One Cold Night

turned to her and she inhaled the corn-bread scent of his skin that afternoon.
    “I love you, Suzie.”
    It was not the first time he had said it; he told her every time they made love. What she wanted more than anything was for him to say it when they hadn’t.
    “Peter Adkins used to seem like a nice boy,” Carole said.
    Behind them, Bill stopped pacing and looked at the photo. Then he huffed and continued wearing down the floorboards.
    “We were so young.” Susan touched the edge of the photograph. “We thought we were pretty smart, too.”
    Marie was staring hard at the picture. Susan took in her profile: lean and finely etched, a roughness to her skin. She wondered what this woman was thinking, looking at a photograph of the man who might have taken — killed, Susan thought, in a betrayal of hope — her daughter. Then Susan realized that Marie was probably thinking and feeling much as she herself was: a deep, aching hunger to see her child again; a wish to reverse time to that moment before the girl walked out the door and to say, “Wait for me; I’ll come with you.” Susan realized that she was on day one of a journey that Marie had simply been on longer.
    Looking at Peter’s young face now, recalling his charm and his energy, Susan felt nothing but shame. Had she really loved this boy? Yes, she recalled; desperately. She had been like every other teenage girl she knew then — a fanatic animal, a deep feeler, a truthseeker. They were probably right about most things, but they grew up — Susan had grown up. She only wished her past could have been reduced to mere recollection; instead, it had been the planting ground for all this.
    She turned from Marie’s gaunt face to the row of windows that stacked neat squares of baby-blue sky one against the next. It was like a film strip caught in a projector, the images floating by anyway. Clouds. Memories. Peter. Lisa. Susan felt herself slide out of her body and drift toward the windows, nudged right, then left at every breeze; while her other body — her real body — sat on the couch, heavy as stone. Then, at the touch of her mother’s warm hand on her arm, Susan returned to the here and now, the place that would normally be called reality.
    Carole was eyeing her keenly, her face soft with the fine lines of a woman aging gracefully. Even now, after all these torturous hours, her pale coif was still perfectly in place. She took the photograph of Peter, slipped it between two pages of the album and shut the book.
    “The past is the past,” Carole said with the Southern snap of authority Susan found so comforting. “We can’t just sit here.”
    “Yes, we can, Mom.”
    “Well, we shouldn’t. Where’s your Scrabble board? Marie, do you play?”
    In minutes, the three women were set up at the dining room table with Susan’s old Scrabble board spread open between them, doling out the little letter bricks. Susan had always loved the smooth feel of the wooden squares as she arranged them on their stand. Her tattered paperback Scrabble dictionary satbetween mother and daughter. Back in Vernon, Carole had started Susan on the game as a way to help her with her reading troubles, in the hope it would make school easier. “If your word jumps around,” Carole would instruct in her bright inspirational tone, “you just take it apart and put it back together again.” In the end, the word practice didn’t help Susan much in school, but she got good at the game and she and her mother became formidable opponents. Tuesday nights Carole played bridge with her lady friends, rotating houses. Thursday nights were reserved for Susan and Carole’s Scrabble games. This set had been a parting gift when Susan went away to college; it had lived with her for one and a half semesters, until she grew exhausted from deconstructing words that wouldn’t stay put, and she dropped out; it had moved with her at nineteen into the rough unheated loft, where it waited lonely nights on the shelf while she waitressed and then worked in restaurant kitchens and then endured the long hours and apprenticeships of culinary school. Through all those years, through all the transformations of Susan’s work life and personal life, through the loft’s makeover from old to new, whenever Carole came to visit the Scrabble board had come out. Ditto Texas, where they still used the lovingly worn set Susan had grown up with.
    Bill paced around and around the three women as they played, eyeing