THE SNOW SHE TOLD ME NOT TO TOUCH
“When your wife leaves, don’t touch the snow in your yard.”
The elderly woman’s fingers closed around my wrist as she said it.
Her hand was surprisingly cold.
I stared at her beneath the fluorescent lights of Miller’s Market while a cashier pushed two paper grocery bags toward us across the counter.
Outside the front windows, the afternoon sky over Lakewood, Ohio, was clear and pale blue.
There wasn’t a snowflake anywhere.
I laughed because I didn’t know what else to do.
“My wife leaves?”
The woman’s tired gray eyes stayed on mine.
“When she leaves,” she repeated.
Then she released my wrist.
“You’ll remember me tomorrow morning.”
Before I could ask another question, she lifted one grocery bag and shuffled toward the automatic doors.
I stood there holding the second.
“Ma’am?”
She did not turn around.
The cashier looked at me.
“You know her?”
“No.”
That wasn’t entirely true.
I had seen her before.
She lived somewhere near our neighborhood, or at least I assumed she did. I had noticed her waiting at the bus stop a few times, always wearing the same burgundy wool coat and carrying a canvas shopping bag with faded blue flowers on the side.
But I didn’t know her name.
I had only paid for her groceries because she was thirty-two dollars short.
Exactly thirty-two dollars and eighteen cents.
It happened on an ordinary Thursday in late November.
I had stopped at Miller’s after work to buy coffee, eggs, chicken breasts, and the cinnamon cereal my wife Natalie liked even though she constantly complained it was too sweet.
The store was crowded with people getting ready for the weekend.
When I reached the checkout lane, the elderly woman was standing at the register ahead of me.
Her groceries were simple.
Bread.
Milk.
Eggs.
Two cans of soup.
A bag of rice.
Apples.
A box of tea.
Nothing that looked indulgent.
The cashier told her the total.
The woman opened a small brown purse and counted her bills.
Then counted them again.
She searched the change compartment.
A man behind me sighed.
Another person checked his watch.
The woman quietly removed the tea.
Then the apples.
She still did not have enough.
Something about the way she apologized to the cashier bothered me.
Not dramatically.
She just kept saying, “I’m sorry, honey. Give me a second.”
As though being short on grocery money was somehow an inconvenience she had imposed on the entire room.
I stepped forward.
“I’ve got it.”
She turned.
“No, son.”
“It’s fine.”
“I can put some things back.”
“You don’t need to.”
“It’s too much.”
“It’s thirty-two dollars.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly.
“That can be too much.”
She was right.
I took my card from my wallet anyway.
“Then let me be the person it isn’t too much for today.”
The cashier looked relieved.
The man behind me stopped sighing.
I paid.
The woman stared at the receipt.
Then at me.
“You have children?”
“No.”
“You married?”
“Yes.”
“Good marriage?”
The question caught me off guard.
“I think so.”
She gave me a look that made me feel like I had answered incorrectly.
Then she took my wrist.
“When your wife leaves, don’t touch the snow in your yard.”
And five minutes later, she was gone.
I drove home thinking the whole exchange had been strange enough to tell Natalie about over dinner.
Our house sat on a quiet street lined with maples and old brick colonials built in the 1940s. We had bought it seven years earlier because Natalie fell in love with the front porch and I fell in love with the detached garage.
The porch wrapped around one corner of the house, three broad concrete steps leading to painted wooden decking. In summer, Natalie filled it with planters. In winter, I cursed the steps every time they iced over.
When I pulled into the driveway that Thursday evening, Natalie’s SUV was already there.
The lights were on in the kitchen.
I carried the groceries inside.
Then stopped.
Two suitcases stood beside the kitchen table.
Natalie was sitting between them.
She wore jeans, a gray sweater, and the long camel coat she usually saved for work dinners.
Her hair was tied back.
Her hands were clasped together.
For several seconds, neither of us spoke.
I looked at the suitcases.
Then at her.
“What’s going on?”
She inhaled slowly.
“Evan, sit down.”
My name is Evan Brooks.
I was forty-five years old that winter.
Natalie and I had been married for twelve years.
We had known each other for fourteen.
I had seen her furious, sick, laughing so hard she cried, exhausted after work, half-asleep on airplanes, dancing barefoot at weddings, and once standing on the roof of our first apartment building because she insisted she could retrieve a lost scarf herself.
I had never seen the expression on her face that evening.
Not fear.
Not anger.
Decision.
“I’d rather stand.”
She nodded.
“I’m leaving for a while.”
I actually smiled.
Not because anything was funny.
Because my brain refused to accept the sentence.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I need to go.”
“Where?”
“I have somewhere to stay.”
“With who?”
“Does that matter right now?”
“Yes.”
She looked down.
“My sister helped me find a place.”
“Your sister in Columbus?”
“No. Here.”
I stared.
Her sister Megan lived on the west side of Cleveland.
Natalie continued.
“I signed a short-term lease.”
My fingers tightened around the grocery bag.
“You signed a lease?”