Free The Elegant Gathering of White Snows by Kris Radish Page A

going out in public and actually acting like a human being. She watched the women move through the house talking, helping each other pull off pants, and pour glasses of wine with such ease she considered for a moment stripping off her own clothes and joining them.
    “What's so funny?” asked Sandy, leaning against the washing machine. “You've got the biggest grin on your face.”
    “I was just thinking how comfortable you all seem around each other, and I thought I should take off my clothes and join you.” Lenny settled next to Sandy as the thirty-four-year-old washing machine kicked in, sounding like a helicopter landing in the living room. The noise forced them to raise their voices.
    “Well, you've probably got the best looking ass here, especially if you work the farm. Why'd you let us in?”
    “Why'd you come in?” Lenny fired back, stalling a few more minutes before she opened up her heart, before she exposed her admiration, before she told this unknown half-naked wild woman drinking wine in her kitchen that the sound of their footsteps had already changed her life.
    “You're a woman for starters,” answered Sandy. “You know,” she said honestly, turning to look out the window. “I'm not sure, but it was like we were supposed to stop here for a while, take a break or something. We never really talked about it but when I saw you, I knew that we'd be safe.”
    Lenny turned to look into Sandy's eyes, dark and deep, offering a sea of understanding. While the machine gurgled and belched, she told her about Jackson and college and her two kids who are grown and gone as far away as she could convince them to move. She told her about a dream that had somehow slipped away during the years of diapers and pigs and sleeping alone in a bed the size of the Grand Canyon.
    Sandy listened, smiling, nodding, thinking the whole time how much she liked this woman with the boots and the fine hair and hands as strong as steel. Before Sandy could tell her how she felt, her turn in the bathroom came. The stove timer beeped and Lenny began mashing potatoes. No one saw that she had quietly taken the phone off the wall and stuffed it into the drawer where she kept towels and hot pads.
    “Hail to you, Lenny,” J.J. finally said after the women finished their feast. “This is just the nicest thing you could have done for us.”
    Lenny put her fork down on her plate, glanced quickly toward Sandy and then away, and told the women how much she admired them, how easy it would be for her to slip out the door and walk with them, how she knew for certain that other women were listening to the same footsteps.
    “The minute I heard about you on the radio, I knew something was going to happen,” Lenny told them, keeping her eyes on her plate. “You have to keep going, you can't stop yet. Not until you go for days and days and more people hear about you.”
    The women felt dazed. Janice, J.J. and Susan looked at Lenny as if she had just told them they were all going to die of some terrible disease in thirty minutes. Alice coughed. Chris smiled, knowing exactly what Lenny was talking about. Sandy had not been able to take her eyes off Lenny since their conversation at the washing machine.
    “Come on, women,” Chris said forcefully. “Didn't you think this would happen?”
    “What the hell are you talking about?” Gail responded defensively.
    Chris shifted forward and put her hands on either side of her empty plate. “When was the last time you heard of a group of women just getting up from something, a church meeting, or as in our case a drunken evening at the home of a friend, to start walking down a highway?”
    The other women had not thought about their decision in quite this way. They had thought about dead babies and rape and heartaches and uncles who shoved their fingers in private places where they shouldn't have, but they had not thought about what their decision might mean to someone else.
    “Well, shit,” Janice said, as