Chris Bohjalian by The Buffalo Soldier

Author:The Buffalo Soldier
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781400032860
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2003-03-11T05:00:00+00:00

IF THERE HAD been a tack shop still open, he might have stopped and gotten another small gift for the boy. One of those horse combs or something. Maybe some special riding gloves. The child’s big Christmas present, of course, were the cowboy boots Laura had found at a leather store up in Burlington: They were a brownish red that reminded him a bit of his own leather wallet, and they looked nothing at all like Phoebe’s black-and-white boots. Even the toe was different—less pointed. Almost blunt. But, still, he couldn’t help but think of Phoebe’s boots when he saw what Laura wanted to buy for the boy, and then—therefore—of Phoebe herself.

He considered driving to the mall in Berlin Corners, guessing even now there might be stores open there. He was no more than fifteen minutes away, and he figured the mall would stay open till five or five-thirty at least. He might even find something more for Laura as well. A new sweater vest, maybe. Or perhaps one of those bulky knit cardigans she was so fond of when it was cold.

But he couldn’t bring himself to steer the cruiser onto the road that led south to Barre and Berlin, and turned instead up into the hills full of stately old homes just behind the capitol building. He drove down the white-pine- and maple-lined streets, reminded a bit of Saint Johnsbury and his mother’s house—his house, too, of course, because it would always be the house in which he’d grown up. These houses would be noisy tomorrow morning. Christmas. They’d be like his house had been when he was a child, and like his current home in the hills over the mountain when his girls were alive.

He wondered what Alfred would be like tomorrow—just after he woke up. He couldn’t imagine the child getting up early to race downstairs to scope out the loot the way his daughters always had. It was so clear he was unfamiliar with the notion of generosity on any kind of scale—certainly not on the scale Terry’s daughters had known and, in fact, taken for granted.

Still, the house would be noisier tomorrow than it had been in the recent past, and that would be a welcome change. Most mornings were eerily quiet. That was, perhaps, the most disconcerting of the myriad small ways their lives had changed since the girls died. The house had become almost too quiet to bear, and Alfred’s presence had done little to change that.

He didn’t know how Laura stood the place when she came home from the shelter. There was no Hillary taking the steps two at a time, pounding up the stairs like a sprinter. There were no wooden clogs—Megan’s shoe of choice—scraping against the soft pine in the kitchen and the hall as she shuffled along in her own little world. There were no giggles, no fights, no squeals. No television. No CD player blaring the latest pop hit from that week’s teen queen sensation.

The girls made

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