Wiley had adjusted fairly well, Marie not so much.  “At least the winters are easy to take,” Wiley offered, but Marie wasn’t buying that, either.  “Ice.  All we ever get is ice.  Would it hurt them to snow once in a while?” Marie complained without identifying the “them” in the conspiracy.  Wiley couldn’t argue with her on that one.  Fluffy white snow was a pleasant memory, ice all evil.  When therefore, on their fourth Thanksgiving as a married couple, the two drove up to St. Joe to visit his mother, and Thursday night three inches of the loveliest, purest, softest snow imaginable fell, the two went out Friday morning and played like children on a day off from school.

            Wiley’s mother came out wearing rubber boots and a terrycloth robe over her nightgown.  She began taking pictures as Wiley and Marie cavorted in the side yard.

            “My God, Ma.  You’re still using that old camera?  Can you even get the film developed anymore?”

            “You don’t have gloves on,” she said, aiming the camera.  “You don’t have anything on your head.”

            Wiley and Marie began making snowballs, eyeing each other with gleeful menace.

            Wiley threw a snowball at Marie, but it exploded midair in a shower of glittering particles.

            “This snow is crap for making snowballs,” he said.

            Marie threw a snowball at him.  It too, burst almost before it left her hand.

            “Oh! . . . Oh no, no, no, no, no!”

            Wiley started to laugh but then saw the look on her face.

            “What’s the matter?”

            He started to go to her, but she held her hands up and commanded, “Stop!  Don’t come any closer.  Stay where you are!”

            She looked down at the snow around her, then let out a low wail.

            “It’s my wedding ring.  It must have flown off when I threw the snowball.  Oh, you idiot, you idiot!” she said, pounding her forehead with the heel of her hand.

            Standing beneath the overhang at the side door of the house, Wiley’s mother began to laugh.

            “Are you sure you had it on?” Wiley asked.  Marie wasn’t one of those women who never took her ring off.  She didn’t wear it to bed and would take it off to cook or clean.

            “Yes, yes, I had it on.”

            “Are you sure?  Maybe—”

            “Yes, yes, yes, yes, I had it on!”

            Wiley’s mother began to laugh again.  Marie turned to her.

            “What in the living hell are you laughing at?  It’s my wedding ring.”

*

            Marie found the ring a moment later when Wiley spotted a small hole in the snow inches from her left foot, pointed, and said, “Look there.”  Marie reached down into the show and extracted her ring.          

            They all went back inside, and Marie spent the rest of the morning in their bedroom.  It’d been Wiley’s room when he was a boy.  There was still an orange plastic basketball hoop nailed up over the closet door. The first time he’d brought Marie there as his wife, he’d found the Nerf basketball on the floor of the closet, and they’d played basketball between the bed and the vanity, alternately giggling and shushing each other because his mother might think “something else” was going on behind the closed door.  Now, though, Marie sat on the edge of the bed with her Sudoku book, and when Wiley asked her if she wanted to go out for a walk in the snow, she didn’t answer him.

            At noon Wiley’s mother called them to lunch, leftover turkey sandwiches with cranberry sauce instead on mayo.  Wiley’s mother said that had always been his favorite way of eating turkey sandwiches, and Marie said, yes, they were very good.  Then she asked Wiley if he’d told his mother yet that they were going to have to head back to Little Rock in the morning.

            Wiley seemed as taken aback as his mother, but he recovered quickly and said, “Yes, I’m afraid so, Ma.  The weather.  The snow.  We can’t risk getting stuck here over the weekend.  We both have to be back to work Monday.”

            “But you were going to stay until Sunday,” his mother said, her voice cracking.  “It’s been so long since you’ve been home, Wiley.”

            “I know, I know.”

            “And what’s a little snow?  It’s supposed to be in the upper thirties today.  Half of it will be melted off by tomorrow.”

            “That’s just it,” Marie broke in.  “It’ll melt, then refreeze during the night, and by morning there’ll be a layer of ice under the snow.  Utterly treacherous.  Trust me.  I know ice.”

            Wiley agreed.  Living in Arkansas, they knew their ice.

