Cover of Snow by Jenny Milchman Page A

Brendan did it that way.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œWhy didn’t I tell you? Or why did he?”
    Teggie lifted the twin knobs of her shoulders. “I don’t know,” she said impatiently. “Both. Either.”
    I glanced out the window. The snow had finally stopped and the opaque world was starting to clear. “I learned something today.”
    Teggie propped one foot on a shelf three feet above her waist, nodding that she was listening as she began to stretch.
    I walked closer to the window. The glass gave off a frigid layer of air, but I shucked off my outer gear anyway, feeling stifled by it all of a sudden.
    â€œI found these laces around the time Brendan and I first met. In his dorm room.”
    Teggie wafted a slim arm down to meet her toes.
    â€œThey were in with a whole bunch of stuff. Brendan always keeps—kept—important things around. Together, in special places. This box mainly. It was his father’s.”
    â€œSo the shoelaces were important somehow?”
    â€œNot shoelaces,” I corrected. “Skate laces. Although I didn’t know that until today.”
    Scales of shivers ran up and down my back. My husband had lied to me.
    â€œBrendan said he’d been a clown once for Halloween. His favorite holiday as a child. So he held on to the laces that went in his shoes.” It had sounded plausible at the time, although now I felt silly for believing it.
    Plausible,
I heard as a distant echo. Not right for
risible
either. That was cheating.
    Teggie, now limber, slid into a split.
    â€œI didn’t see them—or think about them—again until his proposal.” I held my left hand some distance away. The diamond needed cleaning. I couldn’t imagine going about that small task, which I’d once attended to frequently. Chemicals from renovation work tended to dull the stone. “And then we had a fight.”
    â€œYou fought? The day he proposed?”
    My cheeks heated. Teggie had always coveted a relationship like mine and Brendan’s. Most of the men she came in contact with were gay. She joked sometimes that she was destined to be a maiden auntie to our kids.
    But that hadn’t turned out to be true, had it? Not for either of us.
    Tears crowded my eyes, and I turned blindly away from the window, dropping onto the bed. The quilt still smelled faintly of Brendan, and I started to cry.
    Teggie leapt to her feet, squatting gracefully beside me. “Oh, Nor. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for asking. Who cares if you had a fight? What matters is the marriage that came after, right?”
    I pressed my fingers into both my eyes, hard, forcing the tears back. “It does matter, that fight. It matters now.”
    â€œWhy?”
    I took a deep breath and my sobs shuddered to a stop. “I asked him why he had done such a silly thing. Made a necklace out of laces that once belonged to a costume. For a clown, no less. It felt like he was making a joke of asking me to marry him. I almost said no that day. I wanted him to do it—” A groan escaped me. “Do it over.”
    â€œOkay,” Teggie said soothingly. “That’s understandable. Every woman dreams about how she’ll get engaged.”
    â€œBut Brendan convinced me that he used them because the laces were special. A memory from childhood.” I looked up at Teggie, my eyes suddenly arid, vision clear. “I think he was telling the truth. These laces
did
have to do with his childhood. But not with dressing up as a clown.”
    Teggie shrugged, clearly puzzled. “So he swapped stories. The laces are from a childhood memory that had to do with skating. What’s the big deal?”
    The laces, dangling near the edge of Brendan’s desk, suddenly slithered off. I didn’t stoop to pick them up.
    â€œNo, you don’t understand,” I said. “What’s bothering me isn’t that Brendan used to skate as a kid.
Everybody
skates