A Christmas Blizzard by Garrison Keillor

alone, and you know something? Most of them were glad to go. That’s how it was.” He took a sip of coffee. “Coffee’s cold, Myrt.” The waitress took a carafe off the hot plate and brought it over.
    “Right here in town, a man and a woman were struggling through the storm to get home and finally they made it into the house and she looked at him and she’d never seen him before in her life. She said, ‘You’re not Bob.’ He said no, he was Larry. She said, ‘Where’d my husband go?’ He said he didn’t know, that he saw her reach out her hand so he took it. She said, ‘I wonder what happened to Bob.’ He said he had no idea. She said, ‘Well, as long as you’re here, you may as well come in and get warm.’ And he did. And they’re still together. Had three children. Bob never came home. That was in 1975. January. Sure tells you something about marriage, doesn’t it.”
    The wind whistled in the weatherstripping, just like it did in their house when he was a kid. Cold drafts. Once, Daddy woke up in the night, deaf in his left ear—it had been frozen by a cold draft. Never got better.
    A man in a snowmobile suit sat on a stool at the counter and Myrt slid a cup in front of him and filled it with java from the carafe in her right hand.
    “You don’t take cream, do you, Bobby?”
    “You know me better than that, Myrt.”
    “Oh yeah. It’s your brother who takes cream. How’s he doing in Florida?”
    “He’s stuck there, that’s what. Paid three-quarters of a million for a house that’s now worth about half that and he lost his job and he’s working part-time as a security guard.”
    “You ever been to Florida?”
    “Why would I want to go there?”
    “It’s warm there.”
    “If you’re cold, put on a sweater. That’s what I say.”
    “I’ve got two on already.”
    The snowmobile suit and the waitress didn’t look at James but they were thinking about him, he could tell. They were aiming their repartee in his direction.
    “Another reason not to go to Florida, Myrt: no ice fishing.”
    “I could live without it if I tried. Nothing but an excuse to drink, if you ask me.”
    “Man has to keep off the chill any way he can.”
    “My brother never drank at home. A cocktail was foreign to Marvin, strange as an artichoke, but he’d go ice fishing and when they passed the Four Roses he took a hit off it. And that was when he ran off with that woman. She was lost, or so she said, and came out to the fish house to get warm, and he warmed her up all right. Took her off to a motel and turned the heat up. And it all started with taking a drink.”
    “I never knew your brother but I do know that a lot of people have perished in winter storms for want of a little whiskey. The death toll among Baptists is staggering.”
    “The woman he ran off with was a Baptist. Or married to a Baptist.”
    “Well, there’s your motivation right there.”
    “I forget—did you say you wanted cream in your coffee?”
    “Get away from me with that cream pitcher, Myrt.”
    The old man who was an authority on winter had moved over to the counter to get away from drafts. He motioned to Myrt for another cup of coffee. “Gimme the usual.” He looked over toward James. “Man’s got to keep up his strength in cold weather. Back in 1957, the temperature dropped forty degrees in one minute. Went from thirty-two to eight below. Sixteen teenagers were taken to the hospital. No scarf, no mittens, no warm jacket. Same winter we got ten feet of snow and a dozen houses collapsed from the weight on the roofs.”
    The phone rang. It was Buzz, at the airport. They had slept aboard the Lucky Lady and were eating cold pizza for breakfast. “Visibility is a hundred feet. The runway is iced over. Same with the fuselage and wings. The forecast is for nothing good whatsoever. The Interstate is strewn with abandoned vehicles. They’re opening schools for shelters. Nothing to do but sit tight. You at your uncle’s?”
    “Staying