Winter and Night Read Online Free PDF

smugness in rising to the challenge. It irritated me, and I turned it off.
    The Warrenstown exit brought me to tree-shaded streets lined with old houses with porches and fenced backyards, newer split-levels with wide lawns and shrubs. I stopped and asked directions in a downtown of two-story brick shops centered on a well-trimmed park. A banner across the main street reminded everyone that the Hamlin's game was Saturday, that the bus would leave at nine. I didn't understand about the bus, and I wasn't sure what the game could be. This late in the fall, the football season must be over, surely, and the basketball season not yet begun.
    I drove on, found what I'd been directed to: a new subdivision of vaguely colonial homes on streets carefully curved to provide both interest and easy steering radiuses. In front of a house with pale gray siding and gray-blue shutters, different only in small details from the houses around it, I pulled up and parked. Chrysanthemums bristled along the concrete walk leading to the door; two carved pumpkins, staying beyond Halloween, stood on the low stoop. One grinned a lopsided grin. The other sneered.
    I pressed the button and heard two tones ring inside. A dog barked. I waited and the door was pulled open. A brown-haired girl in glasses, jeans, and a blue Pokémon tee shirt stared at me a moment, seemed caught off guard. She had her hand on the collar of a black Doberman that glared and growled warningly. The girl, manners returning, said, "Yes?"
    "Hi, Jennifer," I said. "You don't remember me, but I'm your uncle Bill. Is your mom home?"
    Confusion washed over her face. "Oh," she said, then called over her shoulder, "Mom? It's Uncle Bill."
    Another girl, smaller, dressed in corduroys and a flowered turtleneck shirt, came running to the door to have a look at me. For a moment, it was just the three of us. Then, coming down the stairs, pushing her hair back with her hand, her blue eyes unsure and unsmiling, was my sister Helen.
    "Bill," she said, stopping behind her daughters. The girls looked from one of us to the other. Helen was wearing jeans and a white turtleneck with fall leaves embroidered on the collar. She was small, high-cheekboned, fair-skinned. Delicate and pretty. Her daughters both looked like that. It's the men in our family who are always big. Gary, my father. Helen's husband Scott is a big man, too. And me.
    Helen started to say something else, seemed undecided, stopped, settled on, "What are you doing here?"
    "Can I come in?" I asked, not certain of the answer.
    "Yes," she said after a moment, stepping aside at the door. "Yes, of course."
    I moved past her into a vestibule lined with raincoats and rubber boots. A child's snow shovel leaned in the corner; umbrellas large and small stood, each in its own slot, in a rack with plenty of empty spaces for visitors and friends. From inside the house came the sweet smell of maple syrup: Breakfast had been pancakes, a hearty breakfast for a cool fall morning.
    "Go on, get your things," Helen said to the girls. They skipped off with backward glances— whatever we were doing was more interesting than making sure they had all their homework and books for another school day.
    Helen led me into her living room, a sunny, rose-carpeted place where the upholstered furniture looked used and comfortable, the slate fireplace ready for the chilly nights to come. Lined up on the mantel were family pictures: the three kids as babies; in Halloween costumes; on the floor in front of a Christmas tree surrounded by toys and torn wrapping paper and untied ribbons. One photo showed Gary in a football uniform, helmet under his arm, wide grin on his face. The black grease smeared on his cheekbones mocked the dark circles I'd seen last night under his eyes.
    There were photos, too, of adults I didn't know, probably Scott's parents; and there was a small one, a snapshot really, of my mother, framed now behind glass, but bent and tattered. In the picture, my