"As long as you're not rushing into things." Sabine had meant it as a joke, but Bertie just nodded her head as if to say that was how she thought of it, too.
"No one will ever accuse Bertie of not being cautious," Dot said.
The man in the jumpsuit brought Sabine her luggage, never for a moment doubting it was hers. She was suddenly embarrassed by having two bags. She had packed carelessly. She had brought Phan's gloves and was wearing his coat. She had brought the sable hat that Parsifal had bought for Phan in Russia. She had brought Parsifal's sweaters. She had thrown anything that caught her eye into the suitcase. In LAX, where skycaps pushed flatbed carts burdened with hat boxes and shoe trunks, Sabine had never even thought about her luggage. Bertie took the heavier bag and led the way out to the car.
Maybe, if anything, it was like Death Valley. None of the beautiful parts, not Furnace Creek or the range of Funeral Mountains. No place where the rocks were red. Not in the spring, when the ground cactus bloomed with vicious color out of the sand. But maybe this was Death Valley in its endless stretches of flatness. Death Valley in July at noon in the places where people with flat tires managed to walk three miles or four before giving out, their sense of direction destroyed by the 360-degree sweep of nothingness. Add to that the snow, which pelted the car the way the sand could bury you when a windstorm came out of nowhere. Over and over again Sabine tried to fix her eyes on a single flake hurtling towards them, lost it, and found another. It made her head ache but she couldn't make herself stop. Add to the snow the bone-crushing cold, which was a combination of the cold of the atmosphere and the cold of the wind. It was not so unlike the heat in that it permeated every square inch of your skin and deep beneath it. Cold, like heat, quickly became the only thing possible to think about: how to get out of it, how it was going to kill you. There were no towns in the thirty-five miles between Scottsbluff and Alliance. Sometimes there were billboards, but there was little to advertise, places to eat and sleep that were so far away there was no point in even thinking about them now. Most of what there was to look at was flat land and snow.
"I bet you never thought you'd see Nebraska," Dot said. She was beaming. Nebraska made Dot Fetters whole. They were coming into the town now, driving down streets lined in rows of tiny, identical ranch houses.
"I never did," Sabine said. Was it the snow that made every house exactly the same? Was there something else under that white blanket?
"It's hard to tell it now, but in the summer this place is beautiful. In the summer you'd never want to be anyplace else."
"This winter has been worse than most of them," Bertie said from the front seat, where she sat next to Haas. "Don't think it's always going to be this bad."
Always? Did they think she was staying? Did they think she'd be around to see the summer or the winter after this? Was that what Parsifal thought as a boy when he looked out into the fields: Do you really expect me to stay through to the summer?
"It's a shame you didn't bring Rabbit," Bertie said. "Haas, you should see Sabine's rabbit."
Haas pulled into one of the many driveways there were to choose from. The house was lit up, waiting. They tightened their coats and stepped into the soft, deep snow. They hurried up the front steps and through the unlocked door.
"This is it," Dot said, stretching out her hands. "This is home. I should feel embarrassed. I've seen your house."
Over the sofa there was a copy of a painting, an old covered bridge, a horse and wagon approaching. "When I'm king," Parsifal had liked to say as they wandered through antique stores, "my first edict will be to outlaw all covered-bridge paintings and their reproductions."
Sabine told her she was happy to be there, and it was true.
Dot smiled at the room, the nappy brown sofa with maple arms, the console television set, the two recliners. The bulb on the ceiling was covered with a piece of frosted glass that resembled a handkerchief pinned at each of its four corners. "I've been here a long time. We moved here when Guy was barely walking and I was still carrying Kitty around. Now I think about this being Guy's house and I don't think I'll ever move. It's one of the only links I've got to him. I started feeling that way a long time before he died."
Sabine's parents had told her that the house on Oriole was too much for her, that she should give it up and buy someplace that would be easier to manage, but she wasn't moving, either.
Bertie and Haas, who had been lingering out in the car, came through the door, red faced from the cold or from the pleasure of finding a minute alone. Bertie stamped on the mat to dislodge the snow from the deep treads in her boots. "Kitty!" she called out, her voice loud enough to call Kitty from next door. "Isn't Kitty here?" she asked her mother.
"Sure she's here." Dot went into the kitchen and then looked down the hallway. "Kitty?"
"She was supposed to make dinner," Bertie said to Sabine. Haas unzipped his jacket but couldn't quite bring himself to take it off. He stood on the mat by the door, waiting.
"I'll call her," Dot said.
"Then you might as well do it in the other room." Bertie sat down heavily in a chair and started to unlace her boots, Haas watching her, longingly.
"Don't be silly." Dot picked up the phone. "Sit, sit," she said to Sabine. "This will take one minute. I bet she just had to run someplace with the boys. She's probably on her way."
They were all watching her, waiting quietly while the phone rang for what must have been a long time. Far past the point at which Sabine would have hung up, Dot spoke. "Howard," she said, her voice gone flat. "It's me. Let me talk to Kitty." They waited, all of them. Dot curled the plastic phone cord around her finger. Sabine could barely make out some framed pictures hanging in the hall and wanted to go to them. Now she understood how much Dot had wanted to see the pictures at her house. "Well, she has to be there because she's not here. She was going to come over for supper. Guy's wife is in town from California. You know that." Dot looked at Sabine, to be sure. "Just put her on the phone." After a minute she put the earpiece of the phone on her forehead and tapped the receiver there a few times, then she hung up. "So," she said, her voice steady and reasonable. "Other plans for dinner."
"I'm going to pick something up," Haas said, and slid the zipper of his jacket back into place.
"I shouldn't have asked her to make dinner," Dot said. "I should have done it myself."
"This isn't your fault, no matter how you look at it," Bertie told her mother. Then she put her hands on Sabine's sleeves and she squeezed. Sabine knew that Bertie was telling her something, but she was too tired and confused to figure out what it was. Maybe she meant to say sorry, or, just bear with this and don't ask. Sabine nodded in general compliance. "We've got really good pizza in town," Bertie said. "Tomorrow night we'll cook." She pushed her feet back down in her boots.
"Be careful," Dot said. "It's getting worse out there every minute."
Bertie slipped her hand in the pocket of Haas's coat as if she were looking for something important, and then she left it there. They did not care about the weather.
Sabine moved her hands inside her own pockets. Snow.
"Look at you, standing there in your coat," Dot said to Sabine when they were alone. "I don't get enough practice being a hostess."
Sabine took her coat off and held it in her arms. She would prefer to wear it. The weight of the coat made her feel pinned down. "So, do you want to tell me about this?"
Dot tilted her head to the lacy piece of crocheting that hung over the back of the chair. She closed her eyes. "Not really," she said. "Not if you're giving me a choice. Everything comes out awfully quick, anyway. Don't you think?"