            “It didn’t snow at all south of Kansas City,” his mother said, but without hope.

*

            Wiley hoped that his playing along with her “great escape,” as he called it, would put Marie in a better mood.  No such luck.

            She was brittlely courteous to his mother the rest of the day while barely acknowledging his existence.  He knew quite well what the problem was and decided to lance it right then instead of letting it fester for days as sometimes happened when he touched, or created, a sore spot.

            She was in bed reading one of her Agatha Christies when he finally worked up the courage to speak.

            “Ma can’t help it, you know.  It’s just the way she reacts to something like that:  she laughs.  All of us Wallaces do.  I don’t know if it’s a family thing or cultural.  In fact, I read just the other day that the Navajos wouldn’t give a child a name until after it laughed for the first time.  Hey, maybe we Wallaces have Navajo blood.  One of us falls and breaks a leg, the rest of us laugh.”

            Marie slammed shut her book.

            “You mean like the time I slipped walking down that steep sidewalk in Eureka Springs and about broke my hip?  And you laughed?”

            He let out a hiccup of a laugh before he could stop himself.

            “Sorry.  But, yep, that’s what we do.  It’s our way of dealing with tension or something, I don’t know.”

            “It hurt, Wiley, it hurt.”

            “I know, I know.  And again, sorry, but . . . Look, every culture has its own things.  Every family has its own things.  It’s not good but not necessarily bad, either.  Just a way of reacting.”

            She glared at him.

            “You’re talking about my family.”

            “No I’m not.  I’m just speaking in a general way.  Cultures.  Families.”

            “You’re talking about my family.”

            “No, I am not.  But of course it does apply to your family, too.  Every family—”

            “What, for instance?”

            “Whoa, you think I’m nuts?  Give you an example and get my head bit off?  No thanks.”

            “Oh, so you live in terror that I’m going to bite your head off?”

            “Come on, of course not.  OK, then, one example—and something that I like.  It doesn’t always have to be a bad thing.”

            “Go on.”

            “Well, you know, the way your family always kisses and hugs when they greet someone.  It’s an Irish-Catholic thing, I guess.”

            Marie laughed.  Wiley couldn’t tell what kind of laugh it was.

            “It’s sure not a Protestant thing,” she said.  “You Protestants, somebody tries to give you a hug and you turn into a cigar-store Indian.  Ha, I remember the first time you came to New York to meet my family, and they all lined up to greet you.  You had a look on your face like you were running a gauntlet of whips and knives.”

            Wiley laughed, too loudly.

            “I know, I know.  It was a real trial by fire.  Or rather a trial by hugs and kisses.  But I got used to it, and now I love it.”

            “You don’t love it.”

            “I do so.”

            “You do not.  You still freeze when somebody approaches you with their arms open, and then you either squeeze them too tight or leave room for the Holy Ghost between you.”

            “I didn’t realize I was getting judged on style points.”

            “Well, if you were, you’d make a poor damn showing.”

            “Thanks for that, Marie.”

            She seemed to realize she’d gone too far.  She sighed and said, “What are we fighting for, anyway?  Come to bed.”

            He got in bed, and she laid her book on the nightstand and turned out the light.

            “I love you,” he said, and she said she loved him.  It was something they did every night because right before they were married Marie had read in an advice column that a couple should never end a day without saying I love you to each other.

            They lay there in the dark.  Wiley was just about to turn and reach for her because he thought there was something erotic about making love in the bed he’d slept in as a boy, and he fancied Marie did, too.  But at that moment she turned on her side with her back to him.  He knew what that meant.

*

            They left early the next morning.  By the time they got to Kansas City, the snow was gone.  Traffic was lighter than they’d expected, and they made good time.  It was early afternoon when they crossed the border into Arkansas, a state of strange customs and habits which, much to their surprise, they sometimes found themselves calling home.

 

Bio:  Dennis Vannatta is a Pushcart and Porter Prize winner, with essays and stories published in many magazines and anthologies, including River Styx, Chariton Review, Boulevard, and Antioch Review.  His sixth collection of stories, The Only World You Get¸ was published by Et Alia Press.