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The Center of Winter
A Novel

Kate

It begins with a small town, far north.

Motley, Minnesota, Pop. 442. Near the headwaters of the muddy Mississippi, past the blue glass of the cities and the stained red brick of the warehouse districts, past the long-abandoned train stations and the Grain Belt sign and the Pillsbury Flour building on the riverbanks, past the smokestacks and hulking wrecks of the industrial section, the town lies past all this, in the center of the prairie that creeps north and west of the river, into the Dakotas.

Seen from above, this prairie, its yellow grasses, is dotted sparsely with towns too small for mapmakers' concern.

Just south of Staples, on the county road that runs through the center of town, passing the school at the south edge, Norby's Department Store, Morey's Fish Co., the market with the scarred front porch, the old brick storefronts with small wooden signs on hinges, the painted names of businesses faded and flaked. Morrison's Meats, the Cardinal Cafe. By the time you've noticed that you're passing through, County Road 10 swerves sharply to the left, past Y-Knot Liquors, and all semblance of town disappears, leaving you to wonder if there was a town after all. All you see are acres and acres of field.

On the corner of Madison Street is a pale eggshell-blue house with three steps leading up from the walk and a postage stamp of yard in the back where my mother, when the spirit moved her, gardened feverishly and then let the garden go sprawling untended in the tropical wet of July.

My father would sit on the back porch watching her, sitting the way men here sit: leaned back, feet planted far apart, arms on the arms of the chair, a beer in his right hand. The beer would be sweating.

They met in New York, at a club. They met and got married at city hall, and when I had my mother alone, I demanded she tell me again about the dress she made from curtains, and the red shoes, and the garnet necklace she got for a song. They had a party with cheap wine back at the apartment. I picture it all in rich colors. I remember the club for them, with red walls and small, spattered candles on the tables. Whether it had these things or not is of no concern to me, because it's my story, not theirs.

The garnet necklace is mine now. I keep thinking I ought to get the clasp repaired.

"What were you wearing?"

My mother was soaping my head.

"Sweetheart, I don't remember. Dunk," she said. I dunked and spluttered.

"You have to remember," I insisted. She laughed. "All right," she said, and I could tell she was going to make it up, and I didn't care. "Black. A black coat. And a hat."

"What kind of hat?"

"Katie, for heaven's -- hold still -- what? A hat with a feather." She scrubbed my ears. In the hall my father was yelling for her, and the door opened. She turned to look at him.

"There you are!" he said. "When's dinner?"

"I'm bathing Katie."

"I can see that."

"When I'm done."

He stood there. "Esau's sulking," he said.

My mother turned back to me and started scrubbing my neck ferociously. "What am I supposed to do about it?"

"Hi, Daddy," I said.

"Hiya, kiddo," he said. "I see your mother's in one of her moods again."

I nodded. My mother rolled her eyes.

"Well, all I can say," my father said, and then paused as if thinking.

"Yep," he noted with finality, and closed the door.

In the summer I wore a white nightgown and the sun didn't quite set, the sky turning a faint purple that lingered late. We ate dinner out on the back porch. My father was watching the sky.

"We ought to go down to the city," he said.

My mother snorted.

"What, we shouldn't go down to the city?" my father asked. "You don't want to go down to the city? There was something wrong with the suggestion?"

I sucked on my tomato wedge. My mother said nothing.

"Claire?" my father said. "Answer me. Do you or do you not want to go down to the city?"

"Mom, just answer him," Esau muttered.

We waited.

"Yes," my mother said carefully, "I would love to go down to the city."

My father grinned. "Good!" he said. "We'll have dinner. See a show." He looked around the garden, pleased, and took a swallow of his drink. He leaned over and kissed my mother on the cheek. "Good," he said again.

My mother smiled faintly at her plate.

We would never go down to the city.

The light was fading, the way light fades in a memory, objects losing their definition, faces falling into shadow. My mother was clearing the table and telling me to get ready for bed.

And the house settled into obscurity for the night. My father watched night fall over his small square of the world while his wife did the dishes and his children did whatever it is that children do before bed.

What was he thinking about?

Perhaps my mother startled slightly when he came up behind her at the sink and placed his hand on her arm.

Perhaps she relaxed, and turned her face a little toward him.

Perhaps they danced then in the living room, to old records, while I stood in my white nightgown and watched through my crackedopen door.

I went to bed to the muffled sound of Count Basie, and the hot night, and imagined my brother on the other side of the bedroom wall.

It was 1969. America had gone all to hell, but that was far away.

Nothing could happen to us because it was June and my brother was sleeping and my mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. Soon my father would dip her, kiss her, go to the bar for another drink.

The Center of Winter
A Novel. Copyright © by Marya Hornbacher. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.