TWO
“Get your own fucking duck,” said Ruth, and held Rosa a little closer. A living eiderdown.
Constance Pineault smiled and stared ahead. Four days ago it would never have occurred to her to get a duck, but now she actually envied Ruth her Rosa. And not just for the warmth the duck provided on the bitter, biting December day.
Four days ago it would never have occurred to her to leave her comfortable chair by the bistro fireplace to sit on an icy bench beside a woman who was either drunk or demented. But here she was.
Four days ago Constance Pineault didn’t know that warmth came in many forms. As did sanity. But now she knew.
“Deee-fenssssse,” Ruth shouted at the young players on the frozen pond. “For God’s sake, Aimée Patterson, Rosa could do better.”
Aimée skated past and Constance heard her say something that might have been “duck.” Or “puck.” Or …
“They adore me,” Ruth said to Constance. Or Rosa. Or the thin air.
“They’re afraid of you,” said Constance.
Ruth gave her a sharp assessing glance. “Are you still here? I thought you’d died.”
Constance laughed, a puff of humor that floated over the village green and joined the wood smoke from the chimneys.
Four days ago she thought she’d had her last laugh. But ankle-deep in snow and freezing her bottom off beside Ruth, she’d discovered more. Hidden away. Here in Three Pines. Where laughter was kept.
The two women watched the activity on the village green in silence, except for the odd quack, which Constance hoped was the duck.
Though much the same age, the elderly women were opposites. Where Constance was soft, Ruth was hard. Where her hair was silky and long, and done in a neat bun, Ruth’s was coarse and chopped short. Where Constance was rounded, Ruth was sharp. All edges and edgy.
Rosa stirred and flapped her wings. Then she slid off Ruth’s lap onto the snowy bench and waddled the few paces to Constance. Climbing onto Constance’s lap, Rosa settled.
Ruth’s eyes narrowed. But she didn’t move.
It had snowed day and night since Constance had arrived in Three Pines. Having lived in Montréal all her adult life, she’d forgotten snow could be quite so beautiful. Snow, in her experience, was something that needed to be removed. It was a chore that fell from the sky.
But this was the snow of her childhood. Joyful, playful, bright and clean. The more the merrier. It was a toy.
It covered the fieldstone homes and clapboard homes and rose brick homes that ringed the village green. It covered the bistro and the bookstore, the boulangerie and the general store. It seemed to Constance that an alchemist was at work, and Three Pines was the result. Conjured from thin air and deposited in this valley. Or perhaps, like the snow, the tiny village had fallen from the sky, to provide a soft landing for those who’d also fallen.
When Constance had first arrived and parked outside Myrna’s bookstore, she’d been worried when the flurries intensified into a blizzard.
“Should I move my car?” Constance had asked Myrna before they went up to bed. Myrna had stood at the window of her New and Used Bookstore and considered the question.
“I think it’s fine where it is.”
It’s fine where it is.
And it was. Constance had had a restless night, listening for the sirens from the snow plows. For the warning to dig her car out and move it. The windows of her room had rattled as the wind whipped the snow against it. She could hear the blizzard howl through the trees and past the solid homes. Like something alive and on the hunt. Finally Constance drifted off to sleep, warm under the duvet. When she awoke, the storm had blown by. Constance went to the window, expecting to see her car buried, just a white mound under the foot of new snow. Instead, the road had been plowed and all the cars dug out.
It’s fine where it is.
And so, finally, was she.
For four days and four nights snow had continued to fall, before Billy Williams returned with his plow. And until that happened, the village of Three Pines was snowed in, cut off. But it didn’t matter, since everything they needed was right there.
Slowly, seventy-seven-year-old Constance Pineault realized she was fine, not because she had a bistro, but because she had Olivier and Gabri’s bistro. There wasn’t just a bookstore, there was Myrna’s bookstore, Sarah’s bakery, and Monsieur Béliveau’s general store.
She’d arrived a self-sufficient city woman, and now she was covered in snow, sitting on a bench beside a crazy person, and she had a duck on her lap.
Who was nuts now?
But Constance Pineault knew, far from being crazy, she’d finally come to her senses.
“I came to ask if you’d like a drink,” said Constance.
“For chrissake, old woman, why didn’t you say that in the first place?” Ruth stood and brushed the flakes off her cloth coat.
Constance also rose and handed Rosa back to Ruth, saying, “Duck off.”
Ruth snorted and accepted the duck, and the words.
Olivier and Gabri were walking over from the B and B, and met them on the road.
“It’s a gay blizzard,” said Ruth.
“I used to be as pure as the driven snow,” Gabri confided in Constance. “Then I drifted.”
Olivier and Constance laughed.
“Channeling Mae West?” said Ruth. “Won’t Ethel Merman be jealous?”
“Plenty of room in there for everyone,” said Olivier, eyeing his large partner.
Constance had had no dealings with homosexuals before this, at least not that she knew of. All she knew about them was that they were “they.” Not “us.” And “they” were unnatural. At her most charitable, she’d considered homosexuals defective. Diseased.
But mostly, if she thought of them at all, it was with disapproval. Even disgust.
Until four days ago. Until the snow began to fall, and the little village in the valley was cut off. Until she’d discovered that Olivier, the man she’d been cool to, had dug her car out. Unasked. Without comment.
Until she’d seen, from her bedroom window in Myrna’s loft above the bookstore, Gabri trudging, head bent against the blowing snow, carrying coffee and warm croissants for villagers who couldn’t make it to the bistro for breakfast.
As she watched, he delivered the food, then shoveled their porches and stairs and front walks.
And then left. And went to the next home.
Constance felt Olivier’s strong hand on her arm, holding her secure. If a stranger came into the village at this moment, what would he think? That Gabri and Olivier were her sons?
She hoped so.