Read Online Home Safe by Elizabeth Berg - Free Book Online

carefully through every desk drawer. It is awful to do this, to see his penmanship, to recall the many times she sat in the chair in his office, chatting with him while he worked at the desk. There is a group of photographs on his desktop, family shots of the three of them, and a haiku that Tessa wrote in seventh grade. Helen framed it and gave it to Dan for his birthday.
Last night we had snow
Tattered pieces of white lace
Rode the winter winds
    It had been a fierce storm; Helen remembers how Dan came home early from work, how Tessa exulted in the fact that school would be canceled the next day. Helen awoke around 2:00 A.M. and went to look out the bedroom window. It had stopped snowing and the tree branches were frosted down to the tiniest twig. The sidewalks were covered with at least a foot of snow that glistened beneath the streetlights, and the street was covered, too; the plows had not yet been around.
    She'd gently awakened Dan, asking him to get up and come for a walk with her. He refused and so she went alone. At first she was angry that he hadn't come with her, though she knew she had no right to be—Dan had to get up and go to work the next morning, and she should not have awakened him at all. But she trudged through the snow full of resentment for him not sharing this with her, and then her resentment was replaced with wonder, and she understood the specific kind of appreciation that comes to a person witnessing a thing of beauty alone, how the spectacle seems to sit whole inside the soul, undiminished by conversation, by any attempt at translation or persuasion. She stayed out for an hour, walking around a neighborhood transformed, and when she returned she very quietly fixed herself a cup of cocoa made with cream and topped with many marshmallows, and then she sat in the living room to drink it, only one small light burning. When she heard the sound of the snowplow, she watched with some regret as it turned the street back to normal. And then she tiptoed back upstairs and slid into a bed that had been kept warm in her absence. She felt Dan pull her close to him, heard him murmur into the back of her neck that he loved her, then fall immediately back to sleep. She and Midge talked sometimes about moments when you understood your great luck, when you experienced gratitude as a body-wide, physical sensation; that had been one of those moments.
    She turns out the light in Dan's study and goes upstairs.
    In the morning, Helen makes coffee and then sits at the kitchen table listing her minimum monthly payments. Not too bad. Then she sees that she has forgotten annual tax bills, and adds that on. And car maintenance. And home insurance. She adds those on. Then she picks up the phone to call Nancy Weldon to say she'd like to accept the job teaching.
    “Well, I am thrilled,” Nancy says. “But not really surprised. I have to tell you, I knew you'd come around.”
    “Did you,” Helen says. Outside, birds have congregated around the bread crumbs she sprinkled on the ground for them. It's all sparrows, a dusty, mud-brown sea of them. She has always thought of sparrows as scrappy little city birds who descend en masse to gobble up the offerings, and she used to resent them, fearing they would leave nothing for the beautiful birds who might happen by, the cardinals and the goldfinches, the blue jays, whose deep blue feathers more than made up for their terrible personalities. Now, she identifies somehow with the sparrows, and intends later to put out suet for them, fresh from the butcher.
    “I just knew it,” Nancy says. “I figured you'd think about the people who were in the workshop and your curiosity would get the best of you.”
    “Something like that,” Helen says.
    “So, we'd like to give you complete freedom for the way you teach the classes. The only thing we ask is that at the end of the workshop, each participant shares something they've written with an audience at our ceremony—as I think I told