Cover of Snow by Jenny Milchman

unrecognizable without it. “Rhymes with
cougar
.”
    I almost missed it when his hands started to curl into fists, and had to hurry to scare up a response as he started to pummel his own hips.
    â€œGotcha,” I said in a deliberately easy tone. “You say your name with two ‘o’s.”
    The tension in his posture began to loosen.
    I dropped the flimsy card into my sack. “Well, Dugger, it was nice to—”
    â€œThey kept us little guys off the lake. Not all the time then, not yet, but me they did almost always,” Dugger said, as I began to walk toward the cloudy glass door. “That didn’t matter. I liked standing on the sidelines.”
    I turned halfway back.
    â€œI could make out Brendan, even way off on the bank. Red, you know, his strings. They called out from real far away. Called, lolled. Don’t spell ’em the same, but they still work.”
    A car drove into the lot on a wave of slush.
    My reply took a moment to form. Because that last thing Dugger had said made a strange sort of sense. “Are you talking about laces? Skate laces?”
    The car honked, a rude blast, and Dugger, still coatless, turned toward it.
    â€œDugger? Do you mean that Brendan wore red—”
    â€œSorry, Missus,” Dugger said breathlessly. He flung open the door. “I got to see to this customer. The boss gets mad if anyone has to wait.”
    I was left to stare after him, and try to untwist his words.

Chapter Ten
    The pharmacy would have to wait for another morning. Right now there was something more pressing I needed to check on at home.
    Dugger’s words, slow and precise, were still trickling through my head.
    Go, slow, row to hoe.
Was it wrong—paranoid of me again—to take that as some kind of message? Wasn’t the word
tough
usually inserted in front of the last three? It was as if Dugger had been warning me about what I might be in for.
    The wipers slapped snow back and forth across the windshield, and I blinked to clear my vision, trying to make sense of the road amidst the churning flakes.
    I was behaving as if I’d come in contact with some kind of seer, when in fact Dugger was probably just an eccentric character about town, compromised in intellect or sanity.
    Did Vern know Dugger? He must. I could ask the Chief about him.
    In the meantime, something even wackier than this morning’s encounter was waiting to be resolved: the notion that once upon a time Brendan had skated.
    â€œIt’s a box. A yellow flannel box,” I told Teggie when she came upon me in the bedroom, not having bothered to remove my coat and hat.
    The box had been an inheritance from Brendan’s father, and he always kept it in his dresser drawer. The fabric covering was worn as soft as rose petals, and the lid caught a bit as I lifted it off. My gaze skidded over the objects inside. Brendan never encouraged me in looking at these things, although he hadn’t exactly stopped me either, and so even though I was wont to give his past some privacy, I had caught glimpses of certain items from time to time.
    I recognized Brendan’s college acceptance letter. There was a Christmas card with a picture of two boys on it, one much younger than the other, almost completely concealed by a snowsuit and hat. Brendan’s little brother, who had died as a child.
    I pushed some other things aside. There was a bumper sticker with a distasteful logo—a meaty, red tongue splayed out against a rock—and the word
Stonelickers
on it, as well as a slim stack of letters and a bulbous class ring that Brendan never wore.
    Finally, a pair of long strands, which I lifted out, winding them around my finger.
    They were red.
    â€œWhat are those?” asked Teggie.
    I held out my finger, cocooned in red cotton. “Remember? My proposal?”
    â€œOh, right. Your ring was on them. Like a necklace,” she said.
    I nodded. “But I never told you why