Chapter 5 #2
I watched him shovel for maybe thirty seconds, which was long enough to understand that Knox Kovak was the kind of man who did useless things anyway, because the thing that was not useless was the attempt.
I said, “The apartment is warmer, sugar.”
He did not stop shoveling.
I said, “You have a heater.”
“Two. One in the apartment. One in your mudroom.”
“You got a generator.”
“I did.”
“Why.”
He pushed the shovel through the snow.
“Because your furnace is not going to turn on when the power comes back, and your house is going to freeze, and you are not going to leave just because it is cold.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Maple. Don’t be stupid.”
The wind hit me then, hard enough that I stepped back. Hard enough that I had to lean into it to stay upright. The cold was not cold anymore — it was a thing, a creature, something that was actively trying to move me.
He set the shovel down. He did it carefully, like setting something down carefully was a form of communication. Like he was telling me that he had heard me. That he understood.
“Come on,” he said.
He walked toward the side stairs without waiting to see if I would follow. He did not need to wait. He knew I would follow. He had known it since he had put a generator in my mudroom. He had known it when he left the rink. He had known it when he bought the supplies.
I followed because the alternative was freezing. I followed because the wind was getting worse. I followed because standing on my porch in three sweaters and refusing his help felt like a kind of pride that was going to kill me.
I followed because part of me had been waiting for him to appear on my front walk since the moment he walked into my diner.
I had not planned to follow. I had planned to stand in the snow and tell him I was fine, that I had a diner with a propane stove, that I did not need his generator, that I did not understand what had happened in my mudroom or what it meant.
But he was already at the top of the stairs, holding the door open, and the apartment behind him was warm, and I could see the heater running, see the light inside, see the small table where he had made coffee at four in the morning, probably, or five, or whenever his sleep had failed and he had decided to prepare for the world to end.
I climbed the stairs. The snow was packing down under my boots. The wind was trying to push me sideways. I made it to the top and Knox held the door open for me without speaking.
I went inside.
The apartment was warm the way the inside of your mouth is warm — alive and moving and completely at odds with the frozen world outside the windows.
The shock of warmth made me gasp. My lungs expanded.
My body, which had been coiled in on itself for two hours, suddenly remembered that it could uncurl.
Knox had a coffee made. A pot of it, sitting on the counter, still steaming like he had made it knowing I was coming, knowing I was standing in the snow, knowing I would need the heat and the steam and the smell of the coffee to anchor me to something real.
He had a blanket folded on the back of the couch — not my blanket, one of his, which meant it would smell like him, which meant I was not going to be sitting under some neutral hotel blanket. I was going to be wrapped in the smell of a man who had left his job to buy me a generator.
The heater was running on its highest setting, pushing warmth into every corner of the small apartment. The propane lantern was lit. The whole space was glowing like some kind of sanctuary.
I said, “You left the rink.”
“I did.”
“Beckham probably needed you.”
“He had fourteen people. He needed me less.”
“That’s not fair to Beckham.”
“Fair is a luxury, Maple. We will do fair next week when the power is back.”
I did not have an argument for that. Fair was a luxury I had given up when the bank merged. Fair was a luxury I had given up when my parents died. Fair was a luxury.
The only thing that was not a luxury was the fact that I was warm and he had made that happen.
He poured me a cup of coffee.
I drank it because I was frozen and the coffee was hot and because some part of me that I was not going to examine too closely understood that Knox Kovak was the kind of man who did what he said, and if he had decided to stay, then staying was what was happening, and I could either make peace with it or spend three days arguing with him while the blizzard killed the power grid.
I made peace with it.
We spent the rest of the day like this.
Me in the armchair with a book that I was not reading, him at the table with a stack of papers that looked like team paperwork. The heater hummed. The wind hammered at the windows. Outside, the world was going white and cold and historic, the way Minnesota does when it decides to make a point.
Around two o’clock, Mira called. My phone had almost no battery, but it had enough.
“Maple. Oh my God. Maple are you okay.”
“I’m fine. Are you—”
“I’m at the diner. The diner is fine. The propane stove is fine. The building is holding up. I came to check. I called the team. They’re all at the rink. They’re saying to shelter in place. They want to know if you’re—”
“I’m at the apartment. Knox’s apartment. The one above my garage. The power went out. He had a generator.”
“He—wait. Knox got you a generator.”
“Among other things.”
“Maple.” She said my name like it was a complete sentence.
“What.”
“Nothing. I’m just. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“I’m reading. Knox is doing paperwork. We’re fine.”
“Uh huh. Maple. Sugar. That man cleared your front walk in a blizzard. You don’t do that because you think someone is fine. You do that because—”
“Mira. I’m fine. The diner is fine. You should get home before it gets worse.”
“It’s already worse. It’s a white-out. I’m going to stay at the diner until tomorrow. There’s gas heat. I can sit behind the counter and do literally nothing.”
“Be careful.”
“Always. You be careful too. And Maple?”
“What.”
“Thank the man.”
She hung up.
I looked at Knox, who was pretending he had not been listening to the entire conversation.
“That was Mira.”
“I know.”
“She confirmed the diner is fine.”
“Good.”
“She’s staying there overnight.”
“Smart.”
I went back to my book, which was a mystery novel from 1997 that I had found on the shelf in the apartment and had no memory of my grandmother buying. Knox went back to his paperwork. The heater kept the apartment at exactly seventy degrees.
Around five o’clock, Knox made dinner.
I say made but what he actually did was open two cans and heat them in a pot on the tiny electric stove that he had somehow gotten to work using the generator, the way you make miracles happen when you understand the basic principles of power distribution and stubbornness.
Beans. Bread. Butter.
It was the plainest dinner I had ever eaten and also the best.
We ate it at the small table that had been my grandmother’s work surface forty years ago.
The light from the propane lantern — because Knox had apparently known that the lights would go out and had prepared for that too — made the room look small and warm and completely removed from the world outside the window.
Maple, the part of me that was still thinking clearly said. This is the most dangerous thing that has ever happened to you.
But the rest of me, the part that was cold and tired and had been carrying the weight of the foreclosure like a stone in my chest for sixty days, just sat across from a man who had appeared in my house with a generator and did not ask any questions.
When I finished eating, I said, very quietly, “Thank you for the soup.”
He did not look up from his plate.
He said, “It was just soup.”
But he said it the way you say something when you are lying to yourself and to her and to the empty kitchen, the way you say it when you know that it was not just soup, that nothing about this was just anything, that the blizzard was still coming and the world outside was still frozen, but inside this small apartment above her garage, something was beginning that neither of us had the power to stop.
The wind outside rattled the windows.
The heater hummed.
The lantern light made his face look like a place I might want to stay.