Free Shadow Season by Tom Piccirilli Page B

with the need to do something that they nearly hum. Your time is up.

WHATEVER DUCHESS IS COOKING, SHE’S GOING heavy on the molasses and lemon. Finn moves to their table in the dining hall, which used to be a restaurant known as the Carriage House back in the hotel days. It stirs his imagination, thinking of late-nineteenth-century travelers stopping at the inn. Captains of industry up from the city heading into New England spending the night, talking politics of the day. It’s not difficult for him to hear coach wheels spinning loosely on bent axles. It’s the kind of thing that makes him drift.
    He arcs his chin toward Roz. He’s about to ask where everybody is, but he doesn’t get a chance. She tells him, “Damn it, I forgot something. Back in a few minutes.”
    “Forgot what?”
    “Back at the store.”
    “At the store? Which store?”
    “The market.”
    “You mean you’re going back to town?”
    “Yes. Back in a jiff.”
    A jiff? The fuck’s a jiff? “You can’t, it’s a whiteout, isn’t it?” Just walking over from his cottage has left them both breathing heavily.
    “It’s not that bad, really, and this is important.”
    “What is?”
    “I need to get something, make sure of something.”
    “Need what?” He moves to grasp her and she dodges him, always so fast on her feet. The girl always in the center of the action. He tries again and misses again. “Make sure of what?”
    “Back soon!”
    “Wait a second,” he calls. “Roz? Rose!” But she’s gone.
    He thinks, This got something to do with the lack of Santas?
    A jiff? She’s never said “jiff” in her whole damn life.
    Before he can sit, Duchess touches him on the elbow. He knows her hand. She smells of ham and honey. There are subtler scents too. He coasts for a moment on the aroma of brown sugar and chocolate.
    She’s got him by a couple of inches. Her voice comes down from above. She says, “Hold on, let me dry your hair before you catch your death from pneumonia,” and pulls out what must be a dish towel, hopefully a clean one. She begins to roughly rub his head with it. He thinks of Harley doing the same thing to him. His neck cracks twice while Duchess snaps him back and forth. “Don’t you think you ought to wear a hat if you go out in the middle of a blizzard?”
    Again with the hat.
    “I only have two and I don’t like them,” he says, which is true. They’re both wool caps with a poof ball on top. His old man used to wear a homburg on special occasions, dressed to the nines. Finn feels a slight tug ofnostalgia wishing you could get away with that sort of thing nowadays.
    “Yeah, those I’ve seen on you were terrible. Made you look like a special child standing on a corner waiting for the short bus.”
    “So why didn’t you tell me?”
    “Figured you already knew and were just asserting yourself.”
    “Who the hell asserts themselves with stupid-looking hats?”
    She clucks. “Not for me to question how you empower your own self.”
    “I wasn’t empowering myself with a wool hat.”
    “No,” she says, “not with that poofy ball on top. Not that way. But you should’ve told me sooner. It’s Christmas, I would’ve bought you something different, something you’d like. You a fedora man?”
    Finn thinks about it. “I don’t think so.”
    “Nuh, I’m not sure I like ’em either. Not since Harlem, about ’73 or 4. Men knew how to wear a fedora back then. It was all in the tilt. So I’ll consider it some. You think I want to trudge all over creation, up to your office and out to your little house just to spoon-feed you chicken broth? Clean your dirty balled-up tissues? Carry you to the bathroom when you got the runs?”
    “I can’t imagine you would, no,” he says, although she’s already done it for him three years running. He catches the flu. He hates hats. He likes broth.
    “It’s fine for you and Roz, of course. I don’t mind ministrating to you two. But Judith, she’s another one trying