflected in his eyes, and across the paleness of his shoulder in the sleeveless t-shirt he wore.
“Blue?”
