Two Brown Coats on the Sled Hill

Saturday morning

The next weekend was Brent’s again. Because of the Friday night shifts in November, I always dropped Cole off Saturday morning instead of Friday after school.

It had snowed a little overnight, not much, just a thin layer that made the yards look dusted with flour. The sky was that flat gray we get all through November, like a lid on a pot.

I pulled up in front of the tan ranch house at about eight-fifteen. Brent’s shift had ended at six-thirty, so I knew he had just come home and gone straight to bed.

Cole got out of the car with his backpack. I got out with the big coat folded over my arm.

He had his new coat on and a brown knit cap pulled down over his ears, but he had not zipped the coat, because ten-year-old boys never zip anything. I knelt down on the driveway in my navy parka, my auburn hair blowing across my face, and pulled the zipper up for him, all the way to his chin.

I could feel the cold coming through my jeans at the knee. I did not care. I held the collar of his coat between my fingers for a second longer than I needed to.

“Is that the other one?” he whispered, looking at my arm.

“Yes.”

“Okay.” He looked at the house. “She’s watching.”

I looked up. Shawna was standing in the open doorway in a gray sweatshirt, her long dark hair pulled over one shoulder, her arms crossed tight. She did not come out. She did not wave.

I stood up and brushed the snow off my knees. I put my hand on Cole’s back and we walked up the driveway together.

At the step, I held out the folded coat.

“This one’s for Kaden,” I said. “It’s a boys’ large. I think it’ll fit him.”

Shawna did not uncross her arms. She looked at the coat, and then at me, and I watched her jaw tighten.

“I don’t need your charity, Megan.”

Her voice was low. Brent was asleep in the back bedroom, and she did not want to wake him, and I did not want to either.

“It’s not for you,” I said. “It’s for him.”

She kept her arms crossed. So I reached past her, set the folded coat on the bench just inside the door where they kept the boots, and stepped back down onto the driveway.

Cole slipped past her into the house. He did not look back at me, which was right. He was going to be there two days, and he did not need to be on anybody’s side.

“Have a good weekend, bud,” I called.

“Bye, Mom.”

Shawna was still standing in the doorway when I got in my car. She had not moved. I did not look at her again. I just backed out slow and drove home and sat in my own driveway for ten minutes with the engine running.

I had no idea what she would do with it. She could have thrown it in the trash. She could have given it to the church clothing drive. She could have handed it back to Cole on Sunday and told him to take it to his mother.

I told myself that whatever she did with it, I had done the thing I could live with.