“Are you going to dig us out so soon?” she asked, clearly disappointed.
He smiled at her. “Not exactly. I’m going to make a couple of passes at the road—but no one has to know about it. I just don’t want to get us too buried. Do me a favor? When you’re done with your bath—start my water cooking?”
“Sure, Ian,” she said. “And if you’re very nice—I’ll scrub your back.”
Winters had always been a huge burden to Ian—the shoveling and plowing a necessary evil to give him access to the road, the john. But not on this particular winter day—this time it was a godsend. He’d like to keep Marcie boarded up in his cabin for a couple of weeks, but in reality, a day and night would be all he could really afford. After making sure there was a path to the outhouse, he fitted the plow onto the truck and loaded the bed with firewood to make the truck heavier. He covered the wood with a tarp and drove down his access road. A couple of feet of snow wasn’t a big deal and if he cleared it today, tomorrow wouldn’t be as bad.
There was an old guy a couple miles down who had neither a plow for his truck nor a working tractor. In fact, it didn’t appear the tractor had been in use since Ian migrated to this mountaintop. The old boy’s road to Highway 36 wasn’t real long and tomorrow Ian would check on him to make sure he had a clear road and food. They weren’t friends; they’d hardly spoken. But Ian had been aware of him for a long time and just couldn’t stand the thought of him freezing or starving to death, stranded. It was a small thing; he only had to make the short pilgrimage a couple of times a winter.
When he finally made his way back to the cabin, she said, “Well finally! I’ve been wondering if I should come out and lend a hand!”
He pulled off his gloves. “We’re clear to the road if we have to get out of here. But there’s no reason we have to. Is my water hot?”
“Yes, and if you’re nice, I’ll make you eggs before they spoil.”
He took his jacket off and draped it over a kitchen chair. “You going to read your book while I take my clothes off and wash up?”
She grinned an elfish grin. “Not on your life.”
It was only two nights and a day, but for Ian it was healing and for Marcie, pure magic. They ate well, made love, napped in front of the woodstove, talked. The end of the snowy day found them together on the couch, Ian leaning back against the arm, stretched out, holding Marcie between his long legs, enjoying her closeness and their conversation. Her head rested against his chest and he stroked her soft hair, catching it between his fingers. “I want to know more about Erin,” he said. “You two seem nothing alike.”
“Nothing,” she confirmed. “There are three different Erin’s. If you really want to know, get comfortable.”
He chuckled at her. “I’m comfortable.”
“Well, while we were growing up and she was so much older, she was just a bossy big sister. I think that’s the natural order of things, but it’s magnified when a mother is lost—the oldest daughter sometimes assumes the role. A giant pain in the butt. But then we lost Dad and she tried so hard to take care of us. We were beyond being taken care of, you know. A thirteen-and fifteen-year-old—we coped in our own ways, had our own lives. I had Bobby, and Drew had sports and buddies. I feel really terrible about that—we weren’t there for Erin at all. And she was just beginning law school, which demanded so much of her. But we were stupid kids—we didn’t know anything.”
“You told her that, of course,” he said. “Once you realized it.”
“Of course,” she said. “I was next to mess up her tidy little life, but at least she was already a lawyer in a nice practice when I hit her with getting married. She tried to talk sense to me, but I had only one thing on my mind. There were fights and tears between us, but in the end Erin did what Dad would have done—she gave me a wedding…”
“She did?” he asked.
“Or Dad did, depends on how you look at it. When Dad died, there was a house, insurance, stuff like that. Erin guarded it for things like educations. I wasn’t interested in all that—I wanted to marry Bobby. Since there was no stopping me, she did the only thing that would make me happy. And although I knew she was miserable about it, she beamed the whole time. She wasn’t upset about it being Bobby—she loved him and his whole family—it was just our youth.
“Then Bobby came home to us as an invalid. My big sister, who I’d spent so many years resenting and resisting, was the best advocate I had. She worked her legal brain for months to get us the best benefits available from the military. You know how it is getting stuff out of the military—you have to be a bulldog—relentless. Some people just luck into things like larger base housing or CHAMPUS for off-base medical care—but most people have to wait till stuff is available and then better be first in line when it is. That takes constant energy. She made phone calls, wrote letters, and I think she even got our congressman involved. And she was the one who found the perfect care center. And my glamorous sister? She got right in there, got her hands dirty, helped to wash him, change linens, brush his teeth, put salve on his eyes…She held him and whispered to him like the rest of us. She came through in every way.”