I carefully remove his glasses and put them on the coffee table, then feel his forehead. He’s clammy, but no fever. He doesn’t know I’m watching him, which gives me free rein to have a closer look. His bone structure is so elegant, I almost hate him for it. He swerved all of Harold’s genes while developing as an embryo and he’s only going to get more distinguished-looking as he ages.
The tissue box is empty, so I go pull down a fresh one from a closet. Then I see he’s had quite a night down here by himself, drugstore paraphernalia scattered all over the counter under the cabinet where we keep antacids and allergy tablets and the like. There’s a plastic medicine cup in the sink with a drop of cherry-red liquid in it. It hits me that he probably slept downstairs so that his coughing wouldn’t wake me up, and my heart makes a little tick, rolling over.
I root through the cabinets and come up with a bag of cough drops, so I leave those on the table for him, too.
“Just had to get that canoe, didn’t you,” I murmur to myself, padding into the drawing room. I sneak behind his desk to look outside and almost gasp.
It’s a wonderland out there. A good four inches of shimmering white covers everything, even the pond, which means that canoe isn’t going anywhere. It’s stranded in the middle, surrounded by ice. The forest is breathtakingly beautiful with sunrise glowing up over the edge of the world, coloring the spaces between branches like stained glass.
I wish Nicholas were awake to see this, but then again, snow isn’t as magical to him as it is to me. For him, snow means he has to go and—
Oh, crap.
My joy explodes to dust. Nicholas once left me in a bookstore to drive to his parents’ house and carry groceries in from Deborah’s trunk in the pouring rain. He did this because she called and asked him to. He mows their grass and fixes things around their house and worries about their memories and medical appointments and finances. He’s incurably concerned, and will baby them for as long as he lives even if they don’t necessarily need it.
I stare at his miserable form on the couch, back convulsing off the cushions with each coughing jag. He’s so exhausted, the coughing doesn’t even wake him up. This man is sick, but that’s not going to stop him from going over to his parents’ house this morning and shoveling their driveway. That’s just Nicholas. He’s That Guy.
I glance outside again at the snow, at the thermometer on the other side of the window that declares it’s nineteen degrees, and I think with a vehemence that jolts me: No.
No way in hell.
There’s only one way to stop him, so that’s the way I’ve got to go. I reach for my coat and hat in the closet but see his coveralls and raise an eyebrow in consideration. It might not be a bad idea to wear something a little more heavy-duty. After I tug my Ghostbuster gear on and roll up the pant legs about a mile until the cuffs no longer drag, I decide to go the whole hog and grab his hideous earflap hat, too. It smells like him, which is oddly comforting even though he’s right here, and the fleece is so soft and comfortable.
I need to get me one of these.
Once I’m all bundled up, I grab the keys to his Jeep and throw three different shovels into the back. Three shovels, because they’re different sizes and I’m ashamed to say I’ve never shoveled snow before so I don’t know which I’ll want to use. Nicholas does all our shoveling. I don’t think that’s a fact I’ve appreciated until now: he always shoveled a pathway from our porch to my car when we lived at the old house. He never asked me to do it instead, not even once.
As a matter of fact, he scraped ice off my doors and wind-shields, too. He did it before he left for work, before I woke up.
Shame burns my face. When’s the last time I thanked him for that? When’s the last time I noticed he even did these little things for me and didn’t simply take them for granted? I’ve been so hung up on him doing this for his mom and dad that I kind of forgot he does it for us, too.
I drive very, very slowly to Mr. and Mrs. Rose’s house on Sycamore Lane. Only the main road has been visited by a salt truck, but the Jeep is a total champ and never slides. I am behind the wheel of Nicholas’s Jeep that he bought without telling me and have entirely too much time alone with the disturbing revelation that I’m an asshole.
The lights are on when I nose up the driveway, which means Deborah’s awake. Harold’s got at least until noon before he rolls face-first onto the floor.
The beautiful, untouched snow blanketing their driveway sets me off. They’ve got no problem hiring people to power-wash their house and prune their rosebushes and arrange rock structures in the flower beds. And yet for whatever arbitrary reason, they depend on Nicholas to make this particular problem go away. They expect it. They say he’s so good, so kind, and that pressure is a ten-ton weight, making sure he’ll never stop doing it. If he does, they’ll withdraw all their approval. He won’t be the good, kind son anymore. He’s heard the way they talk about Heather and knows that with one misstep, they’ll be talking about him the same way.
I snarl at the snow, at the warm, glowing windows and Deborah’s silhouette peeking out. Her maternal pleasure radiates.
Nicky is here to take care of everything! He loves to help us and feel useful.
Not today, dickheads! Today you’re getting a substitute who’s incompetent at best when it comes to manual labor, and you can just deal.
Their driveway is personally cruel to me right away, a crust of ice eating one of my shovels. I dig back in, nose dripping like a faucet, face a frozen block of “Why, god, why” while the rest of my body melts like a candle in these coveralls. This is the pits. This is some goddamn bullshit. I call my present situation every curse word I can come up with. Sometimes Nicholas is over here well before he has to go to work, and I mentally run through that timeline. In order to shower and get to Rise and Smile at seven, that means he’s doing this in the dark. I’m so pissed on his behalf that I shovel faster.
It’s frankly amazing that he has any goodwill left in his heart toward his parents. I want to drag them outside and bury them with my shovel.
There’s so much snow to clear, I’m too daunted to be methodical about it and scoop at random, flinging it over my shoulder. Deborah and Harold aren’t getting neat borders of snow on either side of the drive. They’re getting carnage. It occurs to me that if I come back again next time it snows and do another piss-poor job, Nicholas will be off the hook. Mr. and Mrs. Rose will beg me to stop. They’ll hire a snowplow guy.
When I’m about halfway finished, the front door opens and Deborah trundles out in a fur coat that’s probably fashioned solely from baby animals, steaming mug in hand. She hustles over, a big smile on her face, until she gets up close and realizes that the person in coveralls and a hideous hat is me.
“Oh!”
Her horror is invigorating. I want to have it made into perfume. Clothing. Bath bombs.
“Naomi,” she says gravely, like she’s just heard the most terrible news. “I wasn’t expecting …”
“Is that for me?” I reach for the mug. It’s hot chocolate. Before Deborah can reply, I take it from her and sip. There are mini marshmallows swimming at the top, and I’d stake my soul she put in thirty-two of them, one for each year of Nicholas’s life. This hot chocolate tastes better than the kind she supplies me with during winter visits, confirming my paranoid suspicions that Nicholas gets the good stuff while I’m offered store-brand.