“And if they don’t do the trick?”
“Then you can always try what I do on those days when I’m a little bit down in the dumps.”
“What’s that?”
Peg smiled and nodded to the monitor. “I check out those abs.”
Later that evening, Francesca stood at the kitchen counter, beating some eggs in a bowl. She stirred in a little milk and some bits of cheese before pouring it all over a batch of ground beef and onions she had sizzling in a frying pan atop the stove. While everything simmered, she threw together a quick salad of lettuce and cucumbers, with a little oil and vinegar as a simple dressing, then she turned her attention back to the eggs, moving them around with a spatula to keep them from sticking to the bottom of the pan. When they were cooked, she pushed them onto a plate, added a splash of Tabasco sauce, and poured herself a little glass of red wine. The addition of the heel of a loaf of bread made it a simple but hearty meal, more than enough to warm her up a little on a cold winter’s night. Francesca put everything onto a dinner tray and carried it into the den.
Francesca set the tray on a TV table and sat down on the sofa, listening all the while to the intensifying storm. For once, the weathermen had gotten it right; it was snowing like crazy outside. In fact, it had already started to come down quite heavily by the time she had left the library earlier that afternoon. The snowplows had not yet cleaned the roads, and it was a slick, jittery ride home after brushing off the car; she had regretted being so smug with Rebecca, the librarian. The wind now had started to howl and to toss great handfuls of icy snow, which sprittered against the windowpanes like grains of sand. The sound of it made Francesca shiver, and she pulled a throw over her legs and feet. As she contemplated her dinner, her thoughts drifted to Florida and Oregon and Australia, all of them nice warm places far from the cold and the whirlwinds of snow that were spinning wildly across her backyard like drunken dancers. She looked up and let her eyes scan the photographs of her children and grandchildren covering virtually every square inch of the den’s walls. She gazed longest at a photograph from Christmas two years earlier. It was the last time that she had had everyone all together at the same time. It had been a wonderful day for her, and the memory brought a brief smile to her face.
Francesca reached over and popped the first of the language tapes into the cassette player on the table by the sofa. As the tape started to play, she lifted her wineglass to her family.
“Salute,” she told them. “Sleep tight tonight, my sweets.”
Then she took a sip of wine and began to eat her supper.
CHAPTER 6
The telephone rang first thing the next morning. It was Rosie, of course, checking in to see if her mother had survived the big storm. It wouldn’t be long before Alice awoke out west and called as well. Though she would never have let on to her daughters, Francesca had already been up since the crack of dawn. The moment she had gotten out of bed that morning, she had dressed quickly, pulled on her boots and coat, and headed outside.
The raucous winds of the previous night had diminished to barely a whisper earlier that morning when Francesca had stepped out the front door and surveyed the scene. It seemed to her then that the entire world had gone white, as if overnight the skies had chosen to blanket the earth and the roofs of the houses inches deep with baby powder. The low-lying bushes and shrubs to either side of the front stoop had disappeared, and the branches of the evergreens drooped beneath the weight of the snow that clung to them like enormous cotton balls. As she waded across the yard to the driveway, all was quiet and still, every sound softened in that way it usually is after a heavy snowfall. Even the engine of a passing sander was muffled to a low grumble, the sand whisking out the back sounding like the bristles of a shoe brush moving against leather. There was something peaceful and soothing about it all, the quiet and the frozen landscape. It was as if nature had chosen to take matters into her own hands and slow the world down, if only for a short while.
It was difficult to tell precisely how much snow had fallen. In some places, the wind had sculpted it into fanciful wavelike drifts that curled up as high as four feet, while in other spots, it had left patches of ground completely bare, hardly a flake to be seen. Francesca guessed that at least a foot or more of the white stuff had come down. One thing was for sure: There was far too much snow for her to shovel. The front walk was buried, and the passing plows had left a small mountain at the end of the driveway.
Francesca assessed the situation and let out a grumble at the thought of her son, who was off, at that moment, somewhere on the far side of the world, soaking up the warm Australian sunshine. Joey usually stopped by to dig her out on days like this. Arranging for someone to take over for him in the event of snow while he was gone was the one item she had forgotten to put on her list of things to do before she went to Florida. Francesca cast an annoyed glance at her driveway. It was obvious that she wouldn’t be driving anywhere that day. Just the same, she brushed off the driver’s side door, started the engine, and left it running to warm things up while she cleaned off the rest of the car.
By the time Rosie called, Francesca was already back inside, warming her toes by the kitchen radiator while percolating coffee on the stove.
“Yes,” Francesca told her after she answered the phone, “it really came down last night. There’s definitely no school in Foster-Glocester. The Weather Channel said we got how much? Eighteen inches? Wow. I don’t know. I think we got more than that around here, but it’s hard to tell just from looking outside.”
Then, “No, now don’t worry. I’ll find someone to shovel me out. What? No, I haven’t got anywhere to go today.”
Rosie was in a state, lecturing Francesca as if she were bundling up a child before sending her off to school on a cold, blustery day. How did she get to be such a bag of nerves? One would never have guessed that she had grown up in New England.
“Yes, yes, yes,” Francesca assured her daughter. “I’ll probably just stay right inside today. The car’s snowed in, so where would I go?”
The conversation went much the same when Alice called a little while later. While they talked, Francesca sipped her coffee and eyed the patches of blue breaking out across the morning sky. The sun was finally getting ready to show its face again.
“It’s about time,” she said to herself, interrupting Alice, who was in the middle of warning her against trying to shovel the driveway by herself.
“Say that again, Mom,” said her younger daughter.
“Never mind. It was nothing,” replied Francesca. “Just talking to myself. You were saying…”
By late morning, the clouds had drifted away, leaving behind clear skies for as far as the eye could see. The January sun was not nearly strong enough to melt away any of the snow; it was still quite cold outside. Nonetheless, the brilliant sunshine reflecting off the snow and through the windows brightened even the rooms on the north side of the house, which were normally left in shadows throughout the day. It almost hurt to look outside.
Francesca sat in the living room, flipping through an old photo album. She was trying to find the pictures from the great Blizzard of ’78, a vicious nor’easter that had struck the region with sudden and startling fury. Packing hurricane-force winds, the storm had unexpectedly hit with full power at midday, downing power lines and sending cars skidding into each other on the highways. There were dozens of accidents, stalling traffic in every direction and blocking roads all over the state before the snowplows had a chance to clear them. Stranded motorists were forced to abandon their cars wherever they happened to find themselves on the highways and take their chances trudging home through the gale. Several people died, and the entire state, for all intents and purposes, was paralyzed for the better part of a week. After all the years, that blizzard was still the gold standard, the storm by which all other winter weather was measured in Rhode Island. It was as deeply etched into the memories of Rhode Islanders as any great historical event. Those who lived through it could tell you exactly where they were and what they