Who Left the Firewood at My Door
He didn’t seem surprised to see me. He took his cap off.
“Mrs. Oakes,” he said. His voice cracked a little in the cold. “I figured it’d be today. The snow, I mean. I should have thought of the snow.”
“You’ve been bringing my wood,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Every cold morning since the second of November.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I looked at the little girl. She was looking at me with enormous brown eyes over the collar of her coat, holding the thermos.
“Who are you?” I said. It came out harsher than I meant. “I’m sorry. I mean, I know you from the road. I don’t know your name.”
“Jeff Mortensen,” he said. “This is Kaitlyn. Kait, say hello to Mrs. Oakes.”
“Hello,” whispered Kaitlyn. And then, in a very small voice, with great seriousness: “I tied the string.”
“I know you did, honey,” I said. “That’s your daddy’s knot?”
“It’s Mr. Oakes’s,” said Kaitlyn.
I put my hand on the side of the truck. The metal was so cold it burned through my glove.
“Mrs. Oakes,” Jeff said. He was looking at the steering wheel, not at me. “I owe your husband. I’ve owed him a long time. I would have told you, but I never could work out how.”
“Owe him for what?” I said.
He turned off the engine. In the sudden quiet I could hear the hood ticking as it cooled.
“Come up to the house,” I said. “I have coffee. I’m not going to hear a long story standing in a snowbank, and neither is that child.”
“It’s a long story,” he said. “Mostly it’s a short one.”
“Then it’ll fit in a cup of coffee.”
He looked at me a moment, and then he nodded. He came around and lifted Kaitlyn down, though she was perfectly able, and the three of us walked back up the lane, Jeff’s big boots filling the prints he had made that morning, Kaitlyn between us with the thermos in both mittens.
I made coffee, and toast with my last jar of strawberry jam, and sat the two of them down at the kitchen table. I sat Kaitlyn in Ray’s chair by the window. I hadn’t meant to. She sat in it with her boots swinging a foot off the floor and her hands around a mug of cocoa, and I looked at her there in the morning light, and my heart did something it hadn’t done since October.
The county had given the plow crews until eight on account of the snow. Jeff said so twice, as if he were afraid of wearing out his welcome. I told him the county could wait ten minutes.
“I owe you the whole of it,” he said, “and I’ll start with the plain part. I come most days at a quarter past four, on my way to the shed. Kait only comes on Saturdays and the worst of the cold, when she begs and Bernadette is on the early shift. The truck runs warm, I keep the heater on high, and she’s asleep against the door half the way. She wouldn’t let me tie a bundle without her.”
“I tied the string,” Kaitlyn agreed.
“It was the winter of ninety-five,” Jeff said. “I was twelve. I rode your husband’s bus.”