With a final, feral heave, Brenda hurled me across the foyer. I tumbled over the bristly welcome mat, the rough, freezing concrete of the front porch tearing the skin from my knees.
Before my lungs could even draw a ragged breath, the heavy, metallic clack of the deadbolt echoed like a gunshot.
I scrambled to my feet and spun around. The mahogany door was sealed shut.
It was mid-November in Oak Creek, Ohio. A freak atmospheric pressure drop had plummeted the afternoon temperature to a biting thirty-eight degrees, unleashing a torrential, horizontal onslaught of icy rain. I was clad in nothing but a threadbare, oversized cotton t-shirt and flimsy pajama shorts. I lacked even the basic protection of socks.
Within a span of ten seconds, the freezing deluge soaked through my thin garments, adhering the wet fabric to my trembling skin. The wind shrieked through the manicured trees, slicing directly into my marrow.
“Brenda! Please let me in!” I shrieked, slamming my freezing palms against the thick, frosted glass sidelights. “It’s freezing! I’m sorry!”
Through the distorted glass, her silhouette remained perfectly still in the warm glow of the foyer. She took a leisurely, measured sip from a balloon glass of Pinot Noir. Her posture was languid. She was actively reveling in this. She was exorcising my mother’s memory by torturing the only living vessel that still carried it.
I whipped my head around, scanning the usually bustling cul-de-sac. The violent storm had chased the affluent neighborhood indoors. Everyone except Mrs. Gable.
The septuagenarian widow next door treated our street like her personal surveillance state. I caught the subtle movement of her white plantation shutters parting a fraction of an inch behind her bay window. She saw me. I knew with absolute certainty she was watching a barefoot, weeping teenager turning cyanotic on a concrete slab in a freezing tempest.w
