As Simple as Snow by Gregory Galloway Page B

decrease in his monthly paychecks. He wasn’t making the commissions he used to. She would call the dealership and he wouldn’t be around. Then he would come home late, smelling like alcohol. She told him that it was a problem. He said he would quit. He didn’t.
    He missed more work and finally was fired. Still he didn’t quit drinking. Finally Mrs. Hathorne asked my mother to help. She must have been desperate. My mother took the initiative for once and called a bunch of his friends and family together, and a few of Mrs. Hathorne’s friends too, and they held an intervention. They all told him that he had a problem and that he needed to get it taken care of for his sake, for his family’s sake. A couple of days later he went down to Joplin and spent three weeks in rehab.
    It was when he got back that Mrs. Hathorne stopped wanting anything to do with my mother. She stopped seeing a lot of her friends, as if they had been the cause of all the trouble. Or maybe she was embarrassed. Then the Hathornes moved north of town. It was only a few miles away, but it might as well have been the North Pole. Carl and I still hung out, but our parents never socialized anymore. You never saw Carl’s mom.
    Everyone saw Mr. Hathorne, though. After he got out of rehab, he spent his days down at Gurney’s gas station. Gurney’s was a full-service gas station; you had to go to the other end of town, to Downey’s, for self-serve, and the gas was usually the same price. You would see him anytime you went by, sitting in a black plastic chair by the front counter, sipping on a big cup of coffee. Every once in a while he might get up and clean someone’s windows, but he never pumped gas. He wasn’t working. Derek Gurney or his twin brother, Erick, did the work. Carl’s dad sat and sipped.
    Carl’s mother waited before she said anything to her husband about going back to work. She gave him time to adjust to his sobriety. But Carl thought differently. “Why doesn’t he just sit on the road with a sign around his neck that says, ‘I’m a drunken out-of-work bum’?”
    Carl’s father sat at the gas station for a long time. It was the only place I saw him anymore. One day after school, in the middle of October, I guess, Anna and I were walking down along the river and Carl came out of the woods, holding his hand over his right eye. I was a little embarrassed to see him, since I’d been ignoring him since I started hanging out with Anna. It was nothing personal, it was just all Anna, all the time.
    “Are you all right?” Anna asked him.
    “I will be.” He took his hand away and revealed a swollen mess.
    “That’s going to look good in the morning,” I said.
    “What happened?” Anna said.
    He looked at her with his left eye and then at me. He didn’t want to say. “Customer dissatisfaction.”
    “Do you want to go after the guy?” I asked.
    “No, I’ll take care of it later.” He looked at my hand. I would have gone after the guy, even with my splint. I was about to say so, when Anna spoke.
    “Put a raw potato on it. It’s the best thing.”
    “How do you know that?” I said.
    “It’s an old witch’s trick,” she said. “I can also put a curse on the person who did it.”
    “That you can do,” Carl said.
    I invited them both over to my house. Carl didn’t want to go to his own. And he didn’t want to be seen around town with a swollen eye. That would be bad for business. So we walked to my house.
    We went in through the garage and into the kitchen, which was a mistake. We should have gone in through the front door—that way we would have avoided my mother. I should have known better; I spent every afternoon avoiding her, and here I led Carl right in on her. When we walked into the kitchen, my mother and Carl’s dad were sitting at the table, drinking coffee.
    “Anna and Carl are going to hang out for a while,” I said.
    My mother was startled. She got up from the table but then sat down again. “Okay,”