And okay, maybe that was how it worked. If the art world was like any other business, then of course it was about who you knew and how you positioned yourself and what the market was looking for. She couldn’t fault Justine for working the system. But sitting here, looking through her fingers at the garish colors splashed across Justine’s canvases, Mary Ellen began to suspect she’d wandered into a fun house-mirror version of the very career she was trying to escape.
She groaned and rubbed her temples. She couldn’t believe she’d come all the way out here on a fool’s errand. Leaving her job, imperiling her marriage, abandoning her children. Her children! Poor Sydney and Shelby, waiting for a call that never came. She’d been so focused on her own self-serving mentorship—another pointless exercise—that she’d forgotten about her own flesh and blood.
She felt a crushing wave of guilt, spiked with anxiety about what Matt was thinking and saying about her now. She was a terrible mother; he had every right to think that. What he probably didn’t realize was that she wanted very, very much to do better. She’d made it sound like she didn’t care one way or the other, but she did care, she cared so much, and she wanted him—and the girls—to know that.
Mary Ellen stood up quickly and went upstairs. The living room windows were frantic with fast-falling snow. She crossed the room and looked out at the driveway, but she couldn’t make anything out through the rushing whiteness. “I need to make a phone call,” she said to Rose, who was curled up on the sofa. “I’ve got to dig the car out and go back to town.”
Rose didn’t move, except to draw her eyebrows together. “In this?”
“I have good tires. I just need to get out of that drift. Anyway, if we wait any longer, we’re going to be stuck here forever.”
Rose didn’t say anything. Mary Ellen began pulling on her coat, boots, hat, gloves. “Don’t you want to get out of here? I can take you to the bus station.”
Rose sat up slowly. “I told you. There’s nothing to shovel with.”
Mary Ellen went to the kitchen and began slamming through cabinets. She pulled out saucepan and a ladle and returned to the living room, holding them in the air. “Voilà!”
Rose rolled her eyes and lay back down.
“Okay, thanks a lot,” Mary Ellen said. She pulled her car keys out of her purse and shoved them in her coat pocket, then took a deep breath and plunged into the swirling cold.
It really was snowing quite hard. The wind, which had become ferocious, made it almost impossible to walk in a straight line. Mary Ellen held up the saucepan to shield her face from the stinging flakes. The snow on the ground was deep enough to crumble into the tops of her boots, and she could see that the drift where her car was stuck had been sculpted into a smooth, car-enveloping dune.
She began scraping snow away from the hood and windshield. The ladle did little more than make short, narrow channels, so Mary Ellen tossed it aside and focused on taking larger scoops with the saucepan. The cuffs of her coat soon filled with icy wetness, and wind-hurled snowflakes burned her cheeks. She alternated swiping at the car with the pan and with her left forearm, but as she worked, the snow packed down and became hard, so she cleared less and less with each swipe. She clawed at it with her fingers, but it just jammed up against itself, becoming dense and heavy under her hands.
Her arms were starting to ache. She leaned against the car for a moment, pulling her fur hood around her face. Through the curtains of snow, she could see a figure staggering toward her. It was Rose, hood drawn into a tight O on her face, jean jacket buttoned up over the sweatshirt. There were socks on her hands, and she was carrying two canoe paddles.
“Brilliant!” Mary Ellen cried, but the wind carried her voice away, so she showed her enthusiasm with exaggerated clapping motions. Rose handed her a paddle, and she slid it into the hard-packed snow on the windshield, leaning on the handle until the blade popped up, spraying her and Rose with snow. Rose put her head down and went around to the other side of the car, where she began scraping at the snow around the front tire.
They worked like that for a long time, until finally there was enough snow cleared from the doors and the tailpipe for Mary Ellen to get inside the car and start it up. She pushed open the passenger door and yelled out to Rose, “Get in!”
When Rose shut the door behind her, the silence fell over them like a heavy quilt. Mary Ellen leaned her head back and closed her eyes for a moment, breathing hard, feeling the burn of blood rising to the tips of her ears, her fingers, the edges of her nostrils. She pulled off her gloves and held her fingers in front of the heat vent. She looked over at Rose, who was using her teeth to tug at the wet sock on one hand. The sock was caked with snow, and the girl didn’t seem to have the strength to pull it off. “Oh no,” Mary Ellen said, reaching over and peeling the soggy bags from Rose’s hands, which were bright red and shaking. “You need to go inside and put on some dry clothes. You’re not dressed for this.”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you for helping. You shouldn’t have stayed out here this long. My God, you’re really frozen.”
Rose loosened the sweatshirt hood and cleared it away from her face, which looked paler than usual. She shifted suddenly to the side, looking under her rear with alarm. “What the—”
Mary Ellen laughed. “Heated seats.”
“Oh.” Rose looked embarrassed. “I thought I peed myself.”
“It
